39. Declan
39
DECLAN
T wo days after my fateful meeting with Seamus in a bar, I found myself in Mark O’Rourke’s hastily rented Galway office. Once upon a time he would have taken this meeting in his mansion, but I’d made sure he couldn’t do that anymore. I was working on being a better, less vengeance-driven person, but I had to admit that part still felt very good.
Seamus sat to my right, his face nervous but resolute.
Don’t crumble now, I thought. Seamus had leapt on my plan with enthusiasm when I’d proposed it. But making a plan over pints in a pub was different from actually facing down the man who had bullied you since childhood.
Mark addressed Seamus. “I agreed to see you. Not him. He betrayed our family. And you have too, if you’re spending time with him.”
Seamus paled.
“Lovely office,” I cut in dryly, trying to draw Mark’s ire before Seamus could lose his nerve. “Not quite as good as the old place.”
Mark rose and slammed his hands on the desk. “Get out of my office, you bastard.”
I slouched in my chair, mostly because I could tell it pissed Mark off. If this was going to work, Mark needed to feel like he was truly out of options. “Originally, I planned to turn your ancestral home into a pile of rubble.”
I let that sink in.
Mark fumed.
“But Seamus has proposed another option,” I said. “One I think you’ll like better.”
Mark gritted his jaw. Glanced at Seamus. “Is this true?”
“I’d listen to him, Dad,” Seamus said.
Slowly, Mark sat back down behind his desk. “You have five minutes. Then I throw you out of office.”
Good , I thought, the predator in me sharpening its claws for the kill. Mark was listening. And that meant Seamus and I had a shot. “I’m willing to let the mansion stand, if you permanently retire and reinstate Seamus as head of the O’Rourke family business.”
Mark guffawed. “This buffoon? He drove us into the ground. He’s the reason we have to sell.”
“He’s also the only reason I haven’t called in the bulldozers yet,” I said.
Mark hedged. “You’d sell the mansion back to me?”
I barked out a laugh. “Fuck no. You’ll never cross that threshold again, as long as I draw breath.”
Mark glared at me, furious. I held his gaze, letting him see the truth of that threat in my eyes. Until he finally understood that he had nowhere else to turn.
“Then what’s in it for me?” Mark’s eyes darted back and forth between me and Seamus like a cornered rat.
God, he was pathetic.
I couldn’t believe he’d convinced so many people to fear him for so long.
“Your dignity and your family legacy,” Seamus said. He leaned forward. “In one version, you retire magnanimously. Declan’s agreed that the mansion will go to my oldest child when he or she turns eighteen.”
That particular deal point had been surprisingly easy for me and Seamus to agree on, once I’d decided not to level the mansion. It should obviously go to Catie.
“You’d have to have a child first,” Mark grumbled, but I could tell he was listening. He probably had visions of molding and shaping some future heir.
As if Sinead would ever let him get away with that.
Now that Seamus had played the angel offering a way out, it was time for me to play the devil.
I speared Mark with a glance. “Of course, in the other version, I destroy the mansion. The rubble heap becomes a very public monument to the worst defeat of your life. And then I will proceed to drive you out of business, one property at a time.” I grinned like a shark. “That’s my favorite option personally, but Seamus insisted you’d see reason and choose the other plan.”
Mark shifted. “I’ll need time to think about it.”
I gritted my teeth. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But this mattered enough to do it right. I opened my mouth, prepared to give Mark till the end of the day to think it over.
But Seamus surprised me.
“No. You won’t,” Seamus announced, sounding genuinely imposing for the first time in his life. He stood and presented his father with a contract Thomas had drawn up last night. “You’ll sign here right now, to pass the company over to me. Or we’ll leave this meeting, and I’ll tell everyone you chose to turn our home into rubble instead of accepting Declan’s generous offer.”
I bit back a smile. The kid had finally grown up.
I glanced down at my watch, feigning boredom. “You’ve got sixty seconds to think it over. After that, I call the bulldozers.”
Mark blustered and shouted for approximately 59 seconds, but Seamus didn’t flinch. And at last the second, Mark caved and signed the papers. He held the pen so tightly his knuckles were turning white, the point slashing his signature over the dotted line with the violence of a knife slash.
And, just like that, it was done.
Seamus and I strode outside onto the sidewalk with a signed contract that would make life better for everyone in town.
I glanced at Seamus. “You did good in there.”
“I imagined what Sinead would say,” Seamus admitted, somewhat bashfully.
I laughed.
I turned to him and held out my hand. “Let me know if you need business advice. I can help you find a middle ground between Mark’s predatory practices and your…” I tried to think of a generous way to say your terrible but well-intentioned business decisions .
“My previous choices?” Seamus suggested.
“Sure. That.” We shook.
As I walked away, I felt the familiar buzz of victory. But this time, the victory wasn’t tinged with dread of what other people would think. It felt clean. Right.
Like something Da would have approved of.
F ive days later, Sinead finally came home. I’d never forget Catie’s joy when she saw her mum at the airport for as long as I live, or the way Sinead clutched Catie close and wept, murmuring, “I’m here, baby, I’m here.”
Instead of driving back to my house, we stopped in Galway to meet my mum for lunch. Afterward, we all went for a walk along the water. Catie was up ahead with her grandma, but she kept peeking back to stare at Sinead, a giant smile on her face.
