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“I’m fine.” Hot pressure filled my sinuses, and despite my best efforts my voice betrayed a slight wobble. Slipping my hand out of his, I sat up and reached for his beer, helping myself to more of the numbing liquid.
Behind me, Donal stayed silent, likely sensing I needed a minute to pull myself together.
My gaze traveled over his living room. It was expensively furnished but sparsely decorated. Other than a few framed photos of his kids, there was very little that felt personal about it. A giant flat-screen TV dominated the wall across from the sofa where we sat, and my attention snagged on the collection of cords and electronics sitting out on the console below it.
“Are those game controllers?” In a million years, I wouldn’t have taken Donal for a gamer.
Sitting up, he reclaimed his beer from me and took a drink. “It’s for my son.”
Right, he had teenagers who probably stayed here sometimes. That made sense.
Except…other than the game system, it didn’t look like an apartment frequently inhabited by teenagers. It didn’t look like an apartment that was inhabited much at all.
“I’m telling my kids about Erin on Monday.” Something in his voice made me turn and look at him. Instead of meeting my eyes, he took another swig of beer.
“How do you think they’ll take the news?”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I haven’t got a clue. I’m pretty nervous about it, actually.”
“Do your kids come stay with you often?”
“Not as much as I’d like.” Lines of sadness etched his face as he stared at the game console across the room. “They’re at that age where they’ve both got a lot going on. Between school and extracurriculars and everything, it doesn’t really work out for them to stay over much. I try to take them out to dinner once a week, but it’s not the same.”
“You miss them.”
Donal took another drink of beer before offering me the bottle again. When I shook my head, he tipped it back one more time before setting it on the table. “I started playing Final Fantasy XIV as a way to spend more time with Jack. It’s his favorite game, and you can play it with other people online, so I figured it would help me stay part of his life.”
It was unbearably sweet—and exactly the kind of thing my own father would have done. The thought brought a fresh pang of sadness, but I shoved it back down. “And has it?”
“Yeah, actually.” He slumped back against the couch again. “I’m crap at it, but he’s nice enough to let me tag along with him and his friends sometimes. Teenagers are different around their friends than they are with their parents—more talkative and less guarded—so it’s been nice to see him in that element. I know more about what’s going on with him now than I ever did when we lived in the same house.”
I twisted to face him, pulling one leg underneath me and propping my arm on the back of the couch. “What about your daughter?”
Donal’s gaze dropped to his lap, where he was rubbing his thumb across the palm of his hand. “She’s been harder to connect with. I wish I could find something like video games that would give me a way into her life, but Maddy’s a tough nut to crack.”
He fell into a pensive silence, and I waited to see if he’d say more. After a moment he did.
“When she was little, I was Maddy’s favorite person in the whole world. Wendy used to complain about how unfair it was that I was the favorite parent when she spent so much more time with the kids than I did, taking care of their every need. I was a junior associate at my firm, expected to work seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, so I wasn’t around for the kids as much as she was.”
Having spent much of my life cast into similarly thankless roles, I felt a bone-deep swell of empathy for Donal’s wife. Being the one who did most of the work without getting the glory was pretty much my personal brand.
“As soon as I walked in the door, Maddy would always come running to greet me.” A smile curved Donal’s lips at the memory. “She’d glue herself to my side, chattering nonstop about everything that had happened to her that day. If I was home, I was the only one she wanted to give her a bath, read her bedtime stories, and tuck her in at night. I used to feel like the center of her universe.”
Listening to Donal talk about his daughter’s early years was like getting a glimpse into an alternate reality. It wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine things would have played out similarly if we’d tried to raise Erin together.
Donal would have been the fun parent who wasn’t around enough, and I would have been the one who shouldered all the thankless responsibilities and eventually grew to resent him over it. I couldn’t just picture it, I couldfeelit—exactly what we would have been like in a parallel universe where we’d tried to stay together.
“Maddy used to look at me like I walked on water.” Donal’s smile faded into an expression of such sorrow it brought a lump to my throat. “And I squandered all that affection by taking it for granted. It happened so gradually, I don’t know exactly when everything changed—maybe around the same time she hit puberty. Maddy became more withdrawn and didn’t want to talk to me anymore. Getting her to tell me about her day was like deposing a hostile witness. I thought it was simply teenage moodiness at first, but she grew closer to Wendy as she pulled away from me.”
My hand itched to reach for his as I watched his eyes grow sadder and more faraway. But something held me back. I hadn’t fully embraced the hand-holding life yet. I wasn’t ready to be the initiator.
Donal cleared his throat before continuing. “It was only after Wendy and I split up that I understood the source of Maddy’s resentment and how much of it had built up. Every night I hadn’t come home until after she’d gone to bed, every weekend I’d worked through, every missed school function and special event—every disappointment had caused her to retreat farther from me and put up walls between us so I couldn’t let her down anymore.”
I rubbed my chest, brokenhearted for both of them. Having felt the sting of Donal’s neglect a time or two myself, you’d think my sympathies would lie wholly with Maddy. But the pain I saw in his face stirred a possessive tenderness in me. Donal’s remorse was so palpable my bones ached with it. Yes, he’d made mistakes, and he was paying for them now. But at least he was taking responsibility and trying to make amends.
He stared straight ahead, his eyes remote and unseeing. “Maddy blames me for the divorce even though Wendy was the one who asked for it. She was old enough to see how I made her mother so unhappy for so many years that I drove her to it. And she’s right. It was my fault for being such a terrible husband and father, for being so absent and self-involved that I didn’t even notice I was losing my family until they were gone.” His throat moved as he swallowed, and his eyes shifted toward me without quite meeting mine as his voice turned harsh. “At least you can feel good knowing you were right about me all along.”
The cold reproach in his tone struck a nerve. All the old hurts still hovered right under the surface, ready to bubble up at the slightest provocation, and my defensive retort slipped out before I could think better of it. “You must think I’m a real cunt if you think anything you’ve just said would make me feel good.”
