Chapter Thirty-One

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Scarwell Woods, Orkney

May 2024

CLEM

It is almost nine o’clock, the trees filling with birds coming to roost. Clem and Quinn find a dry spot on a bank overlooking the byre and decide to wait there.

“So is the operation scheduled yet?” Quinn asks after a long silence.

She waits a long minute before answering. “What operation?”

“You know what operation.”

She wants to ask, Why do you care? You’ve not asked about this for over a decade, and now it’s important to you?

“I’m on the waiting list. I’m scheduled to have a LVAD fitted if a donor heart doesn’t become available.”

“Remind me what an LVAD is?”

“A left ventricular assist device.”

“Okay. I’m taking it that’s a major operation in itself?”

“It’s heart surgery, yes, Quinn.”

“I see. When?”

“A week after my birthday.”

“Which birthday? This one?”

“Yep.”

“And how do you feel about it?” he asks.

She laughs. “Fuck off,” she says. Then, when he looks at her with a thoughtful expression, “Since when do you ask anyone how they feel about something?”

“I suppose since a minute ago.”

“You care how I feel about having a heart transplant?”

“Yes. I do.”

She takes a long, deep breath, far more unsettled than she cares to reveal. She wants to shut the conversation down, tell him she’d rather not go there, not now. The operation is six months away—less than six—and in her mind the date is like the barrel of a gun pointed at her face.

“I have feelings about it,” Clem says finally. Then, before Quinn has another chance to ask another inane question: “I worry about leaving Erin to raise Freya alone. I worry how she’ll manage financially, logistically, emotionally, without her mother to guide her. Her life at this point looks completely different. She’s lost fingers and toes. I’ve no idea how that’s going to affect her, both emotionally and logistically. And she doesn’t have a father, does she?”

She lets that settle.

“What are you talking about?” he says in a tone of genuine confusion. “She does have a father. Are we talking about Erin, here?”

“Yes, we’re talking about Erin,” she says. “God, Quinn. Are you really that stubborn that you can’t acknowledge how shit you’ve been as a father?”

He keeps his eyes straight ahead, though she reads his body language. He wants to put his fist through something.

Instead, he sits in a long silence, the noise of birds and leaves all around them. After a few minutes, his voice is measured, as though he’s compressed the anger that almost burst out of him before. “Do you realize you do that?” he asks.

“Do what?”

“Lash out when you’re scared?”

“I didn’t lash out. I spoke the truth.”

“So you don’t realize it, then.”

“Don’t twist my words, Quinn. You haven’t bothered with Erin for most of her life. She has felt like a second-class citizen in your eyes, like a kind of distant cousin-by-marriage instead of your firstborn child. She has suffered .” Her voice breaks, and she’s horrified to find she’s crying. Quinn watches her, not taking his eyes off her. “It has been soul destroying, watching her ache for you, only for you to let her down time and time again. And I blame you for everything, Quinn, I do. I blame your complete and utter neglect of her because she fell pregnant. I blame you for her self-harming. I blame you for this , whatever happened here in Orkney. It’s all connected. And most of all, I wish I could turn back time and fall pregnant to someone who gave a shit about our daughter. Because it’s highly likely that I’ll die on that operating table in six months’ time, and I have to do so knowing that my beloved girl has no one else to care for her when I’m gone.”

Her words hang in the air; he is stunned, utterly speechless. Never has she spoken such truth to him, with such raw, untarnished emotion.

“I know you must be terrified,” he says after a moment, and the look on his face is of such concern that it can only be sarcasm, or hatred, or spite, because Quinn doesn’t do empathy, and she wants to punch him in his goddamn smug face.

But instead, she turns away, tears coursing down her cheeks as she stares out the window at Orkney’s enormous sky, beyond which is nothing, absolutely nothing. “Of course I’m fucking terrified,” she whispers. “Who isn’t afraid of death?”

“It was the first thing I thought of when you called me,” he says. “I thought of how you’d be thinking about the operation, and who would look after Erin.”

