Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 82767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82767 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
“So, you left?”
“Not right away. It was complicated. I’d get myself out then get pulled back in. My degree took twice as long as it should have as a result. Then there was Sarah, Kevin’s long-term girlfriend. She begged us to stay, begged us to help Kevin get out of the crowd he was in. To get him off the drugs. We tried.” At this point, Keegan put his hands up to his head, and then rested his head on them, looking down at the ground. I wanted to hug him, but I was wary.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
“Things got bad, and we left. We couldn’t help him; he didn’t want our help. He told us to leave, said he never wanted to see our faces again. So, we went to leave, but there were six men waiting outside the door. He owed them money. They beat us all up, Sarah too, but they stabbed Kevin. He died on the floor in our arms.”
“Oh my god,” I breathed, placing my hand on his leg. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say,” he said, sitting up and trying to adopt a matter-of-fact tone. “We were all placed under arrest and taken to the hospital. That’s when Sarah found out she was pregnant with Kevin’s baby. She was in hospital for months, and then there was an inquest. The neighbors knew we had all had an argument; they saw us go in. Nobody would come forward to identify any of the other men. It wasn’t worth the risk to them. So, my father put up a reward for any information that would lead to an arrest. Money was the thing that cleared our names, in the end.”
“And the baby?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“Little Declan,” he smiled, and pointed at his chin. “Well, do you see this scratch right here?”
“I looked closely and nodded. “Yeah?”
“That was courtesy of young Declan, who saw fit to throw a toy car at me the other day while you were chatting up the locals in Bray,” he laughed.
“That’s who you were visiting?” I flushed now in complete shame. When I had wondered where he was, I had imagined all kinds of dodgy business deals.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sarah got out of the city, and Declan’s parents are helping her with the lad. I hadn’t been to visit in a while. Kevin never knew he was going to be a father, but he would have loved the idea. Maybe it would have even turned things around for him, who knows? But I promised him the day of the funeral that I would stand by his son, make sure he didn’t make any of the mistakes we had.”
“He’s lucky to have you.”
“No, I haven’t been there for them like I should have. A bit like my own father, I threw money at the child but did little else. I didn’t call, didn’t visit. I couldn’t even say why, because I don’t know.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? You’re hurting. You haven’t even started to get over what happened. Something stopped you dealing with all of it.”
He looked at me for a long time and then said, “Running away to America stopped me. I drew a line through everything that happened here and consigned it to the past. I couldn’t take that shit with me.”
“But that means you never dealt with it. And now you’re back, you are right back where you were when it happened,” I said, aching for how palpable his grief was.
“I had no choice. My parents bailed me out of trouble, but they made it clear that they own me now. I finished my degree, but I am tied to Clover House and Boston until I hit thirty-five. Then, if I have been a good boy, I can access my trust fund and live my own life.”
“Is this why you and your brother don’t…” I struggled to find the words to describe their relationship without causing offense.
“Why he can’t stand me?” he smiled ruefully. “Well, Sean got a bad deal. When they held my trust fund back, they did the same with his. My dad wanted to teach us the value of hard work. And that’s why Sean resents me. And I resent him for threatening to mess it all up for me by constantly criticizing everything I do. He wants to see me cut off completely.”
“What about Mick? How did he come to work at Clover House?” I asked, rapidly realizing that the ‘criminal past’ whispered about among the Design team was not the white collar crime that I had expected, and that using these rumors to confirm my suspicions about Keegan’s involvement in the theft from my parents’ company was entirely foolish.
“That was the one thing I got my way. I agreed to tow the company line so long as Mick got a job here in Dublin. The court case had been in all the papers; he was basically unemployable. My father has known Mick since he was a child, knew his family, knew that he is twice as smart as any of the rest of us, and he let him work his way up. And thankfully Mick was born to do the job he is doing, and he’s happy there.”