“Aidan,” he said in a hard voice. I could hear my parents coming back, bantering with each other, and I’d already stood up to greet my father.
“What?” I asked.
“This is the guy who attacked you in the church.”
“What?” I spun around to stare at him, but at that moment my parents walked back in, and my father came over to pull me into a warm embrace.
“Aidan, son, it’s so good to see you. And you must be Teo—” Teo put the photo album down and jumped up to receive his own back-slapping hug.
I took the opportunity to sneak a look at the photo album. It was a picture of my parents at a restaurant somewhere, Mom more made-up than I’d ever seen her, Dad looking proud, his arm around her, both of them beaming at the camera. I recognized my mother’s sister, Auntie Lena, next to her at the table. On the other side was my father’s brother, Uncle Jim, his face stony as he stared at Dad.
Uncle Jim.
I focused so hard on his face that I missed the conversation between Teo and my Dad. Because Teo was right. The man at Our Lady who’d attacked me—it was Uncle Jim.
I didn’t know much about Jim O’Leary. He’d become the black sheep of the O’Learys when he’d joined the Donovan Family back when Finch’s father ran it, before I was even born. My parents, and a large part of my family, had disowned Uncle Jim, because this was back when the Donovans were as merciless as any of the Italian Families of New York. I knew, too, that Uncle Jim had been Finch’s bodyguard when Finch was a kid.
Uncle Jim was also, so far as I knew, stone cold dead.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Teo
“You two boys are soquiet,” Aidan’s mother exclaimed an hour into lunch.
We’d had no chance to discuss the photograph, although I’d made sure to pull that photo out of the album and shove it in my back pocket. I figured Aidan could return it later.
And now that I really looked at his dad, I could see a resemblance with the guy who’d attacked Aidan. That church hobo had been through some shit, no doubt, but they had the same color eyes.
So did Aidan. Serene blue with thick lashes.
For the first part of the meal I was staring at all of the O’Learys on high alert, which was why I was so silent. I couldn’t help wondering if this had all been some long con, even though Aidan was apriest—just about—and his parents seemed utterly, even boringly normal, the kind of parents I’d prayed for myself when I was a kid. They loved the hell out of their son and they obviously supported him in everything he did, from his sexual orientation through to his vocation.
I should’ve been so lucky.
By the time we got to dessert, I’d decided they were definitely as they appeared to be. Aidan had been giving monosyllabic answers the whole way through, and he looked like he was in a state of shock, his pale skin just about see-through.
“I’m sorry, Nancy,” I said now. “I guess I’m a little shy.”
Nancy O’Leary beamed at me. “There’s no reason to be shy. Any friend of Aidan’s is a friend of ours.” God, she was nice. She was as nice and pure as her son and I felt even dirtier sitting there at their table, sharing a meal with them, knowing what I was.
Knowing what I’d done just last night with that innocent son of hers.
Although the idea that tonight I’d get to take Aidan back into my bed and do all sorts of things to him, make him squirm and beg and plead…it got me hot, too. It was the danger, I told myself. I liked danger, and we seemed to be on a knife-edge of it here in Boston.
“Now, you’re sure you can’t come and stay with us?” Nancy asked Aidan. “We were really hoping to spend some time with you before the ordination. Weren’t we, John?”
John O’Leary, who seemed to be naturally the quieter of the two, gave a nod. “Seems like we should,” he said, spooning into his apple pie.
“What was Uncle Jim’s funeral like?” Aidan blurted out, his mouth set with determination, and his mother gasped.
His father paused in his eating and glanced up.
“Now,whywould you bring up something like that, Aidan?” Nancy scolded. “You know your father doesn’t like to—and with a guest here, too. Please excuse us, Teo, Aidan shouldn’t have even mentioned—”
“It’s alright, Nan,” John said, and took another spoonful of the apple pie before he spoke again. The silence before he did was palpable. “It was a small affair, son. Just family.”
“And he was cremated, right?”
