Chapter 23 #3
His voice had changed.
"He'd spread it everywhere. Mam used to tell him if he got gravy on invoices, she wasn't helping explain it to whatever accountant was unfortunate enough to work with him."
I smiled softly.
Irish moved toward the chair and rested one hand against its back.
"He wouldn't move it when we ate. Just stacked everything at the end."
"Did he work from here often?"
"Too often."
His gaze moved toward a doorway beyond the kitchen.
"Study's through there."
I didn't suggest going yet.
He wasn't ready.
Instead, I walked toward the sink and looked through the window.
The view stretched across fields divided by stone walls, with the land falling gently toward a distant gray-blue line that might have been the Atlantic.
"I understand why you loved it."
Irish came to stand several feet away.
"Aye."
"Doesn't mean you have to love being here now."
His gaze shifted toward me.
"You're careful with words when you want to be."
"Don't tell anyone."
"Ruins the reputation?"
"Completely."
His mouth almost curved.
We stayed in the kitchen until the house stopped feeling quite so much like something holding its breath.
Eventually Irish walked into the hall again.
This time he touched the photographs.
One finger brushed dust from the corner of Finn's face before moving away.
He showed me Maeve's room without entering it, his parents' room from the hallway, and the small bedroom he'd shared with Finn until he was nearly sixteen and complained loudly enough that Declan converted an upstairs storage room for him.
He told the stories without realizing what he was doing.
A broken window from a football indoors.
Maeve stealing his jacket. Finn sleeping on his floor during thunderstorms even after he was supposedly too old to be afraid.
Siobhan standing at the bottom of the stairs shouting all their names because nobody had remembered to carry laundry down.
The more he spoke, the more the farmhouse became a home instead of a crime scene.
I suspected that frightened him almost as much as the memories of what happened here.
By the time we returned downstairs, daylight had begun fading toward evening.
Irish stood in the kitchen again, staring toward the closed door leading to Declan's study.
"We should look."
I didn't move.
"Do you want to?"
"No."
That answer was immediate.
Then he exhaled.
"But I think we need to."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"No."
He looked at me.
"I don't want to do it alone."
The admission landed somewhere painfully deep.
"You aren't."
We crossed the kitchen together.
Irish reached for the study door.
His hand stopped on the handle, and unlike the front door, there was no physical lock keeping him from entering this room. The only thing standing between him and the other side was memory.
He lowered his hand again.
"Not yet."
"Okay."
He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
I stayed beside him.
After a while, he spoke.
"My last conversation with Da happened in this kitchen."
I didn't respond.
Not because I didn't care.
Because I knew an opening when someone offered one, and I had finally learned that silence could sometimes be the safest place to put it.
Irish looked toward the old table.
"We fought."
The words were quiet.
"He'd been secretive for months. Angry. Distracted. Kept telling everyone he was handling something and wouldn't explain what the hell it was. I thought he was treating us like children. He thought I was acting like one."
I watched him.
"What happened?"
He rubbed one hand over his jaw.
"I left."
That was all he gave me for the moment, but the pain threaded through his voice told me the rest was close enough that forcing it would only send it farther away.
I moved nearer without touching him.
Irish opened his eyes.
For once, there was no wall waiting behind his eyes, only exhaustion and grief stripped of the control he usually used to hide both.
And fifteen years of something he had apparently never said aloud to anyone standing inside this house.
He looked toward the kitchen table again before turning back to me.
"There are things you don't know about what happened here."
"I know."
"If you hear them..."
He stopped.
"What?"
His jaw tightened.
"I don't know if you'll look at me the same afterward."
I stepped closer until only inches remained between us.
"That's my choice."
Something shifted in his expression.
The lesson we'd been learning since Croft House had followed us all the way to County Clare.
His life had taught him to decide what other people could survive knowing.
Mine had taught me to fight anyone who tried making those decisions for me.
I held his gaze.
"When you're ready, tell me."
Irish looked toward the darkening windows, then toward the hallway where photographs of his family still watched over a house he had finally entered.
When he looked back at me, something in him had changed—not healed and certainly not forgiven, but ready in a way he hadn't been when we first entered the farmhouse.
"Aye," he said quietly. "I think I am."