by Shen, L. J.
“I’m going to be a little busy in the next few minutes, okay? But when I’m done, we’ll sit down with cookies and some chocolate milk and we’ll have a talk. I need to tell you a few things. Don’t worry, you are not in trouble.”
But his father sure was.
When Sam knocked on the door, I jerked him inside at the speed of light. He was wearing a black dress shirt, jeans, and his usual no-bullshit frown.
“His laptop is probably going to be password protected,” I warned, still holding the doorjamb, my heart in my throat.
I never broke the law. Ever. For anything or anyone. Hell, I didn’t even jaywalk. My obsession with my husband was turning me inside out.
Sam passed the living room, not sparing the young boy a look, and ascended the stairs. I followed him, pointing at Andrew’s study. He slipped a pair of elastic gloves on, produced a foldable door lock opener from his backpack, and opened the locked door effortlessly.
We both entered the room. I was hyperaware of Tinder sitting in front of the TV downstairs, waiting for me. Guilt wrecked me. I was going to turn his life upside down, and even though I knew it was the right thing to do, considering his abusive father, I also knew Tinder might never forgive me.
“So Kill was right,” Sam said tonelessly, powering up the laptop as he took a seat in Andrew’s chair. His fingers were gliding on the keyboard. He shoved a USB drive into the device. “You’re not completely useless, after all.”
“You don’t think very highly of women, huh?” I turned outside, to the hallway, craning my neck to look downstairs and make sure Tinder was okay.
“I thought you were a gold-digger,” Sam said bluntly, clicking away on the laptop, his eyes glued to the screen. “Shit, there’s a lot of stuff in his cloud. Amateur mistake.”
“Copy everything. I want to sort through all of it,” I instructed him, standing at the door, returning to our initial conversation. “And I’m not a gold-digger.”
“No shit.” He chuckled. “You’re risking your ass here. You know that, right? You can get a lot of jail time for what you’re doing.”
“Really?” I widened my eyes comically. “I had no idea. Dumb it down for me. What’s jail? The one with the bars, right? I think I’ve seen a movie.”
Sam’s eyes drifted from the screen to me. He smirked.
“So that’s why he kept you all this time. You talk back.”
I glanced through the window, hugging my midriff, speculating whether Andrew’s house was wired like Cillian’s or not.
“The coast was clear.” Sam read my thoughts. “The house is wired, but the idiot’s cameras have crappy street view due to overgrown trees. Apparently, his conscience wouldn’t let him trim the fuckers.”
He stood, handing me a disc-on-key.
When I reached for it, he tilted it away from my reach.
“You sure you don’t want me to go through it myself? That’s a lot of data. You can’t mess it up.”
“I will do a thorough job.”
“Let me make a copy for myself. Just in case.”
“If you make yourself a copy, I’m going to make sure you lose your job with the Fitzpatricks.” I tilted my chin up warningly. “There may be some private things in there I don’t want anyone to see.”
“Like a sex tape?”
Men.
“Sure.”
Sam Brennan was a handsome man. Then so was Ted Bundy. I didn’t find him attractive, especially seeing as his weekly body count surpassed Ted Bundy’s entire career. I honestly couldn’t see what Aisling’s fascination was with him. Then again, the same could probably be said about Kill and me.
“You do understand the concept of an arranged marriage, correct? Nothing about what you have with your husband is real.”
“Samuel,” I used his given name, my tone haughty, as I did when one of my students was misbehaving, “give me the flash drive, please.”
He tucked it into my dress pocket, laughing softly.
“I didn’t get it at first.” He dipped his head down, scanning my face. “I thought he wanted Emmabelle. Every time the three of you were in the same room, his eyes were on her. But then I realized,” he dropped his voice, “the timing was peculiar. See, Kill always looked at Emmabelle exactly at the same time you looked at him. He wanted to throw you off. To make you jealous. The first and last human thing I’d ever seen him do.”