She closes her eyes at this, hoping it’s true, then reminds herself that it’s probably bullshit, like everything else he says.

“Heather asked for a divorce,” he says then, and she starts. Heather, perfect, patient Heather actually asked him for a divorce?

“Sorry to hear that,” she says, trying her best to sound genuine, and she finds she is sorry. It explains a lot. And she knows how crushed he must feel about it. Heather made him feel proud. She holds his and their children’s lives together, a tirelessly dedicated Quinn-champion. And she knows that Quinn’s mother left his father when he was about the same age as Quinn. Come to think of it, Heather is very similar to Quinn’s mother, and Quinn is a carbon copy of his father, Eric. Eric never got over the divorce. He retired early, drank heavily, died early.

“Have you separated yet?” she asks gently.

“She wants me to move out,” he says. “I’ve asked for six months.” He makes a noise at the sound of it, the echo of Clem’s own timeline.

“Six months for what?”

He shifts his feet. “To change. To…be better.”

She lets the silence drift. She suspects he has no idea what be better means, an abstract goal.

“I’ve signed up to an anger management coach,” he says. “And I’m seeing a therapist. We’re working through my issues with my father.”

She almost bursts out laughing, but holds back. A huge part of her feels deeply for him. She always knew a lot of Quinn’s problems were to do with the damage inflicted on him by his father. A cold, emotionally distant, heavily fisted alcoholic, whom Quinn desperately wanted to please.

“Do you think it’s helping?” she asks. “The therapy?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“When is your six months up?”

“September.”

“You’ve still got a few months, then. To turn it all around?”

“Sometimes I think the damage is done,” he says with another sigh, leaning his head on his hand. “Maybe I should just call it quits, move out. Let her get on with her life.”

She bites her lip. The advice she wants to give comes from a place of experience, of how well she knows him—or knew him. And yet it contradicts her feelings of bitterness. She is still furious at him for how he has treated Erin. A voice in her head tells him he deserves this, all of it. Heather has been a stoic. His path, running parallel to his father’s, is laid out.

But the words come anyway. “If you want my opinion…” she begins.

“Please,” he says, turning his blue eyes to hers. She can see how physically similar he is to his father, too, the likeness striking. “I’d like to hear your opinion.”

She takes a breath, startled at her own compassion for him, and how much of it has lain buried beneath her feelings of resentment and frustration. How a person can still care for another despite how much they betray them, over and over and over again.

“I know you’ll hate me saying this,” she starts.

“Go on.”

“You need to work on your marriage,” she says. “And on your relationships with your children—all four of them.”

He nods, taking it in.

“You’re doing all the same things that your father did. Repeating his mistakes.”

She sees him wince, though the observation doesn’t come as a surprise—he has seen it in himself, but to hear her say the words aloud is the confirmation he needs.

He thinks for a long moment, inspecting his fingernails. “I’m sorry for neglecting Erin,” he says quietly. There is a sudden roar in Clem’s ears. She wants to say, Sorry, did you just apologize? Could you say that again and let me record you saying it?

But instead, she says, “That’s a good first step.”

“I know I could have been a better father. You’re right. I’ve been a shit dad.”

She holds her breath, wondering if she’s dreaming or if he’s actually becoming self-aware.

“Heather says I could do better for the boys.”

“Funny, Erin thinks you’ve been an amazing dad to the boys.”

“Not according to Heather.” He rubs his chin. “I know I stand to lose everything,” he says. “My wife, my daughter, my sons, my house. Actually, fuck the house. I don’t care about the house.” He turns to her again, lifting his eyes to hers. “And I’m sorry for how I treated you,” he says.

She isn’t sure how to take that, and for a moment she considers that he’s being sarcastic. But she nods. It seems the right thing to do, the appropriate response.

Just then, a light moves across the hillside in front them. The sky is dark navy, the trees silhouetted, but a gold light is moving through the trees like a jewel.

The light is a flaming torch, held aloft.