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“She better not,” Orla grumbled, finally turning to head for the door. “But I’m leaving the door open just in case.”
Then she was gone and it was just him and me again.
“Want to take a seat?” he asked, gesturing to the little chair next to his bed.
I hesitated for a moment before settling into it with a sigh.
We sat in silence for a long time, both probably unsure of what to say.
In the end it was Finneas who spoke first. “I’ve seen all of your Olympic routines. You’re good at it, just like your mam was.”
That surprised me. How often had he thought of me when I made it my life’s mission to never think about him?
“I love skating,” I said, offering the information as an olive branch. “We all do it in Seattle and I’ve even started pair skating with my omega partner.”
“So there’s more than just that young man?” Finneas asked, sounding surprised.
I nodded. “There’s five of us in total.”
“Really? You were always such an independent little girl that I was sure that pack life wouldn’t be for you.”
My mental hackles started to rise at that but I forced myself to calm down. “I was never independent. Just lonely.”
“I am sorry for that,” Finneas said in almost a whisper as he shifted uncomfortably in his hospital bed. “I—we never meant for you to be an only child.”
I guessed that the ‘we’ was him and Mam.
“How did things get so very messed up, Finneas?” I asked, ignoring his wince when I used his first name. “You weren’t always like that. I remember that we used to be okay once.”
Finneas sighed heavily. “Did I ever tell you about my parents?”
I shook my head and he nodded as if that made sense.
“My mam ran off when I was three and my da was the village drunk. Never met a bottle he couldn’t make it to the bottom of. Spent my childhood peeling him off of pub floors. Then I met Mona—your mam.”
I’d never heard the story of how they’d met before and I leaned in, eager to glean any information about her that I could. “She was all of sixteen and her family moved from the north. She sat behind me in maths and I was smitten from day one. She pulled me right out of my world with my own da and we ran away after finishing school and never looked back. All the way to Dublin where I joined the Garda and she taught figure skating which we always joked was her first love.”
Finneas’s expression was far away, like he wasn’t even in the room with me anymore and instead was somewhere in the past with her.
“I never drank then, my memories of my da still too fresh in my mind and when we had you I swore I’d break the cycle.”
“So what happened?” It was one thing to tell me he tried, but it was another to tell me why things had gone the way they had.
“We lost a baby. You probably don’t remember it because you were only four, but we lost a little boy all the way in your mam’s eighth month. She wouldn’t even look at me and spent all her time hanging on to you for dear life, like she was afraid you would disappear too if she let you go.”
My spine straightened a bit at the mention of a baby and I had to keep my hand from drifting to my own stomach.
“So I started going out with the rest of the department more often and before I knew it couldn’t go through the day without the taste of alcohol. I became the exact thing I swore I wouldn’t and it became my everything and anyone trying to take my everything became my enemy,” Finneas’s fists were clenched in his lap and he glared down at them.
We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to digest all of the information that he’d just thrown at me.
“Why didn’t you get help? Once Mam left?”
Finneas’s smile was so full of self-loathing that it took my breath away. “I still couldn’t see that I was the problem. I let my pride get in the way and didn’t realize it until the department wrung me out to dry in rehab six years ago and by then it was all too late. Mona was gone and you were a grown stranger.”
A knock on the door brought our attention to where Orla was poking her head into the room. “Visiting hours for the day are ending in just a couple of minutes.”
I stood, gripping the straps of my purse tightly. “I still don’t forgive you.”
