Chapter Eighteen Life’s Gonna Kill You （If You Let It） #2
Kenny said nothing. Scrubbed and sealed from the early reports, the truth of the Howells’ children locked in the basement and cupboard had found its way to the surface, eventually.
Not through official channels, of course, but through whispers, trial transcripts, and the insatiable appetite of the press.
Most of the narrative had focused on Mable, Aaron’s sister, the one who took the unforgiveable path despite years of therapy.
The name Cain Howell had remained buried under red tape and shadows.
Where it belonged.
Margaret’s lips curled. “I knew her, you know.”
Kenny’s heart ticked once. But he kept his expression neutral.
“We were in the same church. As girls.” She drifted her gaze past him, fixing on something he couldn’t see.
Maybe her past. “Hard pews. Endless sermons. Repetition until you bled belief. Roisin sat beside me every Sunday. Reciting verses with a sneer in her mouth, even then. Always rebellious. She questioned everything. Wanted to interpret the Word. As if it were hers to shape.” Her smile was tight, contained, as if carved in bone.
“Whereas I… I listened. Obeyed. Conformed. I hope you know that, Dr Lyons. I’m a good Christian. ”
Kenny adjusted his posture. Shoulders relaxed. Hands still. He knew what she wanted. Not confrontation. Nor accusation. She wanted to speak and to be heard. To hold the room. That, too, was its own kind of ritual.
“I saw what Roisin really was long before the trials. Before the newspapers gave her a crown of thorns and painted her in blood. Before the masks. Before the roses. I saw it in her eyes when she stood up and spoke during youth study, twisting parables into prophecy. She always believed she was special. Chosen.” Her lip curled. “That’s what made her dangerous.”
A pause.
“She dared to call herself a mother.” Margaret gritted her teeth.
“After everything we endured. After what they did to us. I never believed she could have children. Something in her… seemed broken. Like her womb would reject her. I wonder what sort of children she could have. How they might have turned out. Were they as…damaged. Obedient.”
Kenny’s pulse stuttered, though he kept his expression blank.
“I followed her story. Watched the coverage. Read everything. Not for the gore, but to understand. To trace the path she took. And if it was her fault. Or that of who she had married.” Her eyes drifted, far away.
“But then again… we were all maltreated, weren’t we?
” Her gaze snapped back to Kenny. Clear.
Intent. “And you study people like her. But do you study the soil too, Dr Lyons? The ground they’re grown in? Those that come after?”
Kenny didn’t move.
Because this wasn’t a confession.
But it was circling one.
“I study all the conditions that contribute to a person crossing the line,” he said. “From impulse to action. From fantasy to follow-through.”
“Because they all start like you and me?”
Kenny lifted his brow. “I wouldn’t place myself in that category. But if you mean we’re all born with the same neural architecture, the same vulnerabilities, then yes. At a fundamental level, the machinery is similar. What separates us… is what we choose to do with it.”
She paused her idle stroking of the silver cross at her throat.
“Choices.” She nodded. “Yes… I suppose that’s the word we cling to when everything else slips through our fingers.
” She took a breath, held it as if she didn’t trust the air.
“And when you speak of ritual… of blurred morality… of delusion mistaken for belief… I wonder…” She narrowed her eyes, tilting her head.
“Do you think people are born evil, Dr Lyons? Is it genetics? Or… do they become that way? Through influence and circumstance?”
Kenny kept his posture relaxed, but inside, every instinct coiled.
“That’s one of the oldest debates in forensic psychology,” he said evenly.
“Nature or nurture. The truth? It’s never one or the other.
Some children are born with traits. Impulsivity, detachment, lack of empathy.
Psychopathy is rooted in genetics. Others are shaped by pain.
Neglect. By the stories they’re told. The frameworks they’re raised inside. ”
She nodded. “And by love?”
That silenced him.
Because love was where the lines blurred most.
She stepped closer. Enough for Kenny to see the hollows beneath her eyes. The hairline fractures coming not from grief, but from years of bracing for what might come next.