I cleared my throat. “I set up a bank account in Catie’s name and put some money in it for you both.”
I’d put a million dollars in it, to be precise.
“You didn’t have to?—”
“That way, if you ever need money, you can use it without having to justify your choices to me.” My smile was crooked. “Someone mentioned I can be overbearing. And it’s possible that I don’t always know what’s best.”
Sinead stopped and faced me, hands on her hips. “You bastard. You know I can’t turn down anything that will help Catie.”
I grinned and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “I love you too.”
We started walking again. I updated her on my new plan for the O’Rourke mansion. “I’m turning it into a community center and naming it after Da. I know you’re heading back to the States, but if you ever wanted to move back, I was thinking you could help me run it.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and faced forward so she wouldn’t notice how badly I wanted her to say yes.
“…I’ll think about it,” Sinead said.
“Please do.” I gave her hand a squeeze. “I think this will be good for the town, and it might be good for you too. Some people…” Seamus, in fact, but I still didn’t feel comfortable speaking his name in front of Sinead, “Well, some people are even planning to throw a celebration of sorts to mark the occasion.” I wasn’t too keen on the idea of a party—I hadn’t done this to get a pat on the back—but Seamus had been adamant. I hadn’t wanted to clip his wings, not when our partnership was just getting off the ground, and so I’d relented. “You should come.”
“That…” She ran her teeth over her bottom lip. “Part of me doesn’t want stick around any longer than I need to, but one of the things I realized in rehab is that the reasons I left don’t matter as much anymore. And the things pulling me back are stronger than ever.”
I bit my cheek to keep from smiling too hopefully.
Sinead was in recovery. And she and Catie might be coming home for good.
We started walking again. “What did Olivia say when you told her you’re turning the mansion into a community center?”
“I haven’t told her,” I said.
She slugged me. “ Why ? The whole town is going to throw you a party and you’re keeping Olivia in the dark?”
I shook out my arm where she’d hit me. “The town isn’t throwing me a party,” I corrected her. “It’s just a quick shindig to celebrate the new community center, not me.” Sinead arched an eyebrow but was kind enough not to say anything else. “Besides, Olivia told me to stop chasing her. I don’t think ignoring her wishes is the way to win her back—if she even wants me back.”
“Why wouldn’t she want you back?” Sinead asked, confused. “ She was going to move to Ireland for you .”
I shook my head, ruthlessly shutting down the hope trying to flicker to life at her words. “She reached out a while back to talk about something that matters a lot to her. You know, as a friend. I was in a bad place, and I shut her down. She hasn’t tried to talk to me since.”
Sinead looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. I wanted to meet her.”
I changed the topic. “Catie can’t wait to show you the bugs she found. She was keeping them in a shoebox, but I convinced her to upgrade to a terrarium.”
Eventually we wound our way back to the car. We were saying goodbye to my mum, when Catie spotted Molly across the street and started jumping up and down.
“Mom! That’s the lady who sells me books!” She pointed.
Molly and Sinead’s faces lit up when they saw each other. I was surprised for a second but then realized I shouldn’t have been. Sinead had been closer to Molly in school than I was.
“She’s illustrating Olivia’s book,” I added, and then wished I’d bit my tongue. I sounded like a teenager talking about my crush.
Sinead got a gleam in her eye. “Well, we have to say hi, then.” She towed Catie and my mum across the street. I followed warily.
They’d barely made it through two minutes of small talk when Sinead blurted, “You’re Olivia’s friend. Tell Declan he’s being an idiot. He won’t go after Olivia even though he’s clearly head over heels for her.”
Sinead gestured to me, as if my longing for Olivia was written all over my face.
Who knows, maybe it was.
I crossed my arms and scowled at my brat of sister. “She told me to let her go.”
Sinead arched an eyebrow. “And your gut’s telling you that’s the right thing? To let her go?”
I clenched my jaw. I knew she meant well, but this wasn’t a game. “It doesn’t matter what my gut says.”
Molly was watching this exchange, wide-eyed. “Um. I think there’s something you should see, Declan.”
She dug in her bag and produced a folder of what looked like sketches for a picture book. Underneath, I recognized Olivia’s words.
Pride and pain mixed equally inside of me.
I turned the pages carefully, newly awed that Olivia could create something like this. It wasn’t until the end that I noticed the words changing from what I remembered. The last ending had been about how you could always remember the advice of the people you loved who were gone, and how those words would guide you through.
This ending was different. In this one, the duckling realized that sometimes he would encounter situations his mom hadn’t given him advice for. But in those moments, he could listen to his own heart, because he knew the people who loved him had raised him to have a good, smart heart.
My hands tightened involuntarily on the pages.
It was what I’d told Olivia in the garden.
I’d thought she wanted to show me the change in her book as a way of re-establishing our casual online friendship.
But what if she’d been showing it to me to tell me to follow my heart?
“Breathe, Declan,” Mum said.
I inhaled sharply, the warm scents of a summer afternoon flooding me. I felt like I was coming back to life. Suddenly, the world was full of hope. And it was fucking beautiful.
Olivia was giving me permission to follow her one more time. And this time, I wasn’t going to waste my shot. After I was done with the community center’s celebration, I knew exactly what I needed to do…and where I needed to go.