I nod. Unlikely.
After a brief silence, he looks at me cautiously, and I can sense he’s working out a way to say something.
“You know…I hope this doesn’t seem presumptuous. But I’m hoping you might see me as a father figure…over time. Someone who wants to look out for you. Help you when I can.” He glances down briefly before meeting my eyes. “Your mother was the best thing in my life. Brief though it was.”
As it turns out, I don’t sleep until after we stop for a re-fueling in Amsterdam.
I listen with a tissue pressed perpetually to my eyes as he talks about his time with Mummy, answering my questions frankly—when at last I’m bold enough to ask them—and with tact and kindness. I learn they kissed beneath the arches that trapped Declan and I in the burrow. He begged her daily to return to New York with him.
“So…why didn’t she?” It’s perhaps my biggest question.
He smiles sadly. “I think she was scared. Too scared to leave her mother. And then the more we talked about it, through letters—” I arch my brows at that, because I’ve got them in my crates— “she felt more comfortable. But by then she knew I had a family setup for marriage. Like being promised to someone.” He adds, “To Declan’s mother, Katherine.”
“Oh.” I nod slowly.
I see him swallow. It’s a brief thing, but I know the contours of his face so oddly well, for they’re so like my Declan’s. It’s a bit of pain leftover…lasted decades.
He lifts his brows. “Your mom didn’t want to interfere.” After a moment of silence, he says, “I think she was too aware of the differences…in our economic situations. It was probably my fault. I talked so much about what I could give her. Trying to court her, you know?” He smiles wistfully. “I think it intimidated her.”
He’s so kind, talking through the entire situation with me when we both should be sleeping. I confess I read some of the letters.
“You were coming for us, weren’t you? You and Declan.”
He hesitates before he confirms what I knew to be true. “We were going to take the two of you back to New York. Whether the powers that be agreed with it or not. Your mom was married, but that shouldn’t make someone a prisoner.”
“The laws are archaic. They’ve been changed now. I think they were never meant to be a chain. Or so I was told…after.”
He nods. “That’s good.”
We drink tea and talk until my throat is tired. We talk of Declan…of his mother. How she left when he was four, and nannies cared for him while his father worked long hours, pining for my mum. I ask how Declan’s mum passed and am floored to learn she died by suicide. She jumped off a building in Manhattan following years of alcoholism and addiction struggles.
All the things he didn’t tell me…
“I’m so sorry.”
His lips press together. “Declan was at Carogue. It was New Year’s Eve. She texted him before. It was 2005. Newly 2005. After that…” He shakes his head. “Everything was harder for him after.”
Charles says Declan wouldn’t speak of it with him—not ever.
“He wanted to pretend that he was…less affected than he really was. I don’t know why. Sending him to Carogue was a mistake, I think now. We left Tristan and I never even took him back home.” His face twists, and for a moment, his hand tunnels into his hair. He meets my eyes, and I see his are desolate. “I couldn’t go home without—” He shakes his head, and I know he means my mum. “So I took him to Carogue. I told myself at the time that he’d be better off there.”
“Perhaps he was.”
He shakes his head. “The staff there ignored a lot of problems. With the kids. Drugs…and drinking. One of Declan’s friends—he died, and I think Declan found him. Actually, I know he did.” I think of Nate. “That was after I found out he had been having problems himself. Using…downers, for anxiety—or partying. Who knows. But I think it really affected him…what happened to his friend. After Nathan passed away, I don’t think he was the same kid. Declan. And I didn’t do a good enough job after his mom died. I was flying over when they told him—someone at the school. So he didn’t even
hear it from me.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
He throws his head back laughing, and chills prickle my arms. “You don’t need to reassure me. I should be alleviating your fears. What can I tell you about America?”
“He would always do that same thing,” I say softly. “The surprised laugh.” I add, “I don’t want to hear about America. I want to hear about Declan.”
And so he tells me. Things I don’t know, like how my Carnegie potty-trained in two days— “That kid was determined. I think it was the superhero underwear. ” How he fared quite decently when his mum left because already, he was mostly watched by nannies anyway.
“She loved him,” Charles tells me. “She just had her problems. As he got a little older, I think he knew that.”
Somehow, he mentions Declan’s favorite restaurant in New York.