Sam took a step back, looking around the room.
“I’ll relock the study. Andrew will never know we’ve been in here. Proceed as normal when they get here.”
He turned around, tapping the doorframe.
The oven dinged downstairs, and I heard Tin-Tin yelping in delight.
We were running out of time.
I thought Sam was going to say some parting words.
About my bold move.
About the risk I’d taken for my husband.
But that would imply Sam Brennan was impressed.
And if there was something I knew with every bone in my body, it was that, unfortunately for Aisling, my friend, woman-hater Sam Brennan would never be impressed by the other sex.
“I’ll be going away after today, but things are about to change here. I thought you should know.” I sat Tinder down in front of the burnt, disfigured cookies. Neither of us touched the sweets. His big brown eyes clung to me like I was a lifeline.
“C-Change how?”
“Your father is not treating you well. He shouldn’t do the things he is doing, and I cannot—will not—be able to be here all the time to protect you. There will come a day when you grow up and make your mind up about what I’m about to do. You will either hate me or appreciate me.” I shook my head, feeling the tears welling up in my eyes, but held myself back. Tinder deserved more. He deserved my composure and reassurance. He deserved the world. “However you choose to feel about me, I will accept and respect it. I think I’m going to put your daddy in a lot of trouble soon, but you will still have your mommy and your brother, and they’re the important part, you hear me? They’re the part I want you to focus on.”
He nodded slowly, taking it all in. It was a lot. Even I wasn’t sure if I fully grasped what I was about to do. I dropped my forehead to Tinder’s, breathing him in. If I inhaled really deeply, I could still detect it faintly. That elusive baby smell that made my bones melt.
“Have I ever told you about The Wish Cloud, Tin-Tin?”
He shook his head.
“I’m about to gift you one wish. Something to remember me by. But you’ll have to choose your wish carefully. You only get one. And you can only cash in on the wish when you see a lone cloud in an otherwise clear sky.”
“I know what I’ll ch-ch-choose, Auntie Persy,” he said, smiling. “I’ll choose what I always choose. I’ll choose you.”
Two hours later, the rest of the family returned from the charity event. I stood from the couch and walked over to the entrance. As soon as Andrew walked through the door, I pointed at him with my finger, my expression very possibly manic.
Joelle backed away, stumbling with a gasp. Tree looked back and forth between his father and me.
“What’s going on?” The young boy sniffed.
“I know what you did to Tinder,” I whispered to Andrew. “I need to talk to you two. Alone.”
Andrew’s eyes zoned in on mine, his nostrils flaring.
“Tree, take your brother and go up to your room,” he instructed. The boys bolted up the stairs. Andrew opened his mouth, but I held my hand up. We were still standing at the doorway.
“Save it. I know about the ruler. About the beatings. How you pushed Joelle from the railings.”
Joelle shrieked behind her husband, covering her face in her hands and sobbing. Her carefully staged world was collapsing.
“I know about Cillian,” I finished softly. I was mostly bluffing but knowing with certainty that burned inside me that he did to my husband something that made him the way he was. That changed him beyond recognition.
> Andrew’s face paled, his jaw slacking. “He told you?”
I couldn’t bring myself to lie, so I smiled in what I hoped resembled confidence, shrugging.
“Your secret is becoming not so secretive. Doesn’t bode well for your role as the chairman of Green Living. At any rate, I’m here to tell you that was the last time you hit your son. I am taking this to Child Protective Services. Since it’s not my first rodeo with CPS, let me tell you how it’s going to play out. I will file a complaint, they’ll visit your house within twenty-four hours to check for the wellness of your children, and once they find signs of neglect or abuse—which they will, because Tinder is physically injured—they’ll remove the children to a foster home and press charges against you.”
Joelle nearly choked.
“Since I’ve worked with numerous schools during my short career and know quite a few CPS agents, I can probably help Joelle get full custody since she wasn’t complicit in the abuse. Now, as for you—” I turned to Joelle, who buckled with her back against the wall, crying on the floor. Her face was wet with sweat, tears, and snot.
