Page 118 of Ruthless Claim

I snap out of my reverie, realizing Claire has been talking to me and I’ve been having not so nice thoughts about her. I flash her an insincere smile. “I’m so sorry. Please, continue.”

“Should I start from the beginning?” she asks.

“Please,” I say.

Claire looks at her mug for a second, deciding where to start, then she looks up.

“I knew Cillian over the span of eight weeks. It was the summer of 2017,” she says. “Cillian came into a pub I used to go to—The Duke of York, on Hill Street. I noticed him straight away. He had this—” She pauses, and her mouth twitches fondly, like she’s accessing a memory she hasn’t touched in a while. “This presence, you know? He’s the kind of person who walks into a room and you just—you can’t help but notice them, even when they’re not trying to be noticed.”

I know exactly what she means. I hate that I know exactly what she means.

“We talked,” she continues, lost in thought. “For hours that first night. He was funny and witty but he also had a dry sense of humor.

Where you’re not sure he’s joking until you see the corner of his mouth turn up. And he listened, which is so rare for a man to do.” She looks at her mug. “He was really present, like you were the only thing in the room worth his attention.”

I take a sip of my tea, eyes locked on Claire.

“We kept running into each other after that,” she says. “Or we arranged to. It turned into—” She stops before glancing at her son. She bites her lip, struggling to verbalize what she wants to say. Get on with it, I think impatiently, my heart pounding.

“It was more than I expected it to be, for something that was always going to be temporary. We both knew he was only there for a few weeks. But there were moments where it felt like—” She pauses again, and her cheeks pinken. “I used to wonder sometimes whether, if things had been different, he might have stayed.”

I set my mug down.

She—she really thinks Cillian Brennan would have stayed in Belfast? With her? God, she really doesn’t know him.

Cillian would never leave Connor and I don’t think Connor would allow his lackey—I mean second—to have a normal life.

But sure, yeah.

He potentially would have stayed in Belfast for a woman he’d known for less than two months.

Yeah, okay.

But I don’t let my thoughts show on my face. Instead, I keep my face open and interested.

“Then he left,” I prod, metaphorically twisting the knife.

“He left,” she confirms, looking solemn. “And a few weeks after that I found out I was pregnant.” She blows out a breath. “I tried to reach him. I had his first name and his description, which admittedly wasn’t a lot to go on. The hotel he’d been staying at had already checked him out and was refusing to give me his name. Privacy, they told me.” She pauses. “I sent two letters to the hotel anyway, hoping they would forward them to Cillian. They both came back.” She shakes her head, as if unable to believe her stupidity. “By the time I’d managed to piece together who he actually was—Finn was already here.”

She leaves room for me to respond. I don’t.

“By that point,” she continues, “I’d been doing it alone for long enough that I decided to keep doing it alone. I didn’t want to turn his life upside down. I didn’t want Finn growing up with a father who resented being there.” She meets my eyes. “I thought I was making the right decision.”

I nod, pretending I’m accepting her words. In reality, I think she’s full of shit. Her story makes zero sense.

I can kind of understand her thought process of not wanting to disrupt someone’s life.

Better an absent father than a reluctant one. But this is a child.

A whole human being who was going to spend his entire childhood with a blank line where his father should be, with no ability to even ask the question, because one person decided alone that the disruption was too much.

She is presenting this to me as the noble choice.

I think it’s garbage.

“Can I ask you something?” I ask, crossing my ankles.

“Of course,” she responds.