I refused to die the way my mother did.
Sad and unfulfilled.
She always told me how much being my mother brought joy to her life, but there came a time when your children were grown and you realized you didn’t know who you were anymore.
They called it the empty-nest syndrome.
Only that didn’t make sense, because birds kicked their babies out of the nest to make room for more babies. No one told you that by the time your babies left the nest, it was too late to have more babies.
You spent half your life raising children. Making everything about them, only for them to grow up and leave. Then what did you do with the years you have left?
I no longer had a husband to care for. Not that I cared much for him. He was never home, always choosing to be with hismistresses instead. I should have been a part of the organization, and I would have been if I’d been born with a dick.
Apparently, men only thought you had a brain if you had a head between your legs. Maybe if they thought with the one on their shoulders, they would get more accomplished.
“I knew about the Trick Pony.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
“I told the family the reason Eamon was dead was because of Eduardo and what he’d done. What Eamon had let him do. But that wasn’t the truth.”
He emptied his glass and went to get some more whiskey. He refilled his glass and stood with his back to me.
“He’d come home from one of his trips. I knew he was lying about where he was going, so I sent someone to follow him.”
He turned and leaned against the bar. His face was filled with defeat. With a sadness I’d never seen, laced with disgust.
“When I confronted him about where he’d gone, he bragged about it. He told me about a little girl he’d had sex with.” He rubbed his hand over his face, his other fist clenching the glass. “Fuck, Caity, she was only eleven years old. And he fucking bragged about it.”
I sat there; stunned didn’t begin to describe what I was thinking. I looked down at the glass in my hand. I wanted to throw up. That was my father. The man I loved and admired my whole life.
It was one thing to know he brokered and kept records of the disgusting things theSocietywas doing. But to know that he participated in them. That he hurt that child, and probably many others.
I set the glass down and rushed down the hall to the bathroom. I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up. The burn of the whiskey was worse coming up than it was going down.
Sal crouched beside me, holding my hair back. It reminded me of when I was sixteen and he found me at a party I shouldn’t have been at. I was so drunk that I’d almost been raped by a guy who was more than two decades older than I was. Sal was twenty-five; the guy, who’d taken me into a room and locked the door so we wouldn’t be interrupted, was almost forty. My brother had beaten him so badly that he ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
When there was nothing left, I sat back, and Sal handed me a towel. I laid my head back against the wall and hugged my knees.
“What was wrong with him?”
Sal sat beside me and shook his head. “I don’t know. Just born bad, I guess. Maybe something in his brain didn’t form correctly. But when he tried to go into detail, I lost it. I beat the shit out of him until he stopped moving. And then I sat there and watched him until he stopped breathing.”
“Do you think grandfather was like him?”
“Nah, he was an asshole, but he wasn’t a pedophile. Uncle Sean admired him. He had a mistress, and she was a lot younger than him, but she was an adult.”
I laid my head on Sal’s shoulder.
“Cian kicked me out,” I whispered.
“What?” he growled.
“He told me it was time I went home. He doesn’t want me.” I sniffled, trying to stem the tears I thought I’d cried enough of.
“Stupid son of a bitch,” he muttered.
“He really is,” I chuckled. “I shouldn’t have told him.”
