Page 62 of Hold

He was still looking at his lap and paused before saying, “I’m sorry. I’ll keep saying it for the rest of my life if there’s any chance you’ll believe me at the end of it.”

She took a gulp of her wine. “Don’t believe you yet. Did believe you. For thirteen years, I believed you, Gabe.” With the wine and her anger coursing through her, it was easier to look at him. “It was a very bad habit; it hurt me and the kids and I’ve broken it now.”

His eyes were the color of gray clouds. “T, all I’m asking is—”

“Don’t call me T.” She was being petty, but she was so afraid that if he kept talking, he’d somehow make her believe him again.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just going to tell you what happened, and you can believe it or not, whatever you like. So I wasn’t home more than a few days before I realized what a mistake I’d made. I missed you and the boys so bad, I’d bust into tears if I saw a family on the telly. Couldn’t go out, couldn’t go down to the pub, or see my cousins, or anything.”

“God forbid,” she muttered.

“I’d fucked up, T—Thea. And I tried to ignore it like I’d done all those other times. I knew I’d never get you back this time, and I wanted to not care about that.”

“Not care that you left twochildrenover here?” she spat.

“I know.” God help her, there were tears in his eyes now. “I was mad, T, really mad. Away with the fairies, for real. And, you know, you don’t live in America for fifteen years without someone telling you how much a shrink has helped them. But since I didn’t have any money and I couldn’t ask my mam or anyone, I… had to Google it instead.”

She didn’t want to think about the changes he had to have made to get to that point—if he’d actually done any of this—so she said, “How is your dear old mam anyway?”

Gabe’s mother, Sheena, hated Thea. Hated everything about her, from her age to her religion to her pregnancy to her nationality to her taste in baby names. Gabe was an only child, and Thea learned too late that his mother had no desire to relinquish her ironclad control of him. Gabe had had enough principle to stay with Thea—or maybe he really had loved her, though she’d doubted it over the years—but he never stuck up for her in front of his mother, and the one trip she’d made to the States, after Jake’s birth, had been a disaster.

Gabe seemed to be picking his words carefully. “She didn’t want me to come.”

“I bet. I’m curious, Gabe: does she care at all that she has grandchildren?”

He winced and brushed a nonexistent speck off his knee. “It doesn’t matter,” he said in a low voice. “It doesn’t matter what she cares or doesn’t care about. My kids aremykids, and I’m back to get them—to be with them.”

“Get them?” She stood up in a rush—too much of a rush for the alcohol in her brain. She swayed.

“I don’t mean—” He had stood as well. He gripped her arm, steadying her. “Are you all right?”

“Get off me,” she said through a fog that was threatening to overtake her.

Get them.

“T, it was a bad choice of words. I’m not taking them anywhere. Sit down, pet, come on.”

Her legs went out from under her, and she did as he asked. Gabe sat next to her, a lot closer than he had been. “Get away from me,” she whispered.

“I will,” he said, “as soon as you’re all right.”

His hand was still on her arm, his leg now resting alongside hers. Thea put her hand to her head. The third glass of wine had been a bad idea.

“I’m telling you the truth, T,” he went on. He came into focus, his eyes as clear and honest as the day she’d met him. If only all the time in between hadn’t happened, she could be so happy right now.

His voice was low and intimate, now that he was closer. “I love you, T. I’ve loved you from that first day we met in that crummy bar, with your sister flipping her hair at me and you trying to fade into the woodwork, and there was no one like us in the world and there’s never been anyone but me for you and there never will be.”

The tears seemed to have been waiting for these words, and she could no more stop them than she could shut out all the hope he’d given her all those years ago. They poured down her cheeks, and she collapsed back into the couch, not bothering to hide them. “God, Gabe, listen to you,” she said through them. “You said all that all the time, and youleft me, Gabe. You left me and the kidsalone,and I amso tired,Gabe. I’mso fucking tired.”

“I know, pet. I’m sorry.” He leaned back with her; it was as natural as breathing to turn her face into his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

And Thea cried as she hadn’t in months, sobbed and railed and sometimes punched him in the chest with fists weak with exhaustion, and Gabe just put his arms around her and stroked her back and repeated, over and over as if it they were magic words that would heal her, “That’s it, pet.”

And that was how Liam found them.

Chapter 18

His step on the porch stairs didn’t rouse Thea, but his knock on the screen door, abruptly halted as he saw through it to her in Gabe’s arms, sure did. She opened her raw, swollen eyes, swiveled her head toward him, then shot out of Gabe’s embrace as if she’d been greased.

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