Chapter 146 The Unfinished Letter
POV: Moira | Clerkenwell Flat
She wrote the letter in the kitchen while Finn slept, which was the only time the flat was quiet enough to think in a straight line.
She had started it three times over the past two weeks and thrown away the first two attempts because they had come out wrong, either too formal or too much the other direction, too raw in a way that would put Callum on guard before he finished reading. She wanted him to read the whole thing. She wanted him to understand what she was asking.
She dated it at the top and wrote his name and then sat for a moment with the pen hovering, deciding where to start.
You don't know me well, she wrote. We've met twice and both times there were other things happening that took up most of the room. So I'll tell you what I think you need to know before I get to the part I actually want to say.
Finn is healthy. He's a born wolf, full blood, first transformation will come around age three if he follows normal development. He's curious and stubborn and he has your family's eyes, which you'd see immediately if you met him. He talks about you.
She stopped there and read that last line back. It was true and it was the part that had made her pick up the pen again after the second failed attempt, because Finn asking about his uncle was not something she had expected and it had unsettled her in a way she was still working through.
He had heard stories. She didn't know how, exactly. Children absorbed things from the air around them, from conversations adults thought they were having quietly, from the particular weight that names carried when the adults using them were being careful. Finn had heard Callum's name in that careful way and had started asking questions, and the questions had the quality of questions that were going to keep coming regardless of what answers she gave.
He asked me last week whether you were dangerous or good, she wrote. He said his father told him dangerous and I told him good and he wanted to know which was true. I told him both things could be true about a person at the same time and he thought about it for a while and then said that sounded right.
He's two years old. He shouldn't be that thoughtful yet. I don't know where he gets it.
She did know, actually. She just wasn't ready to write it down.
She wrote about Cormac carefully, the way you wrote about something sharp, acknowledging its edges without putting your hand directly on them. He was trying. That was the true thing she could say most cleanly. He showed up three times a week without being reminded. He sat on the floor with Finn and let the boy direct whatever they were doing, which she suspected cost Cormac more than it looked like because Cormac's entire adult life had been about being the one directing. He had not disappeared. That was still, months in, the thing that surprised her most.
I'm not asking you to trust him, she wrote. I'm not asking you to forgive him or meet him halfway or any of the things that would make a tidy story. I'm asking you to consider whether Finn should know his uncle. That's a separate question from everything between you and Cormac. Finn didn't choose his father. He didn't choose any of this. He just has your family's eyes and asks questions that are too careful for his age and deserves to know where he comes from.
She was writing the next line, the part about whether Callum would be willing to meet somewhere neutral, when she heard the key in the lock.
She folded the letter in half and slid it under the stack of Finn's drawings on the table in a single motion that she was faintly embarrassed by the efficiency of. Then she picked up her tea and was looking at nothing in particular when Cormac came through the door.
He looked tired. He looked tired in a different way than he used to, when tired had meant stretched thin by ambition and paranoia. This tired was simpler. The tired of someone who had been working at something difficult and hadn't finished.
He set his jacket over the chair and looked at the table and then at her.
"He still sleeping?"
"Another hour probably."
Cormac nodded and went to put the kettle on. She watched the letter under the drawings and thought about the question Finn had asked her, which she had not finished answering to her own satisfaction even after two weeks.
Which is true, dangerous or good?
Both, she had said. Both things can be true.
She heard Finn's voice from the bedroom, not words yet, just the sound of waking up, working out where he was and what came next. It only took him a few seconds. He never woke confused for long.
Then his small clear voice, directed at her through the wall.
"Mama. When can I meet Uncle Callum? Papa says he's dangerous but you say he's good. Which is true?"
Cormac went very still at the kettle.
The silence in the kitchen lasted long enough to mean something.