Page 108 of Ruthless Claim

A hug would be too much.

A handshake would feel ridiculous.

Her right hand lifts a little, like she might offer it, then stalls there.

I stop a couple of feet from the table. For a moment we just stay like that—her half out of the chair, hand raised, and me standing there with nowhere to put mine.

She sits back down.

I pull out the chair across from her and sit.

Up close, she looks even more tired.

The tension I noticed from the door is clearer now.

She’s holding herself very straight, and her hands are now touching the cup, gripping it harder than they need to.

“Thanks for coming,” she says.

Her voice is exactly the same as I remember. The Belfast lilt bringing back a barrage of memories.

“You didn’t give me a lot to go on,” I tell her, disapproval clear in my voice.

One corner of her mouth moves into not quite a smile. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”

She looks down at the cup then back at me.

I can see the moment she decides to say whatever it is that made her ask me to join her at this coffee shop.

Her chin lifts slightly, her shoulders settle as she meets my eyes and she exhales.

“I was pregnant when you left Belfast,” she finally says.

The coffee shop keeps going.

The machine hisses.

Someone at a laptop near the window shifts in their chair and coughs.

An ambulance wails outside.

All of it is perfectly normal, but I’m not sure if it actually is.

There’s a weird pressure in my ears with my brain refusing to fully catch up with what she just said.

“What,” I ask faintly, shocked that my voice is actually working.

“I found out after you left.” Her voice is even. She’s practiced this—I can hear it in the steadiness, the way the words come out smooth, like she’s gone over them many times already. “I tried to reach you. I didn’t have a number. Just a first name and the hotel you’d already checked out of.” She bites her lips, looking pained. “I knew you worked for someone in Dublin—you mentioned it once—but nothing specific.”

She pauses.

“It took months to find anything real. By the time I did…” She stops and her jaw tightens for a moment. “I made a decision. I decided not to disrupt your life. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

My hands are flat on the table and I can see them there. They look steady even though on the inside I am anything but steady.

“I raised him on my own,” she says. “He’s eight.”

Eight years old.