“Not exactly. It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Aiden said. “I talked to Liam, not before giving him a pop in the mouth.”

Soircha’s blue eyes grew round behind her glasses. “You punched your own da?”

Aiden looked down at her amazed expression. “Yes, but it’s not good to use your fists when you can use your words.”

“Whoa...”

Aiden glanced back at her and frowned. “Could you be a dear and check on the tea?”

Soircha rolled her eyes. “It hasn’t whistled.”

He kept his impatience in check as he spoke. “But it will very soon.”

She hauled herself off his couch and slouched to the kitchen, muttering under her breath about not being a baby.

Clare crossed herself and let out another heavy sigh. “Lord help us.”

“After the incident with Liam, she drove us home,” Aiden explained. “I went back to Clifden to talk to him and I don’t know what I got out of that. When I returned to Antonia, she told me about her job interview back home. Jaysus... I left her, Mam.”

“She has an interview?”

Aiden did his best to explain everything he could about the woman whom his mother only met through a phone app. Once Clare had an investment in one of the boys’ lady friends, she became incredibly attentive. When he finished, his mother was sitting on the edge of her seat with worried eyes.

“Dear god, Aiden. Are you daft?”

That wasn’t exactly the response he imagined. “Maybe?” he said.

“Am I to understand that you saw your da and then did exactly what he did to us? Can’t you tell that the girl cares for you? She wanted you to tell her to stay and you ran off in the night?” Clare shot up from her seat and began pacing his living room. “I thought I raised you better than that, young man. My god, you’ve gone mucked it up, haven’t ye?”

Aiden frowned. He hadn’t heard that kind of anger in his mother’s voice since he failed Statistics at university. She’d raved at him for a full week after grades were released, convinced that she didn’t raise a lazy academic. “I wanted to spare her the trouble, Mam. I loved our time together, but she’s too good of a woman to fool around with my shite.”

Clare spun on her heel and glared at him. “And did it ever occur to you that she cares enough to see you through your shite? There aren’t very many women like her and when you meet them, you don’t turn tail like a coward.”

His mother’s words hit him in the gut, knocking him speechless.

Her expression softened when she saw his face. “Aiden, I was one of those women. When Liam was around, I put up with his long list of ailments because I loved him. You’re nothing like the man, but somehow you got it into your head that you are. Antonia wasn’t going to run away at the sight of a deadbeat like your da.”