CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
William
DAY ONE IS hell.
The shaking gets worse before it gets better. By midday, I can't keep water down. Aoife brings me a glass every twenty minutes. Small sips. My stomach rejects them within seconds.
She holds a bucket under my chin with one hand and presses a cold cloth to the back of my neck with the other.
She doesn't flinch. Not once. Not when I'm retching so hard that tears stream down my face. Not when I soak through every shirt she puts me in. Not when the shaking gets so violent that my teeth crack together and I bite my own tongue hard enough to taste blood.
She gets me to the bedroom at some point. I don't remember how. I remember her arm around my waist. The hallway tilting at impossible angles. The sound of my own voice saying things I can't recall.
She strips the sheets I've already ruined with sweat. Replaces them with blankets she's found somewhere.
I burn. Then I freeze. Then I burn again.
Aoife sits in the wooden chair she's dragged from the kitchen. She wrings out cloths in a bowl of cold water and places them on my forehead, my chest, the back of my neck. When the chills come, she piles blankets on top of me and keeps her hand on my arm.
"Talk to me," she says.
"About what?"
"Anything. Keep your brain working."
I try. Tell her about the safe house. How I found it three years ago when I was running from a deal gone wrong. How I furnished it piece by piece with things I stole from the Murphy estate because I needed somewhere that was mine.
Just mine. No brothers. No expectations. No ghosts.
The words come out fractured. Interrupted by waves of nausea. But she listens. Nods. Asks questions I can barely hear over the roaring in my ears.
When the cramps hit, they hit viciously. My stomach locks up, every muscle in my abdomen contracting so hard I curl into myself. Aoife's hand finds my back. Small circles between my shoulder blades.
"Breathe," she says. "In through your nose."
I try to laugh. It comes out as a cough. "That's my line."
"I learned from the best."
Night comes. Or maybe it was already night. Time stops meaning anything. There's just the cycle.
Sweat. Shake. Vomit. Repeat.
And Aoife. Always Aoife. In that chair with her cold cloths and her water and her voice that never wavers.
"You should sleep," I tell her.
"I will when you do."
"I can't."
"Then neither can I."
Day two breaks me.
The hallucinations start around dawn. Subtle at first. Shadows moving in my peripheral vision. Footsteps in the hallway when I know we're alone. A voice that sounds like Father's coming from the other room, low and disappointed.
Then they stop being subtle.
Father is standing in the corner of the bedroom.
Not a shadow. Not a suggestion. He's there. Full and solid and real, wearing the suit he was buried in. His face is the wrong color. Purple, swollen. His eyes bulge the way they did when I found him hanging from that beam.
The rope is still around his neck.
"You're not real," I say.
He doesn't answer. Just watches me with those dead, bulging eyes.
"You're not fucking real."
"William?" Aoife's voice. Close. "Who are you talking to?"
"He's in the corner." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone small. Young. Scared. "He's standing right there."
"There's no one there."
"He's there. He's looking at me. He's..." My voice breaks. "He looks like he did when I found him. The rope. His face. He..."
"William." Her hands are on my face again. Cool. Real. "Look at me. There's no one in this room except you and me."
But I can see him. Over her shoulder, past her worried eyes, Father stands in the corner with the rope around his neck and watches me fall apart.
"I found him," I whisper. "I was the one who found him and I pushed the door open and I knew. I knew before I even saw him."
"I know." Her thumb moves across my cheekbone. "I read it. I know."
"His shoes. I saw his shoes first. Black Italian leather hanging two feet off the ground, and my brain couldn't...it wouldn't connect them to legs and a body and a rope because it didn't make any sense. He was my father. He was supposed to be invincible. He was supposed to..."
The sob comes from somewhere so deep it tears things loose on its way out.
Not a sound I'd ever make voluntarily. Not a sound I knew I was capable of. It rips through my chest and out of my throat and keeps going. Wave after wave of everything I've been drowning in for months.
Murphy men don't cry. That was the first lesson Father taught us. Before we could read. Before we could fight. He taught us that tears were weakness and weakness was death.
But I can't stop.
Everything I've been burying under cocaine and whiskey just rises up and takes me under.
Father. The way he looked hanging from that beam.
The way he looked before that. Alive and angry and terrifying and mine.
Alex, who killed him and called it love.
