Always You (Adair Family 3)

My head jerked back like she’d punched me. “Of course not.”

She held up a calming hand. “Did you hit him?”

“No. Like I said, Billy and I tried to get them off. We even fought our own lads, but with our backs turned, Nairn stabbed Craig. Then we ran like fucking cowards.”

“But you and Billy found a phone box and called the emergency services?”

“Aye, but we ran. We should’ve stayed to help him. Maybe if we had, he’d still be alive.”

“You were only fifteen, yes?”

I nodded. “Barely.”

“So you were a child.”

“Nobody was a child on the streets of Govan that year.”

“Well, that may have been how you felt, Mac, but physically, mentally, and emotionally, you were barely a teenager. Did you have first aid training?”

Frowning, I shook my head. “Not then.”

“So how did you expect to help Craig? You would have impeded the efforts of the paramedics and then found yourself arrested for something you tried to stop.”

“I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. We’d spent that entire year acting like thugs.”

“A mistake. A boyish mistake. I know this because you’ve proved it by how you’ve lived your life from that point on, leaving Glasgow to start over and making a living protecting people. That says a lot about who you truly are, Mac, so why are you so focused on using this one incident to determine your identity?”

“I …” I was stumped for an answer because, when she put it like that, it sounded irrational. “I just can’t let go of the guilt over not helping him.”

“But you did help him. Instead of focusing on not staying behind with him, focus on the fact that you put your life in jeopardy by fighting your own friends to protect a stranger. Then, when you couldn’t, you made sure the right people got to him. His death is not on you.”

“Whoever is coming after our group doesn’t believe that.”

“If there is someone focused on revenge, Mac, they’re mentally unwell, blinded by their grief. You cannot allow those kinds of feelings to manipulate the truth. And the truth is that you tried to do the right thing, and that’s all any of us can do.”

“I shouldn’t have stayed with her. When Stacey fell pregnant with Robyn, I should have been there for her without being with her.”

“Again, Mac, what age were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Say that again and really think about it. Think about how you see a sixteen-year-old now that you are a grown man.”

“I was sixteen,” I repeated slowly, and a surprising sadness fell over me as I thought about how young a sixteen-year-old is. Still a bairn, really. “I was only sixteen.”

Iona nodded slowly. “You weren’t even an adult yet, Mac. You might have been very mature for your age, but in other ways, there’s no way you could be. You stayed with Stacey because you thought it was the right thing to do.”

“But I hurt her so badly that she stood in my way with Robyn. And I let her. Out of guilt.”

“Perhaps staying with Stacey was the wrong thing to do. You made a mistake in a relationship, which most of us have done. But you cannot blame yourself for not loving Stacey the way she loved you. We aren’t responsible for other people’s emotions or actions, Mac. We’re only responsible for our own actions, our own responses to their actions, and how we treat them. Were you ever cruel to Stacey? Did you cheat on her? Were you an inadequate father to Robyn when she was a child?”

I shook my head, feeling my chest tighten as the weight of how fucking wrong I’d gotten it came over me. “No. I was a good dad, despite how young I was. And I never betrayed Stacey. I’m not that man. I … I only ever hurt her by not loving her back in the same way she loved me.”

“And that’s not a crime. We can’t control who we fall in love with any more than Stacey could control falling in love with you. What she could control was her reaction, and placing blame on you, using Robyn as a weapon in your relationship, was wrong, Mac. You need to know she was wrong.”

“But do you not understand how I feel?” I asked impatiently. “We’ve sat here talking about my feelings of abandonment, and I fucking did it to my own kid. It doesn’t matter what Stacey did.”

“Well, the situation is not so black-and-white as that. But okay, should you have tried harder to see Robyn? Yes.”