Page 97 of 56 Days
“It happened in 2003,” he says. Ciara would have been eight years old, already living in the Isle of Man. “In Kildare. Mill River was this new housing estate—hundreds and hundreds of homes—that had been built just outside Ballymore. On the banks of the river. There was a...”
Oliver stops. He has never had to say this out loud, never had to explain what happened to him to anyone else in his whole life. They always knew already. Either because that’s why they were meeting, as in the case of Dan, or because they were demanding answers from him after someoneelsehad already told them, as in the case of Lucy, in London, just a few months ago.
And now he finds that he’s not sure he can.
“There was a murder,” he says. “Of a boy. Aged ten.”
Ten.
The older he gets himself, the worse that fact becomes.
The more it drips with horror, the heavier the droplets become.
“And—” He takes another deep breath, feeling like his heart is about to break out of his chest cavity, wondering if this is what a heart attack feels like, if he is on the verge of having one. “And two other boys, aged twelve, were convicted of it.”
He can’t look at her.
He looks at the floor.
Tears he didn’t know he was crying blur his vision, start to drip onto his cheeks.
When he finally says the words that matter, his voice is barely a whisper.
“And I... I was one of them.”
78 Days Ago
They’d met on the street outside, Ciara having arrived first, hugging each other before pushing through the restaurant’s revolving doors and joining the line for the host’s attention. He’d led them to afour-topjust inside the window, offering both an uninterrupted view of Emmet Place and aclose-upof the man talking animatedly on his phone while also picking his nose at one of the outside tables.
“Look at him,” Siobhán said, rapping a knuckle on the window to get his attention. “Having a right old dig for himself. Just what you want to see with your lunch.” When she threw him a disgusted look he threw one back, but also—mercifully—stopped picking.
As they shuffled out of their winter coats and sat into their chairs, Ciara waited, literally biting her tongue until the first possible moment to ask about the only thing that’s on either of their minds presented itself.
“So? What did the doctor say?”
When she sees her sister’s eyes glisten, she wishes she’d waited a little bit longer.
“They’re going to move her into hospice care.”
Even though that’s what Ciara was expecting—what they’ve both been expecting, for months now—it still comes as abody-blow.
Ciara absorbs the impact in silence.
Then she says, “What was Mam’s reaction?”
“She wasn’t there. It was just me and Dr. Corrigan. He says they’ll tell her she’s going in for respite—and that’s whatwe’llbe telling her, too, even though we know she won’t be coming back out.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how it’s done. You’ve got to give people hope, even when there isn’t any.”
They slip into a silence.
Ciara’s heart hurts for Siobhán. She has always been much closer to their mother—being older, she could remember her frombefore, when by all accounts she was an entirely different person, loving and funny and full of beans—and even now, after she’s gone, Ciara will still have her older sister, but Siobhán will have no one further up the generational chain. No older, wiser family member to turn to, to rely on, to ask for help. She’ll be the full stop at the end of their family’s sentence.
She’ll also be the capital letter at the start of her own—her husband, Pat, who Ciara secretly thinks is incredibly boring but who adores Siobhán, and their kids, Lily and David—but that won’t do much to lessen the loss.
Ciara reaches across the table and takes her sister’s hand. “I’m sorry, Shiv.”
