We’ve reached my parents’ estate, at one of the barely used footpaths far off the main road. Trees droop over the path, the starry sky only just visible beyond.
‘God, he’s heavy for a thin guy,’ I say as we heft Sam between us.
We struggle as we carry Sam over the rocky and tufted grassy path, the ferns and branches encroaching the whole way. By the time we get to the small clearing that contains the well, we’re both depleted of the little energy we had managed to reclaim since our ordeal. The moon shines on the stones of the well, mossy now with age. The open mouth of it gapes open to the night as we drop Sam on the grass.
Liam looks down into the pit, narrowing his eyes in the darkness beneath.
‘Hey, Dad,’ he says, and there’s little love lost in his words.
‘You don’t have to,’ I say.
‘Yes, I do,’ he says. ‘I need to see him.’
So we stand there until the moon rises higher in the sky and fully lights up the well shaft. And there at thebottom is his father. The skeleton’s no longer intact, but the skull gleams in the white light. We stand there hand in hand for a long time, listening to the owls and the wind rustling the trees.
It’s peaceful, and it feels so right that fate has brought us back to this spot. To these woods where our story began. Liam reaches down and picks up a little grey stone.
He holds it for a moment, looking like he’s making a wish.
Then he tosses it in, and we listen to it fall.
‘I never had spare pennies to throw growing up, maybe that’s why my last wish took so long to come true.’
‘What was it?’
Liam faces me and cups my chin in his hand, kissing me so tenderly it makes me melt against him.
‘To spend my life at your heels.’
I can’t help but sigh with happiness as I wrap my arms around his neck and deepen the kiss.
‘He can’t hurt anyone anymore,’ I whisper when Liam looks back over the edge of the well at his dad.
‘Thank god.’
‘Sam,’ I say, when we’ve both caught our breath and had our fill of nighttime nature.
‘Got to be done,’ he says.
‘The fact that Sam will lie next to him forever bothers me,’ I admit. ‘He spent his whole life being hurtby men like him. And in death, they’ll be together forever.’
‘I know,’ Liam sighs.
‘It’s not right.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not. But it’s the best option we’ve got.’
‘Yeah. I know what he did to us was horrible, but I still feel sorry for him. For the boy he was, and the man he could have been.’
‘He became what the years made him. Same as me.’
‘Not the same at all.’
‘We should bury them all in here. The ones who were in that room. They’ve gone on living, leaving destruction everywhere.’
Liam sets to work, stripping Sam of his clothes and the bin bag before using his knife to relieve him of his fingerprints. I turn away when Liam picks up a rock, and cringe at the crunch it makes when he slams the rock into his face, breaking teeth and making him unrecognisable.
‘Sam wanted justice. He went about it the wrong way, but what he wanted underneath it all was justice. And we’ll give him that.’
