Page 79 of 56 Days
“Do they know how much...? How long?”
“No.”
There’s another long silence.
“What are you not telling me?” Siobhán asks then.
That I might have got myself into somethinghere.
“Nothing.”
“Is everything okay?”
Things might be the furthest from okay they’ve ever been, and you and I both know that that’s saying something.
“Yeah, fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I’ve never been less sure about anything, about everything.Because I’ve met someone who’s made a bonfire of everything I thought I knew and poured lighter fluid on it, and now I’m standing beside it, holding a litmatch.
And the flame is almost at my fingers.
“You know,” Siobhán says, “I really think there should be one person in your life you don’t lie to. It doesn’t have to be me, but...”
Ciara nods, forgetting that her sister can’t see her do it.
“Shiv, can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
She could hear a smile in her sister’s voice as she said that.
It’s an inside joke, born on Patrick Street in Cork many years before, when one of thosegod-awfulcharity workers—so-called—stepped in front of them, blocking their way on a dark, cold, and rainy Christmas Eve, and said, “Can I ask you ladies something?” and Siobhán, without missing a beat, quipped, “You just did,” stumping the guy long enough for them to make their escape.
“Do you think people can change, Shiv? Like,reallychange? At their core?”
Her sister sighs so hard it sounds like a gale blowing down the line.
“What does that even mean, ‘at their core’? What does a person changing actuallylooklike? How would you know if they did?”
“They’d act differently. Different to how you’d expect them to.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on how they’d acted in the past.”
“I think people can change their habits and behaviors,” Siobhán says carefully, as if she’s on the stand in a courtroom, testifying for the defense, and thehot-shotprosecutor has just tried to trip her up with a cleverly worded question. “And sometimes their mind and their beliefs. People get older and wiser and have more experiences, and that all updates their... let’s call it their central operating system. Because everything they do they learned in the first place, right? No one is born being X, Y, or Z. And theoretically, if you can learn how to be a certain way, you canunlearn it, too. But at the same time, you can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box and put that box away, but you can’t make it disappear.” She pauses. “Is this about you? Because I think you absolutely can change. Your problem has always been that you don’twantto.”
Ciara rolls her eyes.
It’s the same old song.
That she’s sick of hearing.
“I’ve got to go, Shiv. I have to work. I was just on a break.”
“Look after yourself, okay? And I can come up there, if you need me. Just give me a call and I’ll get into the car.”
