She just shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
‘So I couldn’t come over,’ Lorcan said. ‘I had to be there for her, because I was the only person who knew. This was our loss – even if Sophie felt it was hers alone. I did feel it too. I really did.’ His voice wavered and Jo reached across the table and stroked his arm.
‘I know,’ she said, as her own voice cracked.
‘That was the beginning of the end for us,’ he said. ‘I came out of the situation knowing that I wanted a child. Sooner rather than later. I know I’m not thirty yet, that I have loads of time. But Sophie and I had been together a long time, it felt like it was the right time to move things up a level. And once the notion of a baby had been planted in my head, I couldn’t shake it. But Sophie… it had the opposite effect on her.’
‘She wanted to wait?’ Jo asked.
‘She wanted to remain child-free. She said she’d had some thoughts about it all before, but this had solidified it in her head. She didn’t want children, not then and not ever. We tried to work through it. At first, I thought she was just trying to protect herself from getting hurt again, you know. Putting a wall up. I thought I’d give her time to process our loss, but she seemed okay about it. In fact, she seemed relieved. That’s what I couldn’t get my head around,’ he said, shaking his head as if he was still completely thrown by it.
‘So I asked her and she told me, told me that she’d hated being pregnant. Even for that short a time. It felt wrong. She’d felt panicked. Trapped. She knew then it was something she’d never want to do again.’
Jo didn’t know what to say. Like Lorcan, her loss had made her know for definite that one day she wanted to be a parent again. That she couldn’t imagine her life without her own child in it.
Lorcan blew out a long slow breath. ‘I tried to convince myself it wouldn’t matter to me and I could learn to live with it because she was Sophie, you know. My Sophie. She was the prize, and that prize should’ve been enough, I told myself. I loved her. So much. But that’s when I learned that all those shitty songs and poems and stuff are right. Sometimes love isn’t enough. Not for me and not for her.’
Jo wiped the tears from her eyes. He was absolutely right. Love wasn’t always enough, and love didn’t always last. Not healthy love. Love that nourishes and cherishes.
‘We will probably always love each other in one way or another,’ Lorcan said. ‘But we can’t be together. We want things that are so vastly different out of life. I just can’t believe it took us so long to work it out.’
Jo realised she’d been lucky in many ways. That her relationship with Colm had been relatively short-lived.
‘So, you see, the reason I’ve not been back here before now is because that was a tough thing to work out,’ Lorcan said, and at this stage he was crying too. Jo was so grateful they were still hidden away in one of the writing nooks where no one could see them. This moment was one so deeply personal, something only people who had experienced this pain could understand, that she didn’t want them to have any kind of audience.
‘So that’s why we split, you see,’ Lorcan said. ‘And it was messy. So I came here to get away. I need to remember the nice things in the world. To find new nice things, like Derry Girl murals and crazy rescue dogs. I don’t think I realised how much I needed that until I was here. How good it felt to have a conversation that doesn’t have some big, deep, sad undertone running through it.’
‘And yet, here we are having a conversation that has a big, deep, sad undertone running through it,’ Jo said, with a watery smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry you felt you had to tell me.’
‘I didn’t have to tell you, Jo,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to. That’s the difference.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ she admitted. ‘And I understand. How hard it is. How awful it is.’ She felt her heart constrict so tightly she thought it might implode. She knew in that moment, on the day she was on the cusp of achieving her biggest dream, that she was about to share her biggest secret.
Only a handful of people knew the real reason she had come home from Spain and exactly what had happened. Her mum, of course. Noah and Erin. She hadn’t even told Libby. But she sat, in her writing nook, and she told Lorcan just how and why she understood what he had been through. More than that, she told him that she knew, categorically, that it would get easier, but that it would never, ever go away. And that there would always be a piece of his heart reserved for his almost-child, just as there was for her.
He had held her hand while she spoke, and that touch had meant the world. There was such tenderness to the way he stroked her hand with his thumb. There was such recognition of pain, it made her feel as if she was finally seen for the person she was – good and bad, broken and healed.
He asked her did she ever want to stay in bed and for days on end. She told him she absolutely had felt that way, and that there had been times when the darkness had floored her so much that she did indeed stay in bed for days and days. But then she realised she had to start living again. She had to move on.
‘Coming here was the first step to moving on for me,’ Lorcan told her. ‘We actually split about three months ago. It was, on the surface, amicable, but, as time went on, it became less so. We’d bought a house together, and originally we decided just to live separately in that space until we were able to either sell up altogether or one of us was able to buy the other out.’
Jo pulled a face. She could have told him how that was going to end.
‘Yeah,’ he said, noticing her grimace. ‘That was ranked in the top five of all-time bad ideas. But initially I thought it would blow over. That if we continued to exist in the same space then maybe there was a chance we could come through it. I had all these fanciful notions that we’d be one of those smug couples who could boast about it bringing us closer together in the long run. I became the perfect housemate. I was more of a considerate housemate than I’d ever been a partner. You know the score, always making sure to put the toilet seat down after I’d used it, not leaving a mountain of used tea bags in the sink. The kind of things that used to drive Sophie mad.’
‘But it didn’t work,’ Jo said and again it wasn’t a question.
‘Nope. I think when I stopped giving her things to complain about it wasn’t the case that I suddenly transformed into her dream man in front of her eyes, it was more that she, well, she didn’t really have any reason to talk to me at all. And that’s when she needed to break free – she needed to have as little to do with me as possible. In the end, she moved out. I came home from work and she was gone. Note on the table, all that stuff that we think only happens in movies. That was a month ago and just before we finally got an offer on the house.’ He stopped and sighed.
‘So I’m here, while all my worldly belongings sit in storage and Sophie deals with the completion of the sale. It was my turn to need to have nothing more to do with her, to move on completely. I suppose to prove to myself that I could exist without her. And I can, I think. No, I know I can. Spending time with Paddy, and realising I probably miss Scraps more than Sophie now, has been a great healer.’ Lorcan smiled a sad sort of smile.