Jason, exiled to some country I'll probably never visit.
Aidan, who never cracks, who never gets to crack, because someone has to hold the rest of us together.
Matty, sitting on that couch with his pack of mints and his dead eyes. Unreachable.
Me. The boy who walked into that office and found the worst thing a son can find, and has been running from it ever since.
Aoife pulls me against her. Holds on. Doesn't say a word.
Doesn't tell me it's okay. Doesn't promise it'll get better. Doesn't offer any of the empty shit people throw at grief to make themselves feel useful.
She just holds me.
Her hand in my hair. Her heartbeat against my temple. Steady and slow and alive while I fall to pieces against her.
I cry until there's nothing left. Until I'm hollowed out and too exhausted to produce another sound. Until the only thing I can feel is her fingers moving through my hair.
Father is gone from the corner. I don't know when he left.
"Sleep," Aoife whispers. "I'm not going anywhere."
I do.
Day three is quieter. Worse in different ways.
The shaking eases. The vomiting stops. My heart finds something closer to a normal rhythm. Still too fast, but no longer the panicked gallop of the first two days.
The fever breaks sometime around noon.
But the cravings come alive.
Not the desperate physical need. This is something deeper.
Psychological. A voice in the back of my skull that sounds nothing like Father and everything like me, whispering that one line won't hurt.
That I've earned it. That the pain will stop and the world will sharpen and everything will feel manageable again.
Just a few hours. That's all I need.
Except it's never a few hours. It's never one line. One becomes two, becomes a bag, becomes a week lost in a fog while the world burns around me.
I know this. I've lived it.
And still the voice whispers.
I stare at the ceiling. Aoife is in the chair. I don't know how long she's been there. Don't know how long any of this has been. But I can see the exhaustion in the shadows under her eyes, the way her shoulders slump. She looks wrecked. Almost as bad as I do.
She did this for me. A woman who's known me for days. A woman I suspected of being a traitor. A woman I let believe her brother was dead.
"Why?" I ask. My voice is a ruin.
She lifts her head. "Why what?"
"Why are you doing this? Why didn't you just leave?"
She thinks about it. Actually thinks, not reaching for some rehearsed answer.
"Because you would have crawled to that bedroom and found nothing. And then you'd have torn this house apart looking for more. And when there wasn't any, you'd have found your way to the city. A dealer. A bar." She pauses. "And eventually, soon, you'd have taken too much."
"So it's strategic. Can't let the alliance fall apart."
"Don't." Her voice sharpens. "I'm not here because of a fucking contract, William."
The words land somewhere I don't have defenses for.
"I read your journals," she says again. Quieter. "You're not what they think you are. You're not what you think you are."
I look at her for a long time. The woman who called me late to my own engagement. Who slapped me across the face and kissed me against the SUV on the same night. Who hasn't left that chair since I hit the floor.
"I don't know how to do this," I say. "Any of it. The sobriety. The leadership. This." I gesture between us.
"I know." She holds my gaze. "Neither do I. But I'm here. And I'm staying. So figure it out."
No softness. No gentle encouragement.
I almost smile. Almost.
Day four.
I wake clear-headed for the first time in longer than I can remember.
Not good. Not fixed. But clear.
The walls hold still when I look at them. My heart beats at a pace that could pass for normal. My hands still shake, but it's the fine tremor. Not the convulsions that made me bite through my own tongue two days ago.
Gray light through the curtains. Morning. Early.
Aoife is asleep in the chair.
Curled into herself the way I saw her in the SUV that first night.
Making herself small. Her head rests against the chair back at an angle that'll leave her neck aching.
Dark hair across her face. One hand tucked under her chin.
The other hangs over the armrest, fingers still loosely holding the damp cloth she was using before she drifted off.
She stayed.
Three days of the absolute worst of what I am, and she's still here. Not because anyone ordered her to. Not because the contract required it.
She chose this.
I don't know what to do with that. Don't have a category for it.
I sit up slowly. Everything hurts. My mouth tastes like death. I need water, food, a shower—so badly I can smell myself.
I get my feet on the floor. The wood is cold. The room doesn't tilt.
I stand.
My legs hold. Barely. I grab the doorframe for balance and catch my reflection in the wardrobe mirror. I look like shit. Hollowed out, gray-skinned, three days of stubble and dark circles that go halfway down my face.