Page 128 of 56 Days
Ciara feels sick. For so many years, she had wanted the details and now that she has them, she’d give anything to give them back.
“The guards came that night,” Oliver says. “To our homes.”
I was there when they arrived.
“Everything happened really quickly after that.”
The way I remember it everything happened in quick succession, one long horrific blur of tears and whispered arguments and a house as quiet and sad and empty as a funeralhome.
“We were charged and sent to Oberstown—it’s a juvenile detention center. There was a trial. Our identities had to remain a secret so we became Boy A and Boy B. We were both found guilty of murder, but got different sentences based on our level of... involvement. I got out on my eighteenth birthday and Shane... Well, Shane took his own life on his. He still had another fifteen years to go at that point.”
She looks up at the mention of Shane’s suicide, hoping that, somehow, Oliver has more information about it, that he can tell her more about why her brother did such a thing, what it was that had, evidently, pushed him to his absolute limit. She’d never seen him again after his arrest and what little she knew about his time in Oberstown she’d picked up from eavesdropping on whispered conversations.
“I’m not some evil seed, Ciara. I’m no psycho monster. I was just a child who, for five minutes, completely lost his fucking mind. A kid who, on the way home from school one afternoon, made a stupid,terriblemistake because he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of his older, bigger friend. I wastwelve. I couldn’t undo it so I did the next best thing: from that moment on, ever since, I have tried to make up for it. I have done everysinglething I was supposed to. I took my punishment. I was a model detainee. Did all the therapy, obeyed all the rules. Whatever they asked of me, I did it and then more besides. And since the day I was released I haven’t as much aslittered. But it doesn’t matter what I do because all anyone thinks about, all anyone cares about, is what Idid.”
He moves closer to her.
One step, two.
“And then I meet you. And you like me. And when I’m with you, it’s like... I feel likeme. The me I should’ve been. The me I reallywas. Am. And even though I knew it couldn’t last, knew you’d find me out eventually, I kept wanting to feel that way, so I kept seeing you. And then, unbelievably, a bloodyglobal pandemiccomes along, and we hear there’s going to be a lockdown, and you’re living in this tiny apartment, working from home, just moved to Dublin, not knowing anybody and”—he shakes his head as if in disbelief—“you don’t evenuse social media, so I think to myself, I’ll just take these two weeks. I won’t tell her for two more weeks. And I hoped, I desperately hoped, that by the time the truth came out, you’d have seen enough of me to know thatthisis me. Now. Here.”
She isdesperateto tell him that she knows.
And what she feels. Which is that she knowsthis, here, now, is who Oliver really is. These last few weeks.
The night she stood here, in this room, in his embrace and saw the scar. The evening on the terrace, when he surprised her. The sunny day in the park.
Every little good thing, she collected them all and kept them safe in her heart, because every one was proof thatShanewasn’t evil, that he was good, that he could’ve lived a good life and been a good man if he’d just been able to hang on long enough to come back out into the world, like Oliver had.
And somewhere along the way, she’d started toloveOliver, too.
And now, she wants to stay. To be with him.
To turn this into something real.
But first, she has to tell himhertruth, reveal who she really is, how she found him,whyshe did.
So they can forgive each other, and start afresh.
But now is not the time. Let the dust from the demolition of these lies, the ruins of the past, settle. Let the shock absorb.
Until then, for now, she has to act like anyone else would, hearing all this for the first time. So she gets up and runs out of the room, into the bathroom, and does her best to sound like she’s being sick into the toilet bowl.
18 Days Ago
Oliver is on the floor and his head is filling with pain and there’s shattered glass everywhere and the water is warm and Ciara is shouting something at him, the same words over and over, sounding like she’s very far away.
He tries to clear a patch in the fog, to catch the words, tohearthem.
“I’m Shane’s sister! Ciara Hogan. And Iknow. I knew it all, from the start. And it’s okay, Oliver. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay...”
He thinks he says, “What?” but he doesn’t hear it; it may have only been inside his head.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to know what had happened that day. And what Shane might be now. What he might belike. And if the answer is like you, then that’s a good thing. Becauseyou’regood. You’re a good man. I believe that. I’ve seen it.”
Oliver starts to cry.
If he reallywasa good man, he’d tell her the truth.