“I’m not here to defend anyone,” she said, voice fraying at the edges. “Please don’t mistake me for one of those mothers on the news—crying denial, insisting their boy would never hurt a soul.”
She looked down at her trembling hands.
“I… wanted to hear from someone who might understand.” She drew in a shaky breath. “What it means to love a psych…” She paused, recalibrating. “Someone… you’re afraid of. Someone who… doesn’t feel things the way other people do.”
Kenny narrowed his eyes. “Are you afraid of someone, Ms Harrow?”
“I’m afraid of the Almighty.” Her smile was wan. Measured. “That’s why I follow the path. I obey. I do what’s asked.” She touched her cross again. “Tell me something, Dr Lyons, does Roisin’s child love her?”
Kenny clenched his jaw. “That’s a complicated, highly nuanced question. One without a clean answer.”
“Because the answer isn’t ‘no’?”
He met her gaze, feeling the shift. The game beneath the words. “The love a child feels for a parent doesn’t always come from safety,” he said. “Or tenderness. Sometimes it’s forged in survival. Sometimes it’s obedience mistaken for love. Especially when love was used to control.”
And Aaron—Christ, Aaron.
For so long, Kenny had watched him twist himself into shapes to keep people comfortable.
To stay needed. Be safe. Aaron had learned early how to disappear in plain sight.
How to weaponize charm. Intelligence. Sexuality.
Not because he lacked emotion. But because he’d never been allowed to feel it honestly.
And yet, somehow, he’d survived it.
He’d come to Kenny with teeth bared and eyes wide open. He’d challenged everything Kenny thought he understood about boundaries. Intimacy. What it meant to earn someone’s trust after they’d been taught to fear it.
And still, Aaron loved. Fiercely. Recklessly.
Not despite the damage, but through it.
“Children raised in violence often become masters of performance,” Kenny said aloud.
“They read people better than they should. Learn to manage adult emotion before they’ve even understood their own.
They figure out how to love in the safest way possible.
Through silence. Surrender. Sometimes even submission. ”
He paused, the ache in his throat unfamiliar and unwelcome.
“But that doesn’t mean the love isn’t real. It just means it came at a cost.”
“And Roisin? Does she love?”
“She sees him as possession.” He desperately clung to the clinical hoping it might steady the spin in his chest. And without thinking he’d let the unthinkable slip.
That Roisin had a child, and that child was a boy.
Aaron. “Not a person, but an extension of her legacy. That’s not love. It’s control.”
Margaret gave a small hum, as if tasting the thought. “And what would that do to a child?”
Kenny answered before he could filter it, the words slipping like reflex.
“It creates a fracture. One that’s hard to see from the outside.
A child raised as an object of someone else’s mythos, especially by a parent with narcissistic or psychopathic traits, learns early on that affection must be earned.
That love is conditional. Transactional.
It teaches them to contort themselves to be seen. To be good enough. Adored enough.”
“And how might that manifest in someone?”
“In most cases, as anxiety. Hypervigilance. Chronic self-blame. But in others… especially if there’s trauma layered over those early patterns, it can become something darker.
A hunger for control. A craving for significance.
For worship. Because if they were never truly loved, they’ll either chase that feeling endlessly…
or punish the world for withholding it.”
He held her gaze. Steadfast.
Because what he’d said was no longer theory.
And why, for as long as Kenny had breath in his body, he would worship every fractured shard of the boy who’d been born in blood and taught to call violence love.
Not just love him but adore him. Kneel for him.
Fight for him. Soothe every bristle of pain until Aaron understood how surrender could be safe.
How obedience didn’t have to mean erasure.
That control, when wielded with love, could feel like coming home. To him.
Because what Roisin Howell destroyed, he would protect.
And what she corrupted, he would reclaim.
Margaret tilted her neck. “And tell me, Dr Lyons… would a child born into such rigid righteousness not strive to please their mother? Would they twist themselves to be loved by them? Regardless of who or what they are?”
