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It’s odd Ewan can’t predict what his friend will do when he finds out I have a daughter. I remember from school lessons on English dynastic wars, the concept of arranged marriages is to make alliances. Ewan is counting on Kieran to marry a Quinlan. A marriage he’d planned because Kieran fell in love with his sister.
I don’t know exactly what’s brewing in this far-off land called Astoria, but if Kieran is the head of his family, he needs to marry one of his enemy’s daughters to keep the peace.
How do I know that, and they don’t?
Ewan is thinking with his heart on this one. Regardless, if his friend marries me, I’ve been promised a life in America. I have several cards to play here. The main one being to tell Ewan, and everyone else, he’s Sadie’s father. I’d told my parents the truth. It was a man I met in a pub, but I refused to give them a name, wanting to protect a ghost. They bit my head off something wicked, but then Sadie was born, and we all can’t imagine our life without her.
“You’ve got that dreamy look in your eyes again,” Ciara whispers to me as she puts Dr. Chan’s medical instruments into the sterilizer.
“Do not.” Trying to focus on work, I take my set of tools out.
Ciara left me that night because Callum told her he’d drive me home.Andthreatened to tell her father we were in the pub.
“Seriously, what’s got you all gooey-eyed, Darcy?”
“I’m gooey-eyed?” I look in the scalpel’s shiny surface and don’t recognize the woman staring back at me. A tension hovered over me all these years, not knowing who Sadie’s father really was. Never getting his name. Now I know, and I have to figure out how to tell him.
And my parents. That will be an ugly conversation. My uncle knocked me up. My dad just met his half-brother and may very well kill him.
“Come on, it’s our lunch hour,” Ciara whines. “Spill. I need some good gossip.”
We grab our sacks from the breakroom refrigerator and sit outside, even though it’s gray and damp.
“I hear we’re getting a huge rainstorm.” Ciara stares at the dark clouds and takes a bite of her sandwich.
“What else is new?” I hope I can see the sun for more than a few days a year in New York.
This thought hits me out of nowhere, but it’s all I can think about. It’s a chance for me to make something of myself. To make a better life for Sadie and me.
“Okay. Who’d ya shag?” Ciara nudges me.
“No one.” I laugh. “Something did happen, though.”
I’m not sure what to mention first. That I learned the mystery man from Carney’s who got me pregnant is my dad’s long-lost half-brother and, technically, my uncle? Or that some random, distant relative showed up yesterday asking me to go to New York to marry his best friend?
Then there’s seeing him naked, and all I can think about is having sex with him again.
“Spill,” Ciara repeats.
“Have you ever been to New York?” I have to start slow. It’s a blow to my senses. Ciara will lose it.
“No. Just that trip to Florida, remember?”
“Right,” I say, remembering how she bragged about meeting Mickey and Minnie.
Her family trip was a big deal in our small town. People from Waterford don’t often fly to Florida to wander around an amusement park.
God, I could take Sadie there. Something I figured impossible a day ago. Whether as Kieran’s wife—if he accepts me. Or as Ewan’s… I swallow, not wanting to indulge in that fantasy. He struck me as a stand-up guy who would do the right thing by a woman he knocked up. We’re not blood related, but our family will see it that way. If anything, we could be kept apart. I feel so alone and wish I had, at the very least, another single mother to get advice from.
“My dad’s brother from New York came to see us yesterday.”
“Brother? You never said your dad has a brother from America.”
“Aye, I didn’t think it mattered. I found out long ago, my maimeó and dad’s father fooled around in high school, but he moved to America. Got married and had a family there. My dad has several half-siblings.”
“What does his brother want?”
“Ewan,” I say his name with a tight throat. “He apparently got in touch with my dad a couple of weeks ago. For… For…” It feels so hard to pry out of my mouth.
