Page 27 of A Castle in the Sky: Fern & Connor
"I must've rehearsed asking you out about fifty times in my head," he continued. "Every version sounded worse than the last.Fancy adrink?Too forward.Do you want to maybe...hang out sometime?I sounded like a twelve-year-old. In the end, I think what actually came out was something like, 'I know a place that has decent chips if you want to not think about your dad murdering you for half an hour.'"
Fern let out a wet laugh, her eyes stinging. "You did say something like that."
"And you said yes," he said simply. His shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, like even now, the memory eased some invisible weight. "Which shocked the hell out of me, because I knew you were way out of my league. You were clever and beautiful, the way you talked about your course and your tutors and your projects...you lived in a completely different world."
"You had grease on your eyelashes," she said softly. "And you looked at my dad’s car like it was a person you were determined to fix. I trusted that somehow."
He swallowed.
"I was... wary," he admitted. "After Matilda, relationships felt like handling live grenades. I'd had hook-ups, though not many. But nothing that involved... talking or meeting parents or having any kind of future."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "But with you, it was different. There was the chemistry, yeah. Obviously." His mouth quirked. "But that constant tension I'd had with Matilda was missing. I didn't realise how much of that I'd normalised until it was gone. With you I could just... sit. Eat chips. Listen to you complain about some pretentious student you hated."
"I call a spade a spade, that's all," Fern muttered.
"Exactly." His eyes warmed. "Before I knew it, we'd been together a year. I'd met your friends, your neighbours knew my name, and one day I was in your kitchen and Harlan walked in, saw my overalls and grunted something about 'the mechanic,' and I realised I'd just... slid into your life."
"Meeting your dad was...intense," he said. "He shook my hand like he was testing to see if my bones would turn into powder. He talked about the Aston for twenty minutes and didn't look at me once. And I remember thinking,if he ever finds out what my mum did, what Matilda said... he's going to drag you out of here by your hair."
"I kept meaning to tell you," Connor said quickly. "about my dysfunctional family. About the fire. About Matilda and the baby. All of it. I told myself I'd do it once we'd been together for six months. Then a year. Then after I'd passed my next block of exams. There was always a reason to wait, always some milestone that felt safer."
He looked down at his hands, flexing them slowly. "But the longer I left it, the worse it got," he said quietly. "The mess didn't shrink just because I'd moved towns. It grew. Every day I didn't tell you, it got bigger. Every time Harlan looked at me with that suspicious look in his eyes, I thought,if he knew... if she knew... that'd be it. The chips, the movies, Fern asking me to fetch her from school because the car wouldn't start... it would all be gone."
Fern's gaze flicked with a mixture of pain and understanding.
"So, I kept putting it off," Connor finished, his voice seeming to disappear on the last word. "I kept pretending that if I loved you hard enough, if I worked hard enough, the past would stay where I'd left it. But it never does, does it? It just waits for the worst possible moment to kick the door in."
He looked at Fern then, properly, like he was bracing for impact.
"And that," he said, shoulders slumped, as if some invisible thread had finally snapped, "is how you ended up married to a man with a past so rotten. And I was too much of a coward to tell you the truth."
"I did tell someone," he said after a moment. "Eventually."
Fern's pulse picked up. "Your mum?"
He nodded, eyes fixed on a knot on the worn wood of the table.
"I called my mum. We were official by then, and despite everything, I loved her to bits. I had forgotten that Matilda was the daughter she never had with the love of her life, and my mom could overlook what was inconvenient to her worldview." His lips twisted. "So, one night, after one too many beers and not enough sleep, I told her that I was in love with this amazing woman and I was saving up to buy her a ring."
Fern could almost picture it: Connor on his second-hand sofa, hands clenched, words spilling out from the bottom of his heart.
"She went quiet," he said. "Then I heard her swear for the first time in her life. And then she did the one thing I begged her not to."
He dragged a hand over his face. "She called Sawyer."
"I didn't know until the next day," he went on. "My phone lit up with missed calls from him. From an unknown number because I had blocked him. I ignored them. I was at work, I was with you, I was... living the life I'd dreamt of."
He gave a short, bitter laugh.
"Up until then, it had been radio silence from Matilda for years. No calls, no texts, no photos. I told myself maybe she'd gotten help. Maybe she'd decided to forget I existed. Maybe the baby wasn't even real, and she'd just said it to hurt me. I never asked my mum. Matildasaid we were siblings and intentionally fucked me to mess with my head. What kind of sick person does that?"
His fingers tightened on the back of his neck. "But then, suddenly, there were pictures."
Fern's stomach dropped. "Pictures?"
"Of a little boy," Connor said quietly. "Jacob." The name sat heavy in the air. "Different ages. Baby, toddler, school uniform. All from some random number. There were no texts, just pictures. Then they started coming with messages. And then the calls started."
He swallowed hard. "'He's got your eyes.' 'You don't even care, do you?' 'He asked about his father today.' "