Kenny’s pulse didn’t quicken. But his breath did. The rest of him stayed perfectly still, because stillness was how he listened best. Not to her voice, but to the pattern beneath it. The rhythm of repression. The tension coiled too tightly behind practiced words.
He knew this. Knew it from the inside out.
“A child growing up in a household where they are overtly punished for being themselves will become exactly what they think their mother needs… even if it costs them everything. Especially if they believe it’s the only way to be seen.”
He met her eyes, but his mind was already moving ahead.
Especially if that mother tied love to righteousness. Obedience. Purity.
This was the profile. He’d mapped it hours ago.
Before she’d even stepped into his classroom.
Laid it out in clinical terms: Childhood moral rigidity.
Conditional affection. Indoctrination framed as salvation.
Compulsion to atone. He’d sent it to DS Parry neatly ordered and annotated.
But now he saw the edges fray into something more personal. More immediate.
Margaret’s eyes shimmered. Not with tears, but with something fossilised and brittle. Something ancient. Not grief. Not even guilt. Belief.
A long silence stretched.
Then… the shape of the killer crystallised in Kenny’s mind.
Not as an anomaly, not as a monster. But as the natural consequence of a life built in this exact architecture.
Not a murderer in costume. Someone raised to earn love through silence.
Through sacrifice. Ritual. Someone whose capacity for tenderness had been broken, reshaped, sharpened, until mercy looked like murder and obedience felt like worship.
And someone had taught them that. Had carved obedience into their bones.
The worst part? Kenny knew how close Aaron had come to being that person. If Roisin had kept him. If she’d pressed her love into his skin with the same quiet, manipulative force, Aaron would’ve performed for it. Would’ve bled for it. Might’ve even killed for it.
That’s what chilled Kenny most.
Because monsters weren’t born. They were moulded.
And some of them had his lover’s eyes.
So he asked, soft and surgical, the question that mattered most, “What does Christmas mean to you, Ms. Harrow?”
Margaret’s eyes flickered as if the question reached somewhere sacred.
“It means judgment, Dr Lyons. It’s not about tinsel or carols.
It’s a holy reckoning. A time when the world pauses…
and is measured. The wheat separated from the chaff.
The good from the wicked. It is the season when children are taught their worth.
When they are reminded that someone unseen has been watching them all year.
And the bad don’t get grace, Dr Lyons. They get forgotten. Or punished.”
A pause. Her hand brushed the silver cross at her throat.
“Especially those who betray what’s sacred. Who chase selfish pleasure instead of discipline. Who abandon their families… for filth.”
Kenny’s mind turned over the implications. He kept his tone clinical. Steady. “And who did that in your life, Ms Harrow?”
She laughed. A single, breathless sound laced with disbelief and long-held rage, the next words slicing out, brittle and cold.
“My husband was a reverend. Beloved. Respected. We were the picture of grace. Churchgoing. Upright. God-fearing. I was keeping to the lessons learned as a child. But then…” She shook her head.
“He walked away. From me. From his son. From God. All for… carnal pleasure.”
She curled her fingers tight around the edge of her cross.
“He broke us. And the town? They whispered. But not about him. About me. As if I’d driven him to it. As if I was to blame for his perversion. Like how Roisin is blamed for Frank’s deviance.”
Kenny watched her. Every tic. Every cadence.
“The wicked should be punished,” Margaret said matter-of-factly. “Those who abandon the path must be reminded of the cost.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing with something that might’ve been pity. “You will be judged, too, Dr Lyons. For the choices you have made.”
She stepped to the window, parting the blinds with pale fingers. Snow swirled outside, fat flakes along the grey sky.
“Oh… would you look at that,” she said, almost dreamily. “It’s snowing.”
A pause.
“Cleansing.” She cast a glance back to Kenny.
“Isn’t that what they say? That snow washes the world clean again.
Covers every stain. Every sin. Makes it all look pure from a distance.
” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t last, of course.
It melts. And everything foul beneath it rises again.
That’s why judgment must come before the thaw. ”
A beat.
“So that what’s buried… stays buried.”