Page 5 of Promise Me This

She turns down the main road back toward town, disappearing behind a tall, downy cluster of violet foxgloves blooming in defiance of the recent cold snap. I firmly ignore the urge to run after her, to grab ahold of her arm and spin her around. To demand the truth. Every fiber of my being wants to understand why she never came back, why we’re now two enemies on either side of a front line rather than fighting whatever that darkness filling her eyes is together.

I shake my head, disappointed in myself for letting her affect me so deeply still. If I’ve learned anything in the last decade, it’s that there isn’t a reason. Some people are just selfish and incapable of handling a real relationship when the going gets tough, and I can’t continue to let them take up space in my mind. Not Catherine, and not Leo either. Not anymore.

“Daddy! We need more tea!”

Niamh’s voice snaps the cord of tension running through my body. With an exhale, I release it, letting the pulsing anger slow to a dull throb in my chest and then fade away completely. Just like Granda taught me. As the only father figure in my life, the first time he saw me holding Niamh in my arms with both our faces turning red as I complained about Catherine leaving and Niamh cried for her mother, he took it upon himself to teach me that I couldn’t hold on to feelings like that anymore.

“Society will tell you a man is a fighter, a soldier, an angry thing,” he’d said. “But that little girl doesn’t need any of those things. All she needs is a soft place to land.”

He was right then, and he’s right now. As the sky grows steadily overcast—because the only dependable thing about sunshine here is that it’s fleeting—I pivot on my heel and walk back inside, shutting the door behind me with my anger and resentment firmly on the other side of it.

My footsteps echo on the light oak flooring, creating a steady rhythm to align my breathing with. As I round the corner into the kitchen, the smell of flowers comes in with the crisp breeze. I stalk past Niamh, grabbing the back of the neck hole on her large sweater and tugging it up over her head, resulting in resounding giggles that fill the room with music.

“Oh, I’m sorry, is that not how you’re supposed to wear it?” I slide the windows closed, locking out the cold wind that’s picking up speed from the impending rain. An inkling of concern for Leo walking in the frigid mist trickles into the back of my mind, but I quickly push it away. I shrug my own sweater up over my head, turning myself into some weird semblance of a turtle. I tried it once while desperate to snap Niamh out of a tantrum when she was a fussy toddler, and it became the only surefire way to make her smile. A sight I desperately need to see right now.

When I turn around, she falls over laughing, and something loosens ever so slightly in my chest. “What? I thought it looked better this way!”

“No, you look silly!” She clutches her favorite bear to her chest, a matted, lumpy thing barely hanging on at the seams. It was the first gift I bought her. When Catherine showed me the positive pregnancy test, I ran to the closest store and picked the softest toy I could find. That was long before I knew the baby inside her was a little girl who would become my whole world. Who would stay that way even after Catherine was no longer a part of it.

I swallow back the lump rising in my throat, willing myself to forget. To show Niamh joy rather than pain.

“I look silly?” I exclaim in a theatrical voice, flattening my hand over my heart. “But I look like you!” I drop to all fours and crawl slowly toward her, earning another peal of laughter before she squeals in delight.

When I finally reach her where she sits at the table, feet dangling and toes sloppily painted purple—listen, I do my best—she yanks them up before I can grab onto one and tickle her. My plans thwarted, I change tactics, hooking an arm around her midsection and hoisting her into the air above me, where I blow raspberries on her stomach while she screams.

“I only wanted more tea!” she shouts, gasping between bouts of deep belly laughter.

I settle her back into her seat, then tug the sweater off her head and smooth the resulting frizz from her curls. I shrug back into the neck of my sweater and do the same to my own hair.

“If it is tea the lady wants”—I bow to her—“then it is tea the lady shall get.”

“Thank you, Daddy.” She grins at me, flashing the gap between her two front teeth.

Bending down to plant a kiss on the top of her head, I steal a quick inhale of her strawberry kid’s shampoo. “Anything for you.”

I make my way over to the sink and refill the electric kettle. Once it’s set to boil, I relax into the counter to wait. Niamh resumes her storytelling with her stuffed animals, only now she’s mimicking one knocking on a door, and the other coming to open it. The poor bear who has knocked is making whimpering sounds as the bear who opened it growls at her.

Kids certainly know how to humble you.

I have to remind myself that Niamh is only interpreting a five-second interaction, without knowing the many layers that lie underneath. The long years that led to that moment. I’m justified in giving Leo the cold shoulder. After all, she can’t just show up twelve years later uninvited and expect me to simply forgive and forget. Surely that’s what she was going to ask me to do.

A nagging thought echoes through my mind. What if it wasn’t?

I remove the glasses from my face and return my hands to my eyes. The pressure distracts me from the pounding ache filling my head, starting in my temples and pulsing its way into a crown of pain.

Why else would she come here after all this time? What could she possibly have to say that could fix what she did? She abandoned me without so much as a parting word. I spent years agonizing over piles of letters, recorded voice mails, saved texts from before she went silent, trying to find the missing link where it all fell apart. I analyzed every touch we exchanged on our last night together, each whispered promise in the airline terminal the following morning.

Her face floods my mind, defying my efforts to scrub the memory of it out of my eyes with brute force. If I had let myself think of her for more than a fleeting moment prior to today, I would’ve hoped that her actions had dampened my connection to her in some way. But even now as she makes her way to God knows where in the steady rain that patters against my windows, I can feel the invisible tether stretching out between us, loosened but ever present.

Those arctic-blue eyes still pierce my soul, the unique golden rings in her irises drawing my gaze as quickly as they did the first time I saw her. I’ve only met one other person with eyes like that since—my very own daughter, with forest-green eyes that she inherited from me, and two golden rings that she was gifted by the universe, it seems, simply to remind me of the woman I’d lost.

It’s too much, all of a sudden, and the wave of delayed emotions comes crashing down on me, no longer able to be kept at bay by simple anger. Disappointment echoes in the chambers of my heart, bouncing off a few ounces of relief. There’s a fathomless pain taking up too much of the air I need to breathe, and I’m no longer hurting for what Leo did but the combined effort of her and Catherine in ruining me for any woman who could ever come after.

“Daddy, are you crying?”

Niamh’s delicate voice draws me out of my wallowing, bringing the hot wetness on my cheeks into focus. I tug my sweater sleeve over my hand and scrub the tears away, replacing my glasses to shield my daughter from some of my pain.

“I’m all right.” I clear my throat. “I thought you were playing.”

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