He looks away, and I catch his throat bobbing as he tries to keep a lid on his own emotions.
“I didn’t want to break you. You idolized him, Ciara.”
“You let me grieve amonster,Callum! You let me love him even after he was gone, like he was some kind of saint?—”
My voice breaks as Ronan’s words replay in my mind.
“Oh, god. He sold those girls to men who would torture them…” My entire body trembles. “H-how could you let me love him?”
Callum’s jaw tightens. “He was still our father.”
“No.” I get to my feet. “Don’t youdaretry to defend him. Our father, ourhero,was selling girls, Callum. For sex, and pain, and god only knows what else.”
“They were of legal age,” Callum says a little too quickly.
I round on him, and for a moment, I consider grabbing one of the empty liquor bottles on the coffee table and launching it at his head.
“Is that the bar, then? It’s okay as long as they’re legal? That’s really what we’re clinging to now?”
Callum flinches, and I can tell by the look on his face that he regrets saying the words.
“I didn’t mean?—”
“You did. You meant to soften the blow because if you admit what he really was, then everything you thought you knew about him collapses, and you can’t handle that.”
“And you can? Ciara, I found out the truth, and I wanted to put my fist through a wall, and I’ve spent every day since trying to piece together who the hell he really was. So, don’t stand there and act like I’m not hurting too.”
“I’m not saying you’re not! I’m saying you lied to me! You and Ronan… You decided together that I couldn’t handle the tru?—”
“We were trying to protect you!”
“No. You were trying to protect yourselves from having to see me break.”
The silence that follows is too heavy, and I turn my back on Callum and press my palms into my eyes because I don’t want him to see my tears.
I don’t wantanyoneto see them.
“He was the reason I believed in men.” I wipe at my cheeks. “Da… He was the standard, the one who made me feel safe and who told me not to settle. But now you’re telling me he was, what? Trafficking girls?Torturingthem?”
“I don’t think he?—”
“Don’t.” I whirl around and point a trembling finger at my brother. “Don’t try to guess the limits of his evil, Callum. We clearly didn’t know him as well as we thought we did.”
He closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath, though his hands shake at his sides. “One thing I do know for sure is that he loved you.”
“I don’t give a shit.” The words come out hollow and lifeless, but as I say them, I know they’re not true.
Idogive a shit, and that’s the problem.
If my father had never acted like he loved me, if he was just some authority figure who was never present in my life, maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much. I could process it and file it away as if I’d read a news article about a stranger.
But he wasn’t a stranger. He was my father.
The man who read bedtime stories to me and brought me ice cream when I was having a bad day and danced with me around the kitchen in our pajamas when I was too sick to go to homecoming.
That man doesn’t fit into the same universe as the one Ronan described.
“I-I have to go.” I’m starting to crumble.
