“Fine,” I said. I tried to sound impersonal, as if I was questioning a witness on the stand. “When did you last see your kid?”
He looked deliberately to the screen, then back to me. “One second ago.”
Okay, so it was a hostile witness. “In person.”
“When he was three.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Ten years.”
I had my next question locked and loaded, but his answer paused me. The timing was odd. Ten years ago, Birdwine started going to AA. It felt backward, to get in AA and then stop seeing your son. Most people started twelve-stepping so they could see their kid. I changed course.
“Why haven’t you seen him?” I asked.
“Wasn’t invited.”
“So?” I snapped. This was now the least impersonal cross-examination in the history of the justice system. “Do you need an invitation?” I amended.
“Yup.”
Birdwine was good at hostile witness. He’d give opposing counsel exactly what they asked for, and no more. But this was not a courtroom. This was the kitchen of a man I’d almost loved. I’d been ready to try at least, last night. Now I felt that sweetness like a bullet I had barely dodged.
“Why?” I asked, and it came out like a donkey’s bray, raw and angry. He didn’t answer and it only made me angrier. “Why won’t you explain yourself?”
He shrugged, impassive. “I don’t see the upside, Paula.”
“You don’t? Well, I do. At least I’d understand your choices, even if—” I stopped myself. The rest of the sentence was stuck in my throat. I’d almost said, even if I can’t forgive them.
Birdwine gave me a rueful smile, eyebrows raised. I tipped my head to him, acknowledging the hit. He was right. There was no upside.
I dropped the line of questions and said, flat, “You should have told me. Before. When we were a thing.”
“Oh, yeah. Because you’re taking it so well.” That sounded more like him than anything he’d said so far, and as he went on, I finally got why he had ditched me in the first place. “I don’t have a good bedtime story for a chick with abandonment issues.”
“It was the truth, though,” I said. Understanding it did not make me less angry. I didn’t want a conversation, anyway. I wanted an apology; it would feel so ugly-good to not accept it. “And you were supposedly in love with me.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Then you should have told me, Birdwine, shit. I think I was in love with you, too.”
“I know you were,” he said, so sad and sure and world-weary all at once that the urge to hurt him, to pick a bruise and press my fingers hard against it or to bite, was almost overwhelming.
I stepped to him, tall enough in my shoes to jam my lips against his swollen mouth, not carefully. Not carefully at all. He hummed the hurt of it against my skin, but his hand went to my hip, automatic, like a reflex. His mouth opened, surprised by pain, and his breath came out. I pulled it in, tasted old bourbon down behind the mint.
I broke the kiss, but stayed close, eye to eye, so angry. “I’m not starting anything.”
“I know,” he said, even though his hand on my hip had already pulled me closer.
My lips twisted. “You should send that memo to your pants.”
He flashed me that gap in his teeth, though the grin had to hurt. “You’re so damn romantic.” This close, I could smell the faded copper tang of last night’s blood.
“You understand that was good-bye.” I said it like a window closing.
“Yeah,” he said. He dropped his hand and moved away to the coffeemaker for a refill. He didn’t speak again until his back was to me. “It’s not what I want, but I can’t change it.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the boy or me.
It didn’t matter. Either way, the love was breakable. All love was. At my job, I helped dozens of couples who were staggering out of it, shell-shocked or enraged. Many of them tore their kids in half and shattered that love, too. Even crazy Oakleigh with her murder-kittens had loved Clark Winkley, once. Now he was risking a broken neck to worm across her roof to pee in her compact and scribble out her face in pictures. My clients, every one, had made promises in front of priests and rabbis and judges and all their friends and their relations. Made a home. Made babies. Then happily ever after cracked, and I came to break it open and divvy up its jagged pieces.
There was something left between me and Birdwine, or I wouldn’t feel this way. I wouldn’t be closer to crying than I had been since—I could not remember, and then I did. Since the last time I saw Candace. Some feeling for him was alive inside me, still, and I would have to break it. Fine. Breaking things was what I did best.