I've run it a hundred times. Every angle. Every way Aidan might react, which amounts to one way, one guaranteed response. I know my brother. I know what he'll do the moment Frank's name leaves my mouth. The only variable is whether I'll be able to pull him back before he does something that can't be undone.
I should have told him sooner. I know that. But there wasn't a moment over the last week that wasn't swallowed by the withdrawal, by Aoife, by the fog slowly lifting and leaving behind it a picture I didn't entirely want to see. Frank was part of that picture. The biggest part. And I kept it at the edge of it.
Not anymore.
At eighteen minutes, someone hits the door. Three heavy blows, no patience in them. Nobody knocks like that unless they're furious or frightened, and I already know which one this is.
I open it.
Aidan. He looks at me the way he used to when we were kids, and I'd done something catastrophic, except now we're grown men, and the catastrophe is worse.
"Why the fuck have you not been answering your phone?" He steps in without being invited. His gaze sweeps the room, clocks Aoife at the kitchen counter, comes back to me. "What's going on?"
"Close the door," I say.
He does. "William."
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down. After everything, you go dark on me? Five days, William. No contact. I thought you were dead." The words are clipped, controlled. Aidan's version of furious is not Jason's version of furious. Jason goes quiet. Aidan gets tight, wound so hard around himself that the slightest thing will spring him loose.
I sit. He stays on his feet in the middle of the room, watching me with that expression I know down to the bone, jaw set, something coiled behind the stillness.
"Sit down," I say again. "Please."
He sits.
I look at Aoife. She's not leaving, and I'm not asking her to. She already knows. She was in the room when I decided this. She's part of it now, whether anyone asked her to be.
"I need to tell you something," I say to Aidan. "And I need you to let me finish before you say anything."
He doesn't answer. Doesn't nod. Just waits.
"Frank is alive."
The room doesn't change. The walls don't move. The kettle clicks off in the kitchen. But Aidan's face does something I've never seen it do: nothing. Absolutely nothing, for three full seconds, and then everything at once.
He's off the couch before I've registered it. The chair behind him skids back. His hands go to his hair, then to his face, then he's pacing, both hands pressed flat against his jaw, and the sound that comes out of him isn't a word.
"Aidan."
"Don't." His tone is low and controlled and terrible. "Don't say anything else for one second."
I wait.
He stops pacing. Turns. The expression on his face is not something I have a name for, but I've felt it, that particular cocktail of rage and grief and betrayal that comes when someone you thought you'd buried walks back into the room.
"How long have you known?"
"Before the house."
He goes very still.
"He came to me," I say. "Said he'd been watching. That he knew the attack was coming. I gave him what he asked for in exchange for the warning. That's why we got out."
Silence.
"You gave him what he asked for."
