Page 26 of A Castle in the Sky: Fern & Connor
"And I won't agree to a test," she went on, over the top of him. "You see, Connor, I know the law. I'll have parental responsibility. I have money. I don't need your child support."
She smiled then, cold and razor-thin.
"But you'll have to wait," she murmured, "until the child is sixteen. Sixteen years, Connor. Not enough, but I'll have to be content watching you and your mum suffer until then."
***
The room was utterly silent.
Connor's hands were trembling where they rested on the table. "That," he said hoarsely, "was the day I realised some people don't just want you to hurt. Some people want to have a front-row seat to your destruction."
"So, I left and didn't look back. Not when Mum called when she got my note. Not when Matilda called crying, saying it was the disease, that she had gone back on her meds. That it was all a prank—her telling me that we were siblings. But I never let her back in. Not when Jacob was born. I blocked out everything. I guess I didn't want to know. I caught the next train to Manchester and slept on a friend's couch until I found a job. It was an uphill battle from there. And then, when things were finally looking up, I met you."
Chapter 15
Fern's fingers dug crescents into her palms under the table. Coral's pencil lay abandoned, the half-finished sketch between them trembling with the slight shake of Connor's hands.
He drew in a breath that sounded like it scraped his ribs on the way out.
"I transferred my credits, got myself onto another course, another apprenticeship. This was my first trip out of town and Manchester is a big city. But it was the same overalls, the same grease under my fingernails... just no Matilda, no Sawyer and no mum. There was no constant reminder of how badly my life was fucked. I just wanted to keep my head down and earn my degree."
Fern's chest tinged with something like sympathy. He had been so young-just eighteen. But she didn't let it show. She knew this part in broad brushstrokes—"my old college," "the other garage"—but not like this.
"For a while, it was just work and sleep," he said, rubbing a thumb over a smear of graphite on Coral's drawing. "The occasional hook-up when I got drunk enough to think it was a good idea. It felt... safer, I guess. There were no heavy promises; no one with the power to take a sledgehammer to my life."
His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "And then some genius backed an Aston Martin Vantage 2007 into a tree."
Fern's cheeks went hot. "I did not back it into a tree," she said automatically, the words slipping out before she could stop them. "I... lightly introduced it to an unfortunately placed bit of landscaping."
Even now, the corner of his mouth lifted.
"Right. Lightly introduced," he echoed. "We got the recovery call. Everyone in the workshop suddenly found a reason to be busy elsewhere except the front desk because no one wanted to be the one to tell whoever owned that car how much the damage would cost. I drew the short straw."
He looked at Fern, and for a moment, the years seemed to peel back.
"I remember walking out to the forecourt," he went on, his voice softening. "The sun was behind you, and you were standing there with this stricken little expression, staring at the back end of the car like maybe if you blinked hard enough the dent would vanish."
She remembered that day, too: the sick drop in her stomach, the crunch the impact had made, the mortification of stepping on the accelerator, not the brake.
"The setting sun caught the red in your hair," he said. "Made it look like molten copper. I'd never noticed hair colour before in my life. It was just... hair. But I remember thinking,don't stare, don't stare, for fuck's sake, she's going to catch you staring."
"There were three of us who went out," Connor continued. "Me, Mark, and Jay. I had grease on my hands, a smudge on my cheek I didn't know about. Mark saw you first and started in with his 'customer' voice, and I... " He shook his head, a little self-conscious. "I actually shouldered him—just nudged him out of the way so I could get to you first."
Fern remembered his striking amber eyes and calloused hands, gentle when he'd opened the crumpled boot. She hadn't known back then that he'd shoved a colleague aside to get there.
"I was so embarrassed about the grease," he admitted. "I kept tucking my hands behind my back, then forgetting, then wiping them on my overalls. You were apologising over and over, like you'd done something criminal instead of just misjudging the distance to a tree."
"It’s my dad's car," Fern said quietly. "I thought he was going to have a stroke when he found out."
"Yeah. I found that out when he came in, screaming at the service desk the next day," Connor said dryly. "Your dad terrifies me, by the way… still does."
"He terrifies everyone but me," Fern muttered.
Connor huffed a faint laugh and looked back at Fern. "You left the car with us. I pretended not to care whose it was, but then your surname was on the paperwork, and the lads wouldn't shut up aboutConnor fucking Ashbourneand his bumbling attempts at flirting." His gaze flicked to Fern.
"I swapped shifts to be there when you came back to pick it up." Connor kept going, remembering with a smile. "Didn't even bother pretending it was about professional pride. I just wanted to see you again. Which, for, was weird enough to make me suspicious of myself."
Fern's fingers clenched and unclenched before she glanced at the clock on the wall. It felt like a lifetime had passed but they had only taken Coral up twenty minutes ago.
