The question I knew was coming. The one that has no clean answer.
"I don't know," I say. "I watched a stranger online for months. She was sharp and talented and I couldn't stop. And then I found out who she was and I should have stopped and I didn't."
"Because you couldn't or because you chose not to."
"Both. I don't know. Both."
"I trusted you," he says. Quieter now. Worse. "She used to fall asleep on your shoulder at barbecues and I thought that was safe. I thought you were safe."
Something in my chest breaks. Quietly. No sound.
I've been managing information for months. Half-truths. Controlled versions. The whole architecture of this secret was built on giving people partial information. I'm done.
"There's more," I say.
His eyes come to mine. Wary.
"She's pregnant."
Silence.
The longest silence in thirty years of friendship. The clock on the wall that I've never heard before and hear now, ticking. The chair where Claire used to sit before she died and where Billie sits on Sundays.
He doesn't move. His hands on the table. His face still.
I wait. However long it takes. I owe him every second.
A minute. Maybe longer.
"Get out of my house," he says.
Quiet. Flat. Not a shout. Something past anger. The voice of a man who has reached the end of what he can hold in one room with the person who put it there.
"Ronan—"
"Get out of my house, Dec."
I stand up. Push the chair in. His face. Thirty years of my life in one man's face.
"I'm sorry," I say.
He doesn't answer. He's looking at the table.
I leave.
24
Billie
He didn't come home.
I know this because I was awake all night in bed waiting, which is not something I'm proud of but is what happened. I lay in the dark with my phone on my chest and I waited and at some point around three in the morning I understood that he wasn't coming.
Not because something happened to him. Because something happened internally and he did what Declan Maguire does when something is bigger than he can fix: he went quiet. He went to his kitchen table, probably, and sat with it alone because alone is the only architecture he has for pain.
I know this about him. The man who watches everything, who counts freckles, who builds files and activates teams — that man does not know how to call the woman he loves and sayI need you.
I'm going to deal with that. But first I'm going to deal with my dad.
