13. Ronan
RONAN
There’s a place on the headland where the wall runs out and the land just stops, and I’ve done the worst of my thinking there my whole life.
It’s where my father used to stand when the family was eating itself alive and he couldn’t show the men he didn’t have an answer.
It’s where I stood the night we buried him with the case unfinished and the name unclear and three of us left out of a house that had been forty strong.
It’s where I told Sienna the truth in Book One of our story, if our lives were a book, the night I followed her grief out into the dark and admitted I’d stayed gone to keep her breathing.
The cliff is where I go to set things down that are too heavy to carry inside, because the only witness out there is the sea, and the sea has never once asked me to be all right.
I went out there after Tiernan came home with the Caffreys.
I don’t fully know why it broke me, that one.
I’ve carried worse. But there was something about it, the scale of it, a man who’d set three families tearing at each other for years and sat back to watch, who’d built the rivalry I was raised inside the way you build a fence, who’d made my whole life out of paper before I was old enough to spell my name.
I’d thought, all these years, that I was at least the author of my own grief.
That the choices that gutted us were ours, even the bad ones.
To learn that the board itself was drawn by another hand, that even the war I’d bled in was somebody’s design, took something out from under me I hadn’t known I was standing on.
So I went to the wall, and I put my hands on the cold stone, and I let the weight be as heavy as it actually was for once, with no one to be strong for but the water.
The Caffreys were the thing that did it, and I sat with why, out there in the wind, until I had it.
It wasn’t the cruelty, though it was cruel.
It was the arithmetic of it. A man had looked at three proud families full of people who loved and feared and buried each other, and he had seen not people but a mechanism, a thing to be arranged, and he had set them tearing at one another for years the way you’d wind a clock, patient, unbothered, collecting his interest off the wreckage.
And it had worked. That was the part that put my hands flat on the cold stone.
It had worked because we let it, because every one of those families, mine included, had been so ready to believe the worst of the others that a careful man barely had to lie, he just had to point.
We did the rest ourselves. We spent all those years hating the exact people we should have stood beside, and he sat clean in his good coats and watched us do his work for him, and the shame of that, the shame of having been so easy to play, was heavier than any grief.
My father died inside that shame without ever knowing whose hand had built it.
I’d very nearly done the same. And out on that headland, with the sea not asking me to be all right, I let myself feel the full unbearable size of how close we’d all come to going into our graves still believing the lie a stranger wrote for us.
I heard her come. I always hear her now, which is its own surrender.
“You’ll catch your death out here,” Sienna said, but she came and stood beside me at the wall, close, her shoulder to my arm, and she didn’t tell me to come in and she didn’t ask what was wrong.
She just put her hands on the same cold stone and looked at the same black water and let me not be all right next to her, which is a thing almost no one in my life has ever known how to do.
“He built the fence I spent my whole life inside,” I said finally, to the sea.
“The Caffreys. The war. The reason my father couldn’t sleep.
I thought it was ours. Our feud, our mistakes, our grief.
It was his. All of it. He drew the board and we played it for fifteen years thinking the moves were our own.
” My hands tightened on the stone. “I don’t know what’s mine, Sienna.
If he built the room and the rivalry and the loneliness and even the want, then how much of my own life have I actually lived, and how much have I just walked where he painted the floor. ”
She was quiet a moment. The wind came up off the water and took the warmth out of both of us and neither of us moved.
“This,” she said.
I turned my head.
“This is yours.” She wasn’t looking at the sea anymore.
She was looking at me, the dark green eyes steady in the little light.
“He didn’t build this. He couldn’t. He set you in my path, fine.
He emptied us both out until we were the only warm thing left in each other’s reach, fine, I’ve made my peace with it being his hallway.
But this.” She took one of my hands off the cold stone and pressed it flat against her own chest, over her heart, so I could feel it going hard and fast under my palm.
“He can’t reach this. He doesn’t even know it’s a thing that exists.
This is the one room in the whole house he built that he’s never been allowed into, and it’s yours, Ronan, it’s the only thing in your life that was never on his board.
So if you need one thing that’s yours, take this.
I’m giving it to you. Out here where he can’t see.
No camera, no wall, no card. Just me, telling you the truth, the way you told me the truth on this cliff once before. ”
Something I’d been holding for half my life, maybe all of it, maybe my whole life, came off its mooring and went.
I don’t break. It’s the thing they say about me, the thing I’ve made true on purpose, the head of the family, the one who carries, the man whose hands don’t shake.
I kissed her like a man breaking. I got both hands in her hair and I kissed her like the cliff was crumbling under us, all the control I wear gone over the edge into the dark, and she made a sound and grabbed fistfuls of my coat and pulled me into her, and the cold and the wind and the whole designed world fell away.
“Inside,” she gasped against my mouth. “Ronan. Inside, now, before we freeze to the man’s own headland.”
We barely made the boathouse. The old stone one below the path, half into the cliff, a door that stuck and a pile of canvas and the sea loud through the gap in the wall, and it was cold and rough and ours and off every eye in the world, and I had her against the wall with her legs around me before either of us got a full coat off.
There was nothing controlled in it. That was the difference, and she knew it, I saw her catch it, the careful man come undone, no patient claiming now, no thirty years of held breath doled out slow.
I shoved her leggings down and got my hand between her thighs and she was already wet and gasping and I worked her fast and rough with my forehead jammed against hers, both of us breathing like we’d run there.
“I’ve got nothing left to hold it with,” I said against her mouth, and it was a confession, the realest one I had. “You took the last of it on that cliff. There’s no wall left, Sienna. This is the man under it. I don’t even know him.”
“Then let me meet him,” she said, and reached between us and freed my cock and guided me to her, and I drove into her with a sound torn out of somewhere I keep locked, and she cried out and took all of me at once, no easing, no patience, just the two of us slammed together in a cold stone room with the sea hammering the wall.
I fucked her like the man under the wall, whoever he is, the one I’ve never met, the one who doesn’t carry and doesn’t decide and doesn’t count the cost, the one who just wants and takes and gives and breaks.
Hard, fast, desperate, her back against the stone and her nails through my shirt into my shoulders and her teeth at my jaw.
She met every brutal stroke and gave it back.
When she came it was with my name like a curse and her whole body clenching around me, and I followed her right over with no grace at all, spilling into her with my face in her neck and a sound I’d have been ashamed of in front of anyone else alive.
We slid down the wall together after, tangled in canvas and half our clothes, both of us wrecked, the sea still going outside.
“There he is,” she said quietly, against my temple. Her hand was in my hair. “The man under the wall. I like him. He’s allowed out more often.”
I laughed, which I also don’t do, a rough broken thing against her throat.
“He’s not safe,” I said.
“Neither am I,” she said. “That’s the whole of why we fit.”
I held her in the cold dark of a boathouse the broker didn’t build, in the one room of my own life I was suddenly sure was mine, and for the first time in longer than I could name I didn’t do arithmetic about the cost of a single thing.
The sea kept on. It never asks me to be all right. But for once, sitting in the wreck of my own control with her heartbeat under my hand, I was.
That was mine too. He’d never get near it.