“So, she is being bullied,” Kav choked out, missing the mark entirely, and looking physically sick at the thought. “Someone at Tommen.” He shook his head, looking lost. “Or at her old school.”
I sighed heavily. “Listen, Kavanagh, if you want to know what goes on in that head of hers, then be worth it.”
“Be worth it?” He glared at me. “Be worth what?”
He knew exactly what I meant.
If he wanted in, like he so desperately seemed to, then he needed to earn that entry pass from Shannon.
I couldn’t give it to him.
Even though, a weird part of me strongly wanted to.
Because, even though I’d long given up on protecting myself, and having spent years failing to protect my siblings, I was starting to come to terms with the possibility that I wasn’t doing the right thing for them.
That keeping quiet wasn’t the right thing.
Maybe I had taken too many blows to the head at the hands of our father, or maybe it was Molloy getting inside my head, but keeping my mouth shut was starting to look, in my mind, less like protecting my siblings, and more like enabling my parents.
Still, the memory of Darren’s abuse continued to imprison me, keeping the fear alive just enough to keep my tongue at bay.
“You’re a smart guy,” was all I replied. “You’ll figure it out.”
Kav shook his head again. “I don’t—”
My phone rang out loudly in my pocket, stalling him, and I quickly pulled it out, only for my heart to fall into my ass when I saw the name flashing across the screen.
Dad.
Fury enveloped me then and I held a hand up to warn Kavanagh to keep his goddamn mouth shut as I pressed the answer button and put the phone to my ear.
“Joey, it’s me.”
“What the fuck do you want?” I sneered, thoroughly disgusted that he even thought that mine was a number he could call.
The sound of his voice had every hair on my body standing on end.
It didn’t matter to me that he sounded sober.
Everything about this man, drunk or otherwise, made my skin crawl.
I almost fell off the stool when I heard him say, “I’m phoning you to let you know that I’m coming home with—”
“No, you were told,” I cut him off, pacing the kitchen, trying to keep my shit to myself all while I was losing the very same shit. You were goddamn told there was no coming home. “There’s no coming back.”
“What happened the other night was a mistake,” I heard him say, tone level. “I didn’t mean to hurt your mother. It was a heat of the moment thing. You understand.”
He didn’t mean to hurt Mam? I understand? What about Shannon? Had he meant to hurt her when he pummeled her face with his fist? Of course he fucking meant to.
Believing that he didn’t mean to do something that he had repeatedly done throughout the course of our lives was the definition of insanity. “I don’t give two shits how sorry you are.”
“Would ya just shut that hole in your mouth and listen to me for a second—”
“No!”
The last time I sat down and listened to him attempt to absolve himself of any wrong doing was more than eight years ago, shortly after witnessing him brutally rape my mother against the same table we were forced to eat at every day since.
I’d taken a hurley to him in my pathetic attempt to protect her, and the fight that ensued had been so loud and vicious that the neighbors called the Gards.
As a result, the social workers had been called in, and I had been forced by the very woman I had tried to protect to sit at that same kitchen table that still remained in our house, and listen to her abuser reel off a convincing tale of how the ring on her finger gave him dominion over her body and mind.
I had instantly called bullshit on that and was then treated to an in-depth and graphic play by play of what happened to a small boy when he went into care by my father.
Darren, being the diligent and conscientious son, having endured the suffering had been spared the warning.
So was Shannon and the small boys.
Not me, though.
Not the black sheep of the family.
The liability.
The fuck-up.
I lost my childhood that day.
I’d never had much of one to begin with, but whatever innocence that had been there, all of my boyhood hopes and dreams, had been snuffed out in an instant.
Mentally and physically scarred to the point where I couldn’t picture myself trusting another human being. Terrorized with grave details about what would be done to me if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, or worse, what would happen to Shannon and Tadhg, I’d buckled under the pressure and lied through my teeth like the good solider I’d been trained to be.
From day one, my reluctance to commit to Molloy never had a thing to do with my ability to love her, and everything to do with the fear of loving her the wrong way.
The fucked-up part was that I couldn’t see then what I was starting to see now, that I was trying to protect those kids from rapists, by living with one.
Because that’s what he was.
He was a fucking rapist.
The things he did.
The pain he caused.
The lives he ruined.
No, I would never listen to another excuse that man made again.
“Your mother is in the hospital,” Dad said, dragging my thoughts back to the present, and bringing with it a flood of panic. “She had a bleed the other night. A bad one.”
I gripped the phone so tight; I thought the skin around my knuckles might crack. “She’s where?”
“Are ya deaf, Joey? I said she’s in the fucking hospital,” he barked. “Placental abruption, apparently.”
Jesus Christ. I felt faint as I pressed a hand to my brow. “When did that happen?”
“Friday night,” he replied, confirming my worst fears. “The hospital rang me to come in to be with her.”
My heart sank into my ass.
I was calling her a cunt while she was bleeding out in the hospital.
“She went in with bleeding, but when they went to examine her, her waters broke,” he added, sounding genuinely human for once. “She, ah, she was in a bad way with the bleeding, so they took her down to theatre to sort it. According to the consultant, it can happen in older women who’ve had a lot of children, and your mother had a c-section on Tadhg.”
“And the baby?” I heard myself squeeze out.
“What do you think, ya bollox?” he snapped. “It’s fucking dead, isn’t it? It wasn’t much bigger than the size of my hand.”
Jesus Christ.
“It?” I choked out, feeling my legs tremble beneath me. “It?”
“What do ya want me to call it; your brother?” he demanded.
So, it was a boy.
A baby brother.
Jesus.
“It’s fucking gone, and that’s that,” Dad snapped. “No point in getting worked up over something we can’t change.”
I didn’t know what I wanted him to say, but calling the baby ‘it’ made me feel physically sick.
“Your mother’s in a bad way here,” he continued to say. “They’re discharging her, but she won’t leave the hospital.” He exhaled a frustrated breath before adding, “She won’t leave it.”