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Pushing the thought away I resolved to buy a pregnancy test before we went to the hospice facility where Ciara’s bio-dad was being kept and crawled into the bed behind her.
Ciara didn’t protest when I pulled her flush against my chest and inhaled her cinnamon scent.
But tonight, I’d let her sleep, and then tomorrow we’d talk about everything else.
Chapter thirty-eight
My palms were sweaty as Wiz and I signed in as visitors at the St. Agatha Hospice facility.
I’d woken up this morning to Wiz hand feeding me saltine crackers and 7UP. Thankfully, they seemed to be staying down as I anxiously waited for one of the nurses to call our name.
“Are you feeling okay?” Wiz whispered, his expression odd as he gave my fingers a squeeze.
I nodded, leaning into him for support. “Yeah, I think so. It’s nice to actually be able to eat something. I thought I’d keel over any second because I was so hungry.”
Wiz’s expression shifted, and if anything, became more strange. I was about to ask him why he was looking at me as if I was an alien when a friendly looking blonde woman stepped out of a door, her eyes scanning the waiting room until she found us.
“You must be Ciara,” she said, her voice cheerful as she greeted us. “I’m Orla, we spoke on the phone. I must say I’m really glad you called me back, Finneas never gets any visitors so I think this will do everyone some good.”
It was clear she was a chatterbox as she led us down the winding, bright yellow hallways of the hospice facility.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked out of curiosity. She’d heard me speak, but never actually seen me before.
Orla shot me a blinding, sunshine-y smile from over her shoulder. “Because you look just like her—your mam I mean.”
My stomach did a flip flop, and for a moment, I was sure that the saltine crackers I’d eaten were about to make a reappearance.
“Finneas has pictures of her, and you, up all over his room,” the nurse continued to explain, oblivious to my very obvious distress.
Wiz’s hand tightened around mine and he leaned in close to my ear. “Are you all right? Do you want to leave?”
I shook my head. I needed to get this done and over with so that I could finally move on.
How was I ever supposed to go back to our pack if I didn’t? I’d just be the same fucked up woman that I always was and the next time something happened the overwhelming urge to run would take over again.
No. I needed to do this.
“So, he’s just inside. I’d just like to let you know that you can’t yell at him, even if you want to. It gets him all worked up and will cause all sorts of alarms to go off.”
Orla had explained over the phone that he was in the last bits of end stage liver failure and that he had no one to say goodbye to.
No one but me.
If I’d told her that I was coming here to blame him for all of my problems, she probably wouldn’t have let me in.
“I won’t do anything to rile him up,” I lied.
Orlan searched my face, her bright visage dropping for a moment before she finally shook her head and opened the door. “Finneas, I have a visitor for you.”
“If it’s that damn priest again, you can send him away. I don’t need last rites given by some twenty-year-old male model,” a familiarly gruff voice called from behind a shuttered curtain. “Either get me Father Lafferty or get the hell out.”
“You don’t need last rites, Finneas,” Orla said cheerfully as she led the charge into the room. “You’ve got some time yet before you keel over. No, I brought her.”
“Who—” the man’s voice began before Orla pulled back the curtain and everything in the room seemed to freeze in place.
Finneas—my father—was nothing like how I remembered him.
In the memories from my girlhood, Finneas Callaghan had been a behemoth. A broad Irishman with a beer gut, dark hair that was just starting to thin, and sharp features that, when he was sober, usually were pulled up into a cheerful grin.
