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Letting go of her hand, I slapped the table, leaned in to kiss her forehead, and then stood up. “Right, let’s get something to eat.”
Placing the plates on the table, I turned back to the oven when the front doorbell rang. “That better not be one of your mates,” I said over my shoulder. “You’ve got revision to do.”
“It won’t be,” Maddy argued. “It’ll be for you.”
The bell shrilled again. “You could answer it.”
“I’ve told you it’ll be for you. You go and I’ll dish the food out.”
When she pushed me out of the way with a hip bump, it was clear I had no choice, so I wandered off down the hall. When I pulled the door open, I took a step back.
“How the hell did you find me?” I asked.
The man in front of me smiled, not looking one bit embarrassed at turning up on my doorstep unannounced.
“I know you told me to fuck off, but—” He shrugged. “You’re my son, so…”
As I stared at him, I felt a presence behind me and glanced over my shoulder at Maddy.
“Dad?”
“Maddy,” I groaned, looking up at the ceiling. “This is your grandfather, Steven.”
Her hand came to the small of my back, offering me support as she silently watched my father from by my side. When I looked back at him, his eyes were expectant and with one foot on my doorstep, it was clear he wasn’t going to leave without a fight. When Maddy’s hand pulled on my t-shirt, I was urged back to life.
“You’d better come in,” I told him. “You have ten minutes and that’s all.”
He gave me a single nod of the head and stepped inside my house, as if he belonged there.
Chapter Forty
Will
“Dad,” Maddy hissed, “shall I turn the oven off?”
I nodded. “Please.”
“Shall I put the kettle on?”
I glanced over at Steven, who was bent at the waist peering at some framed photos that I had on a shelf in the lounge. “No. He won’t be staying long. Turn the oven off and then come back in here.”
I didn’t want to be alone with him because I was scared.
He’d been a mythical man in my childhood, a character from a story that my mum had made up, not a real person who had the ability to crush me. Yet he had. Without even trying, he’d smashed it to pieces, leaving me with an empty husk of a childhood once Mum passed away. If he hadn’t rejected us, I would never have had to endure Christmas’ with families who tried not to treat me like an outsider, or the embarrassment of having no one to attend a parent’s evening at school, or hide when family photos were taken because I didn’t look like everyone else. The only way I’d got through all of that was bybuilding a hard shell around myself, and creating the boy who didn’t care. But, with him standing in front of me again, for only the second time in my life, I had a strange sensation overwhelm me, as if my heart and lungs were arguing with each other, trying to decide which one hurt the most.
He was my dad, the man who’d biologically given me life, yet I’d never had any feelings for him. Now, though, I had a nervous sweat trickling down my temples and pricking at the back of my neck. As if he mattered, and it was unsettling.
“What do you want?” I asked, pushing my hands into my jeans’ pockets. If I feigned indifference, maybe I’d feel it. Maybe I’dfeeldetached from my gene pool.
He turned from looking at the photographs and studied me, like he didn’t understand the question. Like I was stupid for asking such a thing. Well, Mrs P had taught me never let anyone make me inadequate.
“I told you,” I stated, keeping my voice as even as I could, “I didn’t want to see you again. I asked you to leave my bar and not come back, so tell me, what the hell are you doing here? Why did the message not get through?”
“William—”
“For fuck’s sake, if you knew me at all, you’d know it’s Will. No one ever calls me William, except my mum, and she’s fucking dead.”
He jaw tightened, a gesture I recognised because I did the same when I was frustrated. Well, he could be as frustrated as he liked. There was no way I was going to make things easy for him. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that I existed. It was his choice to wait thirty-seven years to come and find me.