“You should put your children above all else. Always.”
“I did.” Joelle grabbed ahold of my dress, tugging at it desperately. “I do! Do you think I liked what he did? Do you think it’s my fault? I had no idea it was going to be this way. I would have never married him, Persy. Ever.”
I didn’t think it was her fault. She wasn’t the abusive party. If anything, she was a victim, too. But I knew her children might not see it that way. They might grow up to resent the woman who clung on their father’s arm with a big smile on her face, knowing what he did behind closed doors.
“Doesn’t matter what you thought. It’s time you take responsibility and step away from this toxic relationship. Put you and the twins first. Consider this my official resignation. Oh, and Andrew? Drop the lawsuit against my husband. You’ll either have to resign or get fired within the next few days, and you have bigger legal fish to fry.”
I grabbed my keys and bag, glancing behind my shoulder. What I saw broke my heart. Tinder and Tree were huddled together on the last step of the stairway, gaping at me with tears in their eyes.
I broke down, falling to my knees, letting all the tears I kept at bay loose. Starting this job, I knew I’d get attached, but I never thought I was going to love them so fiercely.
“Come here, boys.” I opened my arms.
They ran to me, yelping. As always, I fell back from the momentum, from the storm of their embrace, allowing them to bury their heads in my shoulders, crying along with them.
Later that night, I sifted through the material on the disc-on-key Sam gave me.
It took me three hours and two glasses of wine to find the file I’d been looking for. It was simply named. CFF.
Cillian Frances Fitzpatrick.
I double-clicked it, downed the wine, and said a prayer.
I didn’t know what I was in for.
I just knew I wasn’t ready for this.
The Past.
The first time I stepped into a juvenile treatment clinic was at age fourteen.
Earlier that week, I beat myself up so bad, I was still pissing blood and spitting teeth. My face was so swollen, it took three of my peers to recognize who I was when they found me on the library floor.
My mother accompanied me into the Swiss clinic. Reluctantly. I was covered in a coat, hat, and sunglasses to hide my battered figure, like a D-list celebrity zipping through an airport, trying to remain unidentified. Mother remained silent most of the plane journey from England to Zurich, save for a brief conversation, whispered after the stewardesses were out of earshot.
“Your father can’t know.”
That was the first thing she said.
Not how you are doing.
How’d it happen.
Your father can’t know.
I stayed quiet. There was, after all, nothing to say. She was right. Athair couldn’t know. And at any rate, there was no way to explain what had happened. One second I was sitting in front of my textbooks in the library, studying my ass off to finish first in class as always, the familiar weird pressure—an intangible tension I couldn’t explain—skulking up my spine like a spider, and the other, I was on the floor, beaten to a pulp, not sure who did it.
Now I knew who that person was.
It was me.
I beat myself up to a point of unconsciousness.
“Cillian Frances, did you hear me?” Mother linked her fingers together over her lap, face rigid, posture perfect.
“Loud and clear.” I looked out the window at the passing clouds.
“Good.” She frowned at an invisible spot on the cockpit door. “He will blame it on me, somehow. He always does, you know? I can never catch a break with this man.”
My mother wasn’t a bad person. But she was weak. Convenient. Now more than ever, having given birth to my sibling, Hunter, less than three years ago.
The new baby had put a strain on my parents’ marriage. When I came for a visit during the summer, they’d barely spoken a word to each other. When my mother asked if I wanted to hold my brother, my initial reaction had been hell no, but then she gave me that sheepish, poor-me look, and added, “Your father never holds him.”
So I’d held him. Looked down at the tiny, old-looking bald person who stared back at me with big blue eyes that looked nothing like mine and told him, “Buckle up, little bro. You were definitely born into one heck of a family.”
