‘You don’t have to tell me this. It’s not my business.’ She tried to cut him off, but he frowned at her, his deep brows furrowing together.
‘It is your business. I want it to be. Tina was with another bloke." He started talking, and it came out in a torrent. He needed her to get it. ‘She’d left Orla at home, while she went drinking with some other fella. He didn’t even know she had a kid. He’d been to the flat, April. He never even saw my daughter. She left her alone, with emergency credit on for the gas and electric. It didn’t last long of course, so Orla was sitting on her own in the dark when I came home. The girl was petrified, and all she kept saying was that Mummy left her at home, and she talked about the other man. She’d seen him, but she’d stayed in her room. She did all that, April, and now after all this, just when I thought everything was utter shit, you came along.’
‘Exactly.’ She seized on the pause in his speech to try to make him stop. ‘I have baggage, and the park to run. We’re just going to confuse her, and I don’t want to hurt her.’
Cillian banged his hands against the steering wheel in frustration.
‘I know you won’t hurt her. She likes you! I’m not asking you for anything. It’s just a day on the beach. That’s it.’
‘And what then?’ she countered, feeling her own fists clench now as she fought the urge to jump out of the van and run home. Just looking at the flat made her feel angry with Tina, her actions so at odds to anything that April would have done as a mother. Easy to say with an empty womb and no chance to make mistakes, but wasn’t that half the point? These issues would come up time and time again, and how could she be involved? It wasn’t her business. She would always be the one with no stake in the argument, but dragged in she would be. She’d have to, to protect Orla and Cillian. It was too scary. Too much would go wrong.
‘It’s not just one afternoon of paddling, is it? It’s spending time with your daughter, and acknowledging we’re not just working together anymore.’
‘I think that the fact you’ve woken up in my arms for the last solid month should tell you that we’re not just work colleagues. Don’t see me top and tailing with Henry, do you?’ His answer was grumpy, a boy with his lip out. In other circumstances, she would have found it adorable. ‘It’s changing because we’re changing. Orla won’t get hurt – you’d never do that.’
‘How do you know?’ April thought of the girl she was, all those years ago, coming to Cornwall on that back seat. Things changed then, but it was for the better. She could remember so many happy times when they’d come home from Cornwall, settling in Yorkshire again. A different place, a different front door to be photographed in a different school uniform. Those times, just the two of them, were the best times of her childhood, and Shady Pines was the start. She didn’t want to derail the magic of the Pines. ‘We’ve only known each other a short time. We haven’t even slept together yet. This could all end, and then what? I’m doing this for Orla, and you. I think we should just stay how we were.’
She knew even as she said it that he wouldn’t accept it.
‘I don’t think I can.’ He started the engine, motioning for her to put her seatbelt back on before he indicated and pulled back onto the main road. ‘I can’t lie to Orla. I hate it. It feels wrong.’ He looked across at her, her hand still in his, and he released her. With both hands on the wheel, he stared straight ahead. ‘I’d rather be out of this altogether.’
‘Fine, that’s what we’ll do then,’ April said to the passenger-side window as she stared out of it, not wanting Cillian to see her shocked face. She could see his in the reflection of the window, and it was enough to make her hate herself for being so weak, so beaten down. She could reach out, right now, and grab him. She could tell him how much she cared for him, how his late-night kisses and sleepy chats had made her feel alive and seen. He’d kissed every silvery stretch mark on her body, and declared them all beautiful. He made her feel whole, without ever asking her for a thing. Till now, and look where it had gotten them.
‘Fine,’ she heard him say as they headed back to the chalet park. Keeping to the speed limit the entire way home, he didn’t speak to her again for the rest of the day, other than for work. Even then, it was a very different Cillian who looked her in the eye now, and she couldn’t bear to see the hurt and confusion on his face any more than she had to.
Chapter 18
‘Elvis, tell me what to do.’ A slightly squiffy April was sitting on Judith’s back step, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of bubbly in the other. She didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t since Lisa Wallaker had given her a puff of her Lambert & Butler at the back of the science block. She hadn’t liked it then, but given that she was at a celebration of love, and a packet had been offered in her direction, she went with it. Smokers had the perfect excuse for things like this. The smoking ban in pubs probably helped a lot of introverted people, to be fair. Any excuse to
