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He’s talking to himself aloud as if I’m not a foot away from him. It’s not something I’ve seen him do before. It makes him seem even more unhinged than I know him to be. The thought occurs to me that he won’t stop at Teague. Juliet has always been far removed from the family business, but merciless is Callum Monaghan’s middle name. She’s unsafe, and neither my love for her nor my desperate desire to protect her can make her safe. She has to be someone else, someplace else.
I feel the rising tide of panic inside me. It must be plain to see because my father, never one for comforting, pats my knee. “You didn’t shoot the kid, no worries. Just some upstart.” And then his hand is gone from me and clenching his beer can again. He takes a long gulp. “Either way, he’s dead?—”
Dead. The whole world falls out of focus, goes hazy and dark like I’m the one who passed away. I don’t process anything he says after that word; all I can hear is my own voice in my head spitting out synonyms for it: Deceased. Departed. Expired. Killed. Slain. Slaughtered. Yes, I did that. Me. I am a murderer.
Oh. There will be a wake. A funeral. A family mourning the loss of a son, a brother, maybe a husband and a father… And I can’t even go to express my sympathies, apologize until I’m out of breath, fall to the floor and plead for forgiveness, for some measure of absolution. My mind conjures the kids I’m not sure Gino has, crying over his cold body, over the casket as it’s lowered six feet into the ground, and in the future on birthdays, at dance recitals, graduations, weddings. So many tears for an absence that will always be felt and a Gino-shaped space that will never be filled. Don’t cry. You can’t cry. He cannot see you cry. “How do you know? How do you know he?—”
“One of our cops heard, called me with the news.” If it came from a cop, it’s real. Official. There might even be a report on a desk in a precinct somewhere, cold, technical, scrawled with scientific words describing a corpse rather than a man. “You’re a made woman now. Congratulations.” Another swig of beer.
Congratulations! Like I achieved a life goal. And I did. His life goal for me. I’m ready to take over for him when he decides he’s done. What is this feeling bursting in my core? It’s not anger or sadness or guilt. It must be a twisted amalgamation of all three. I want to take him by the throat and squeeze until the life drains out of him. I want to watch the light leave his irises. But that won’t fix things. Nothing will. I have to pay.
I leap up from my chair. He shoots his hand out and seizes my wrist. “I know what you’re thinking. If you want to throw your life away over some nobody you whacked, that’s one thing. But they’d try to use you to nail me. I can’t allow that. Toughen the fuck up.” There it is. The truth of who he is, laid bare: Self-absorbed, remorseless. And scared.
He’d deserve it if I ratted him out for every dirty deed I know about. But I’m not built that way. “So, you think I’d snitch. Am I as expendable as everyone else? You gonna kill me, Dad?”
He yanks his hand from my wrist as though I burned him. “I could kill anyone in the world except you. And no, I didn’t raise a snitch, but that doesn’t mean you’d never let anything slip. People fuck up under pressure. Even you.”
“Then what happens now?”
“I took care of it so the cops can’t tie anything to you. Still, there will be retaliation from the Calloways, which means you have to get gone for a while.” He nods at the paper sack. “There’s a hundred grand in there. Pack a bag and go. I don’t want to know where.”
“When and for how long?”
“Now and I don’t know. It takes as long as it takes for me to finish what I’ve started. I have to clean house first, then I’ll deal with the Calloways.”
Alistair. Juliet. Ben. Merrick. All the people I stand to lose, in one way or another. Merrick is on the outskirts of all this, never in on anything I didn’t bring him into, never with hands so dirty that he couldn’t wash them; he’ll be okay. Ben’s a dope but not stupid enough to try to wriggle his way back in, so he’ll be fine, too. Juliet is too big a problem for me to solve on my own; we need to work together on a plan. But Alistair… All it takes is a phone call. It’s not snitching, it’s warning. I owe him that. I owe myself that. I can’t have another man’s death on my conscience, and it would be—regardless of whether or not I’m the direct cause of it.
I crumple the bag of cash. “I pulled the trigger today and ended someone’s life. That’s on me. But the way this all played out is your fault. I’m never going to forgive you for it. I would’ve done anything for you, without question, except kill anyone in the world.”
He’s never once shown an ounce of emotion. I’ve never forced him to until now. He grimaces as he says, “I know.”
Maine. I’m going to a small beach town called Phippsburg, then on to a campsite on Hermit Island in the middle of Casco Bay. It’s Jules’s choice. She’s never been there but says the white sand shimmers like diamonds in the sunlight and the water is warm and inviting, ideal for swimming. “Yes,” I say, sans hesitation. She’s going to meet me there tomorrow morning. We both need it.
She knows that Gino is gone from the world. I hate that I’m the one to tell her almost as much as I hate myself for being the one who took him out of it. I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to the question weighing heavy on me, yet I ask it anyway.
“Do you hate me?” I focus hard on her eyes through the FaceTime video. I know how sly she is, how effortlessly she can hide or bend the truth, but she can’t keep the honesty from her eyes.
“Of course not. But I do hate that it happened, how it happened.” Then she cries. Quiet tears. And at last, after years of not letting myself, I cry. No, I sob. Noisy and trembling. I don’t know how long we cry together before we hang up, but I understand going forward things will be different between us. We both put our vulnerability on full display. Neither of us take that lightly. There’s no doubt left that what we have is real.
I wipe my sodden face, collect myself as best I can, open my closet, all my dresser drawers, and start piling handfuls into an oversized duffle bag—things I might need and things I probably won’t but would miss: Clothes, shoes, sundries, my phone charger, my favorite books, and the tiny Boston Red Sox beanie bear my mom gave me when I was five. It’s the last remnant I have of her. I remember how much she loved baseball. All my memories of her are with her long black hair loose and topped with a Sox cap. My gun is on my nightstand. I’m bringing it, but only so I can chuck it into the fucking ocean. I shove it, and the cash, into my duffle, zip it closed, then pick up my phone again.
The line rings once. “Hey, kid, what’s up?” Alistair sounds happy to hear from me.
I’m not happy to speak to him. As much as I care for him, he still betrayed my father, and trustworthiness is the one thing he instilled in me that I’m proud of. “Don’t come back to Boston. Don’t stay in New York, either. Take your wife and go somewhere far away. My dad knows you’ve been working with the Calloways and he’s going to handle it the way he handles everything.”
“Oh, Christ, Ben!” His voice shakes. That’s how a parent should react when there’s trouble: Priority number one, get the children to safety.
“He’s out. I got him out. But make a plan for him to meet you in case my dad changes his mind. What the shit went through your thick skull crossing him, Al?”
“Callum is dangerous and getting more dangerous by the day.”
“And Patrick Calloway isn’t?”
“He’s the lesser of two evils. He’s hard, but he gives a shit about his people.”
“Fuck ’em both. And fuck you, too.” I hang up on him.
I take a last look around my room and it hits me that it was never mine. My father chose everything in it, even the color of the walls. I hate purple. I’d have picked teal.
