After my boring answer, I do the polite thing and ask how he’s been too, but I immediately regret it. Everyone in town has heard about his divorce by now. How Emma left him and their son because she wanted to go off and find herself. Whatever the hell that means.

Other than cringing almost imperceptibly before telling me he’s doing fine, he seems to be taking this oddly in stride. He talks about the farm for a while and mentions his son.

“How’s Mason handling everything?” I ask, though from my own experience of being a kid whose my mom left, I can pretty much already imagine.

He swipes at a bead of condensation on his glass before answering. “He’s holding up. I mean, he’s been better, for sure. Emma and I tried to explain to him why it was best for us to separate, but he’s too young to truly understand the complexities of it. And even if he could understand why we got divorced, no kid deserves to be abandoned by their mom.”

“Yeah, that’s bullshit,” I say without thinking. Then I apologize, because I didn’t know Emma well enough to judge her actions.

“No, it’s okay, it is bullshit,” Connor agrees. “I get why she wasn’t happy. I really do. We’ve both spent our whole lives simply going along with what everyone expected of us. And those expectations can weigh you down after a while. If she wanted to leave me, she had every right to. But leaving her son?” He sighs, rapping his knuckles lightly on the table. “It’s a little harder to forgive her for that.”

By the time we finish our beers, he’s told me more than I needed to know about how he and Emma stopped having sex two years before they split. About how he wasn’t happy in the marriage anymore but didn’t think he could do anything about it. He felt too guilty at the idea of asking Emma to leave her home—the farmhouse he built on the edge of the property at Shaw Family Farm and Orchards. But he obviously couldn’t leave it either.

The farm isn’t just a job for him. It’s his family’s legacy, something he always wanted to be a part of. He took over most of the responsibilities of running it from his dad, letting his parents basically retire early, although they still help out.

So he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“Honestly, it was sort of a relief when she told me she wanted out,” he admits. “And that makes me feel like shit.”

“You shouldn’t,” I assure him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were willing to stick it out while she wasn’t.”