Page 49 of Spiralling Skywards
“Nah, to New South Austria. Yeah Australia. Would you fancy that?”
She smiled, not enough to flash her dimple but a smile nonetheless.
“I’d love to go there,” she said quietly. “But please don’t lie to me again. If you had just told me about your wife in the beginning . . .”
“What? If I’d told you in the beginning that I was separated, waiting on a divorce, what? Would you have still gone out with me?”
She tilted her head to the side, considering my question.
“No, probably not.”
“Well that’s exactly my point. I wanted to see you again, I wanted to take you out and get to know you.”
“But you should’ve told me sooner, maybe not straight away, but it’s been a month since we started seeing each, Liam. You should’ve been honest and given me the choice as to whether I wanted to see you again.”
“I know. I fucked up, and I’m sorry. What can I do, how do I make this better?”
“Just be honest with me. And don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sounds simple enough, but will you answer a few questions for me just so I have things clear in my head?”
“Go for it.”
“You and Luke . . .”
Her eyebrows shot up, I think I’d surprised her with the direction I’d taken the conversation.
“Do you have the same dad?”
She licked her lips and nodded her head very slightly.
“Yeah.” She pushed out a slow breath and her eyelids fluttered closed for a long second before she spoke again. “My mum got pregnant with Liam when she was really young, just sixteen in fact. Vinnie, our dad, was eighteen. He moved in with my grandparents, and they tried to make a go of things, but Vinnie didn’t wanna stop doing the things that eighteen-year-old boys do and was rarely home.”
She was quite for a while, and I watched her chew on the inside of her lip.
“From what I’ve been told, they loved each other passionately but were toxic together. He’d stay out all night, they’d fight for hours when he eventually came home, and then they’d spend three days in bed making up. They eventually moved out from my grandparents’ and into their own place, but they just couldn’t make things work. They separated, he met someone else and married her really quickly. At some later stage, he and my mother started an affair. It went on for years.”
She looked down between us. I watched as tears splashed onto her T-shirt . . . my T-shirt. I lifted her chin, forcing her to meet my gaze.
“It went on for years, but he still had two more children with his wife, all the while he promised my mum that he would leave and move back in with her. He didn’t, and when she eventually told him she was pregnant with me, he left for good.” Her bottom lip quivered and she looked so young and broken that I couldn’t hold back from pulling her in tight against me.
“Not just us. He didn’t just leave Luke and me, he left his wife andtheirchildren too. He never even stayed around to meet me, Liam. I’ve never met my own father.” She cried into my chest. I stroked up and down her spine, understanding a little better her reaction to my telling her about Olivia. I felt like a complete arsehole. Again.
She swiped the back of her hands over each eye, but tears still hung from her lashes as she looked back up at me.
“My mum spiralled down into depression after that, becoming even worse after I was born. Social workers were involved, but she fought for us, got on medication, promised to do better. We were her last and only connection to him, she was never gonna give that up. My nan says that my mum was convinced he would return after I was born, but he never did. Her depression worsened, Luke pretty much looked after me the first three years of my life, then the car accident happened, and we finally went to live with our grandparents.”
I had no clue what to say. I had absolutely no concept of what she and Luke had gone through. My parents were divorced, but it was drama free, at least in front of us three kids, and we’d all come out of it relatively unscathed.
“So,” she gave a small smile, which didn’t reach her watery eyes, “now you know why I’m so fucked up.”
I hated that she thought that about herself. Hated that she thought that I thought that about her.
“You’re not fucked up, pretty girl. You just need to learn to trust and understand that not everyone is like your dad.”
“I’m more worried about being like my mum,” she said quietly.
“You’re not like your mum, you’re stronger.”
