“Connor,” he said quietly. The boy looked at him. “Do not call me son.” “I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” Sarah put both hands over her face. David had not seen her cry in nearly two decades. The last time had been in that Columbus coffee shop where she told him she was seven weeks pregnant and had slept with both David and the man she was trying to reconcile with within the same narrow window.
Paul Pell was her ex-boyfriend then, not yet her husband. David had been newly married to Laura, whose own pregnancy with Megan had begun only weeks earlier. The timing was a moral disaster even before biology entered it. Nineteen years earlier, David had been thirty and stupid in ways thirty-year-old men rarely recognize as stupidity because they have jobs, mortgages, and enough adult vocabulary to camouflage impulse.
He had loved Laura. That part had always been true. They had been married just under two years when money, infertility fears, and David’s endless travel for work turned their apartment into a place full of defensive silence. Laura had suffered an early miscarriage the previous year and then become pregnant again unexpectedly.
Instead of joy arriving cleanly, fear came with it. Laura became cautious. David became restless. Their arguments grew sharp and repetitive.
During that period, Laura asked David to stay with his brother for two weeks after an argument about a business trip he had hidden from her until the last minute. It was not a separation in any legal or emotional sense, though David later used that word because language can be recruited to make wrongdoing look less deliberate. He spent four nights on his brother’s couch and the next ten in a long-stay hotel near downtown Columbus because he could not bear being watched by family while his marriage struggled. On the sixth night, he attended an alumni fundraising dinner for his college engineering program.
Sarah was there. They had dated for two years in their early twenties. Sarah had been bright, quick-witted, and less patient with David’s ambitions than Laura eventually became. Their breakup had been painful but not hateful.
They wanted different cities, different timelines, different versions of adulthood. When they saw each other across the hotel ballroom almost eight years later, memory supplied a dangerous shortcut past caution. Sarah had recently broken up with Paul Pell after discovering he had been messaging an old girlfriend. David was angry at Laura, ashamed of his marriage, and hungry for a version of himself unburdened by consequence.