Page 4 of Promise Me This

My gaze falls to my hand, locked in a choke hold around my necklace. I’ve never let myself imagine this day, really, and now that it’s here, I feel completely unmoored. After everything happened, I pushed away any thoughts of this place, and Callum even more so. It was all too painful, too visceral, and it compounded my shame. It was so much easier to bury those feelings if I remained at home in a country that didn’t know how it felt to have Callum’s footsteps on its soil, away from any reminders of everything I’d lost.

Then the carefully constructed life I created began to crumble to the ground. My safe, albeit predictable marriage ended. Moving back in with my parents for the first time since graduating high school was painful but manageable. There were enough logistics to work out while wading through a divorce that my mind had very little time to wander.

But when the mundane job that was supposed to be my most dependable distraction had budget cuts that left me unemployed, suddenly I found myself untethered. Unhinged. In the span of two days, I both decided to come here and bought my ticket. In another twenty-four hours, I was landing on the tarmac. Now that I’m standing on his doorstep, it seems too little too late to come up with a way to say, “Life has been broken ever since we last spoke and I made a terrible mistake and by the way, you had a daughter,” with grace.

He pushes off the doorframe, dropping his arms to his hips. “Ah come on, Leo, I haven’t got all day. Whatever it is you’ve come here to say, just spit it out already.”

Someone must have lit a match under my ears, they’re so hot. “I—”

“Daddy! Who is it?”

The small voice belongs to a sprite of a girl, ringlets of her father’s blond curls tumbling over her shoulders in disarray. She runs up beside him, her head just barely level with his hip as she wraps an arm around his leg and peers up at me.

“You have a daughter.”

Someone who isn’t looking for it wouldn’t hear the inflection in my tone, but the words are gunshots rattling in my head. I stumble backward, suddenly wishing I’d taken the cab driver up on his offer to wait for me at the end of the street. He had a smirk on his lips that I didn’t entirely understand, like he knew something I didn’t about the surly man waiting for me in this cottage seemingly plucked straight out of a fairy tale.

“Would you like some tea?” the girl offers, smiling bashfully up at me. She has a gap between her upper front teeth, and it gives her the faintest lisp. “I’m just after pouring some for my bears. They’re the nice kind; don’t worry!”

I swallow the thick lump in my throat, forcing each of the forty-three muscles it takes to smile to do their damn job even though I’m dying inside. I just hope it looks less painful than it feels. “No, sweetie, I shouldn’t actually have come. But thank you.”

How did it not occur to me that he’d have a whole life now, one that had no space in it for me? He has a family. A daughter, a partner, possibly more children. Together they are living out the dream we once painted for ourselves under this very same roof, a million years ago when we could escape to the countryside for the weekend and I wasn’t yet a mother with no child to show for it.

Callum clears his throat, patting the girl on the shoulder and urging her back into the house. His ring finger is empty, but I draw no solace from it. He once told me Irish couples could be together twenty years before they’d finally tie the knot. It wasn’t the legal marriage that bound them, but their commitment to one another. Something I always found beautiful until right this moment, as unfounded jealousy curdles in my veins.

“Niamh”—he says it like Neev, but I know it’s spelled differently. The Irish and their consonants—“go on inside. Leo was just leaving.”

I nod, choking on the sob threatening to crawl up my esophagus, and turn away. I didn’t even have time to turn on the international plan for my phone, so there’s no calling a cab for me.

“Leo, wait.”

I pause, glancing over my shoulder at him. Niamh has taken his instruction and returned to her tea party with her bears. I imagine her in the kitchen, my favorite room in the house with its wide-open windows and their views of the flowers and the mountains beyond them. Her mother, a blurry, faceless person, comes into the room with a plate full of warm cookies, placing them on the table for her daughter to enjoy.

A fantasy I originally dreamed up for myself. One I never actually got to experience.

Callum’s eyes are clouded over, shrouded in a language I’ve been away too long to remember how to speak. Looking at him, surrounded by this beautiful place, I feel entirely at home for the first time in forever.

And somehow, simultaneously, I am so incredibly lost.

He hooks one hand against the nape of his neck, the way he used to when his uncle had been especially hard on him about work. The gesture fits perfectly into my memory of him, filling me with the yearning to close the distance between us like nothing has transpired.

But it has. She did. And I will never be who I was before.

Callum pulls his gaze from my face after a few heartbeats too long, filling me with an emotion I don’t have a name for. “Let me at least call you a taxi.”

I nod once, then tilt my head back, letting a rare, proud ray of sunlight fall onto my cheeks. A part of me hopes its warmth can penetrate the ice surrounding my heart. That I’ll be thawed and the pain of this moment will melt away. My hair, which fell to my waist until a day ago, dusts my shoulders with the movement. I draw in a breath so thick and full that it sparks a burn in my chest. When I let it flow out at last, the words, “Don’t worry; I’ll walk,” ride on its coattails.

“You sure?” he starts to ask, but I’m already retreating. I wrap my cardigan snugly around my middle and pray the Irish weather will be on my side just this once.

Chapter Two

Callum

If someone had asked me twenty minutes ago if I believe in ghosts, I would’ve said, Hell no. But Leona Granger standing on my doorstep was nothing short of an apparition.

Even after rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands so hard stars have exploded across my vision, she’s still there when I place my glasses back in their rightful position. She walks to the end of the street, brunette waves whipping in the early autumn breeze. When I knew her, her thick hair tumbled all the way down her back, stopping just below her shoulder blades. The memory of her silken, olive-toned skin under my fingertips as I brushed her hair out of the way to undo her bra clasp has my hands thrumming with electricity, begging to feel it again.

I squeeze them tightly into fists, killing the sensation.

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