Free Falling in Love in New York by Melissa Hill Page A

lying at Pat’s feet, jumped up to greet him.
    “What’s wrong?” Finn asked, setting his school bag down on the floor in order to pet the sheepdog behind the ears. “Dad, are you OK?”
    Seemingly caught unawares, his father looked at the boy as if he’d never seen him before; as Finn recalled, he seemed to stare right through him.
    “Dad?” he repeated, continuing to run his fingers through Rex’s silky coat. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
    “Me – crying? Would you get away out of that!” his father said, attempting a half-hearted laugh. “Haven’t I gone and got something in my eye–a chip of wood, I think.” Pat made a great show of rubbing one eye as if trying to dislodge something from it. “I was doing a bit of sawing in the workshop, so I had to come inside and splash some water on it.”
    “Oh.” With some relief, Finn let go of Rex and returned the smile, although in retrospect he was convinced that he should have known there and then that something wasn’t right. But he was seven years old, and didn’t yet know how to read–or react to–deception.
    He picked his schoolbag off the floor and hung it on the back of one of the chairs. “So when’s dinner? And where’s Mam?”
    Pat stood up from the table and walked to the window above the sink, turning his back to his son. “She had to go away for a while.”
    “Where did she go to?”
    His father was silent for a long moment, and his shoulders heaved a little before he spoke again. “Just away.”
    Finn frowned. This was odd. His mother was always here when he came home from school …OK, so maybe not always, but nearly always. Where could she have gone to? Why would she leave without saying goodbye to him? And who would make his dinner?
    Once more uneasy, Finn called Rex over, and again began softly caressing the dog’s head. “But where did she go? And when will she be home?”
    “Soon,” Pat replied flatly, but Finn realised that throughout the entire exchange his father never once turned to look at him. “She’ll be home very soon.”
    But of course, his mother never did come home, and to this day Finn could still recall the sound of his father crying softly to himself at night, when he thought seven-year-old Finn was asleep and wouldn’t hear. He remembered lying wide awake, Rex sprawled at the bottom of his bed and keeping him warm, listening to the muffled sobs coming from his parent’s room. And despite his nightly tears, Pat behaved for all the world as though there was nothing unusual in Imelda, his wife of nine years, taking off and leaving him and their young son to fend for themselves. In hindsight, Finn understood that this was simply his father’s way of trying to make things easier for him, that by carrying on as normal maybe Finn wouldn’t notice his mother’s absence.
    And for a time, it worked. In the years following her departure, he and his father did have a relatively happy and carefree life. Pat was always around when Finn came home from school, he regularly helped him with his homework and cooked him meals, and at weekends, the two of them spent long hours making things in the workshop, or took Rex out for lengthy walks in the fields surrounding their house.
    For the next few years of his life, Pat did such a good job of raising him that Finn had almost forgotten his mother ever existed, but then when he reached puberty for some reason everything changed. Suddenly, Finn wanted to know more about his mother, and why the woman had just upped and abandoned them.
    “It’s complicated–I’ve told you that,” Pat insisted, after Finn’s repeated attempts to delve into the matter in more detail.
    “What could be complicated about it? The selfish cow just took off and left us to our own devices!”
    “Don’t use that kind of language around me–and don’t you dare use it when talking about your mother,” Pat warned, and not for the first time, Finn felt unbelievably frustrated by his