“Anyway,” Mother chimed again on the plane, rearranging her pearl necklace, “I hope this has nothing to do with Andrew Arrowsmith. You won’t be seeing much of him anymore outside of Evon.”
“I haven’t heard or seen him since Athair fired his dad,” I admitted in a vain attempt to try to get some info.
“His father wouldn’t have been fired if he wasn’t a crook,” Mother huffed.
“I don’t care about his father.”
“We’ll see if he finishes his studies at Evon,” she continued, ignoring my words. I’d often wondered why I bothered answering her at all. “Your father is suing him for everything he stole.”
“They used to go golfing together. Take annual vacations. Visit casinos in Europe. Go fishing,” I said, leaving out the escorts, strip clubs, and underground joints they’d promised to take Andrew and me to when we were older.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be naïve, Cillian. People will do anything to get close to us Fitzpatricks. We can’t have real friendships.”
Mother dropped me off at the clinic as soon as we landed, signed the paperwork, and told me she’d come to pick me up in a few hours.
“I would stay,” she sighed, “but you know how jittery I get in clinics. They’re not my scene. Besides, I have some shopping to do. You understand, don’t you, Kill?” She pinched my cheeks. I stepped away, turned around, and left without a word.
A nurse led me to a white small room with a desk and a chair. She locked the door behind me. I sat down, looking up at a security camera that was trained on me. I was obviously being watched.
They kept me like this for twenty minutes or so before a male voice sounded behind a two-way mirror.
“Hi there, Cillian.”
“Hello.”
I wasn’t afraid. I was extremely adaptable. Came with the territory of growing up in the hands of au pairs and attending private schools away from home from age six.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Been better. Been worse.” I crossed my legs, making myself comfortable.
“That’s interesting,” the doctor said. It wasn’t, really, but I appreciated his sympathy, whether it was genuine or not. It was more than I’d received from my own mother, oftentimes.
“Do you know why you’re here?” the pleasant voice asked.
“I’m guessing it’s because I have a thing called the Tourette’s syndrome.” I slouched back in the chair, taking in all the whiteness. The calmness of it pleased me. A long s
ilence stretched from the other side of the window. “How long have you known?”
“About a week.”
I heard pages flipping on a clipboard from the other side. I smiled grimly. Normally, it was the patient who was in the dark.
“How can it be? It says here your tic attack took place two days ago,” another voice said. A middle-aged female was my guess. Both doctors had accents. One was probably Italian, and the other Swiss from the French border.
“Yes,” I said slowly, giving them time to fill in their charts. “But I’ve been feeling the tension of the attack in the days before building up, so I did some research.”
“So you knew you were going to get it?” the woman Swiss doctor asked incredulously. “The attack.”
I nodded curtly. She gasped. She actually gasped.
“Poor thing,” she said. Very un-doctor-like.
“Never been accused of being that before,” I muttered, checking my watch for the time.
“Where are your parents?” the female doctor asked, her voice growing closer. Were they going to open the door between our rooms? I hoped not. Eye contact wasn’t my favorite.
“My father is in Boston, handling the family business, and my mother is shopping. Zurich is one of her favorite retail spots.”
Knowing Mother, she was going to pick me up with bags full of new shoes, cuff links, and summer clothes for me. Her version of being maternal.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” the male doctor asked. “About the Tourette’s syndrome.”
“What was the point?” I brushed my dress pants from lint. “Knowing my family, we will be keeping my condition under wraps. So either you prescribe me with shit, try new treatment on me, or let me go. I’ll figure out a way to hide it.”
“It’s a neurological disorder,” the female doctor explained, her voice turning even softer. “Caused by an array of very complex things, mostly because of abnormalities in certain brain regions. The tics will come and go, and even though we can offer some treatments to relieve and ease the disorder, it is mostly here to stay. You can’t control it. The very definition of Tourette’s is that your tics are involuntarily. You cannot train your nerves. They are everywhere in your body. To numb them, you will have to stop feeling completely.”