Page 23 of A Castle in the Sky: Fern & Connor
"Matilda survived," Connor whispered. "But after that... she was never the same. Something had changed. I thought they would hate me because of my mum, but we remained friends."
He rubbed a hand over his face and kept going. "When we turned fourteen... she changed. She became this beautiful, magnetic girl everyone wanted. "He tried to smile, but it died halfway. "And for some reason, she fixated on me. It made me feel like a king, because the most beautiful girl in class wanted only me. I was sixteen, stupid, and lonely as my dad left and my mum was obsessed with 'curing' me of my dyslexia. I should have known something was wrong. You cannot forget why your life went up in flames that easily. I didn’t realize until it was too late that Matilda had been planning her move for a long time. "
Chapter 13
Fern's chin lifted slightly, watching his every movement.
He rubbed a hand over his face, eyes staring at nothing in the distance. "She wasn't always like that," he said quietly. "Or maybe she was, and I just didn't see it."
Fern stayed silent while Connor's fingers kept worrying at the corner of Coral's drawing on the table, smudging the paper.
"Matilda used to sit next to me all the time in school. I was just one of the lads—good at rugby, not so much at anything else. Sawyer was good at everything—Matilda was as well, always top of the class and the teachers loved her. I always thought... " He huffed out a breath. "I thought the fire happened when we were so little that they didn't blame me. Or Mum. I was right about Sawyer; he kept his distance in the beginning, but then, we were back to the way they were. They had an aunt who moved into town to look after them. The insurance pay-out was huge."
He stared past Fern, like he could see another room, another lifetime.
"Thinking back, all the signs were there. Unfortunately, I was a boy who didn't want to lose his best friends, and later, a teenager who was infatuated with the most popular girl in class. She'd bring it up, you know. Just... little things. Like how we left her behind that night, or how she still had nightmares about the fire. A passing joke here, a comment there. I would let her take pot-shots at me, hoping it wouldmake up for what I did, hoping it would make her feel better. But it was like a knife turned just enough to make me bleed slowly."
His throat worked. "I guess in my case, it was this messed-up combination of guilt and lust and old friendship, on top of... whatever I felt for her. Love, I thought, back then. The love of my life, I thought. I didn't want anyone else."
He exhaled slowly. "When I turned seventeen, the three of us went to a party—bonfire, cheap beer, the usual. At some point, when I was feeling as light as a feather and happy, Matilda took my hand and dragged me off into the woods. There was this old treehouse there we used to play in as kids."
A muscle jumped in his jaw. Fern wanted to stop listening, but she had to see this through.
"That's where it happened—our first time. Or...I thought it was our first time. I didn't know back then that it wasn't Matilda's first… or second, or even third."
He swallowed. "We had been dating secretly for about a year. She said Sawyer wouldn't approve, and I believed her. I wasn't sure Mum would approve, either, so I went along with it. After the fire, mum was all over Matilda. I don’t know if it was guilt or the fact that she looked so much like her father." He shook his head. His fingers tightened on the paper until it curled.
"She was always flirting with other boys—and more than a few—but I didn't see it. Or maybe I didn't want to. I caught her once, kissing another lad, but she said he kissed her and I... I forgave her. As far as I was concerned, we were together, you know? We were going to get married. I was planning a life around her." He let out a breath, shaky this time.
"I was taking my automobile engineering course at college," he went on. "Three days a week in class, the other two at the workshop. I'd managed to get a service technician apprenticeship at one of the main dealers in town—with proper lifts and diagnostics, the works."
He huffed a small laugh. "I was getting paid, but barely. It wasn't about keeping the lights on or anything. Mum had her inheritance, Dad was still paying alimony, and there's a trust sitting there with my name on it for when I turned twenty-one. We weren't rich, but we weren't struggling." His mouth twisted. "But the idea of living off cheques and dead people's money for the rest of my life made my skin crawl. I wanted something that was mine."
"Mum hated it, of course. She always despised Dad's 'blue-collar nonsense'—her words, not mine. She despised the overalls, the grease, the busted knuckles. She wanted me in an office, or at least in something that didn't smell like petrol and burnt oil. So of course, I picked the one thing that made me think of him the most. He was a technician as well, and he loved cars. It was my little rebellion, I guess."
He smoothed the edge of Coral's drawing, gaze fixed on it. "The plan was simple. Stick it out at the dealership for a few years, learn everything I could... then, open my own little garage one day. Nothing fancy, just a place that was mine with my name over the door. A life I'd built with my own hands. Her, me, a little place that was ours. I could support her when she went off to uni." His hand flicked, thinking of the house and life he had dreamt of. "Then she told me she was pregnant."
The words seem to be wrenched out of him.
"She said the baby was mine. I wondered why she said that because, fool that I was, there wasn't a doubt in my mind. She had just turned nineteen. I was terrified, but I loved her. So, I did what I thought I was supposed to do." He gave a small, broken laugh. "I asked her to marry me."
He stared at his tight knuckles, as if waiting for them to split open. "She laughed like I had made a joke. Said she had heard her mum say that my mum and her dad were lovers long before either of us were born. That she knew I wasn't my father's son."
His face paled at the memory.
"I started throwing up right there. She just watched, like she was observing a bug under a microscope. Then she laughed again and said she wanted me to understand the pain her mum had gone through. The pain she had gone through. That Mum and I deserved it." His voice shook badly.
"That's when I told her she had to have an abortion. I couldn't... I couldn't make sense of anything else. The baby, the lies, the way she looked at me like I was some kind of... experiment she'd finally cracked." He swallowed hard with a dry throat.
"She just scoffed," he whispered. "Like I'd said something pathetic. Like I was pathetic. And that was the moment I realised that I didn't know her at all." He paused, breath sawing in and out unevenly. "That scared me in ways I still don't like thinking about."
Fern's hands folded tighter. This was much worse than she thought.
"I went home and shut the door. I stood under the shower, scrubbing myself raw. I felt dirty. Couldn't even tell you what was going through my head. I thought about killing myself—that's how low I felt. My mum, for all her faults, loved me in her own dysfunctional way. Iknew she was worried when I refused to come out that day. But how would you talk to your mother about something like that? I was scared to, and scared not to. I snuck out of the window and crashed at a friend's house for a couple of days, trying to get my head together. I switched off my phone."
Connor looked up and sighed. "It took me a whole week to come back and confront my mum. She was shocked that we all knew. Matilda had only told Sawyer and me. Mom admitted the affair started when they were both in senior school, but said I was definitely my dad's because she was with my dad when he was stationed at the Isle of Man, when I was conceived. We stayed there until I was a few months old. I am definitely my father's son."
Chapter 14
