Chapter 31
Ethan
When we get back, Maeve is sitting at my kitchen island, sipping a cup of tea like she lives here. The urge to remove her from my home by the back of her neck is so strong that I have to control the violence before I do something Annabelle would have feelings about.
“Jack’s evidence,” she says by way of a greeting, nodding at a box. “Everything he gathered that was in his home, anyway. I’ve already given Finn the copies that will put the rest of the ring away. This is the part that’s just ours. Family business.”
“We don’t have family business,” I say. “We haven’t been a family for years.”
She takes that without a flinch. I’ll give her that much. My mother always could take a hit.
Maeve looks at Annabelle and softens in a way I don’t have a category for yet.
“Tell it properly. All of it. They deserve the whole thing, not the version that makes you look best,” Annabelle states, dropping the box on the sofa and crossing her arms.
Maeve’s mouth goes flat. Then she nods.
“I knew something wasn’t right eleven years ago,” she says.
“Before any of you noticed I’d changed. A…
friend went missing, a girl with no money and no one to make a fuss, and the police did nothing because the police were the ones doing it.
Briggs. The men under him. They’d built a quiet little machine out of the women nobody counts.
” Her voice stays level, but her hands knot together on the marble.
“I started writing it down. I was good at it. Better than your father, as it turned out.”
“Spare us the CV,” Aidan mutters.
“They worked out I was onto them,” she goes on, ignoring him, which is the smartest thing to do with Aidan. “And the moment they did, the three of you became leverage. A woman with sons is a woman with a leash. So, I took the leash away.”
“You faked your death,” I say flatly.
“I faked my death.” She meets my eyes. “I let you bury a body that wasn’t mine and grieve a mother who wasn’t gone, because the alternative was a corrupt cop putting a photograph of you three on my kitchen table to remind me what I had to lose.
I couldn’t hunt them and protect you at the same time.
I made myself dead, and dead women can’t be threatened. ”
“And you let us think Jack did it,” Callan says from the window. Cold. Precise. “For years.”
“Your father did that part himself.” For the first time, something cracks in her.
“I didn’t plan for you to blame him. But when you did, it was the safest thing that could have happened.
A grieving, violent widower with a reputation is beneath the ring’s notice.
Jack realised it too, and he let it stand.
He started working them from his side, and I worked them from mine, and neither of us told the other, because by then we trusted each other about as far as you could throw the office block over the road.
” She lets out a breath. “We spent ten years hunting the same men in the same dark and never once held a candle for each other. That’s the marriage. That’s the whole sorry story of it.”
The penthouse is very quiet. Outside, the city does its ordinary business, oblivious.
The silence stretches out. I let it. I’m good at letting silences do the work.
“I don’t forgive you,” I say at last. “I want that on the record. You let us bury you. Those years are gone, and you took them. For the record, I don’t forgive Jack either, just because he is dead-dead.
We buried him yesterday in a pauper’s grave, and that is his entire legacy in a nutshell.
The two of you are about as despicable as each other.
But Annabelle wants us to do… something here. ”
“I know.”
I look at Annabelle, at the woman who told me to cherish the mother I’ve got left before she packed the only one she’ll ever have into a cardboard box.
“She’s right. You’re the only mother we’ve got.
And I am apparently in the business of not wasting things anymore.
So, we start again. Slowly. On a very short lead, and the first time you disappear without a word, I’ll put you in the ground next to him and mean it. ”
Maeve picks up her cup. Her fingers aren’t quite steady. “Understood.”
Aidan exhales like he’s been holding his breath for a decade. “Right. Brilliant. Lovely. Are we doing hugs, or can I make lunch, because emotional reckonings make me starving.”
“Lunch,” Callan and I say together.
Maeve laughs. It’s wet and surprised, and it sounds, horribly, like the laugh I remember from when I was small, before any of the rot got into us.
Annabelle reaches over and takes her hand, this woman who lost her mother, taking the hand of the mother I got back, and the loop of it closes so neatly it almost hurts to watch.
“I went to where you buried him this morning,” Maeve says quietly, to none of us and all of us. “Under the hawthorn. I didn’t know what to say to him after all this time.”
“What did you land on?” I ask.
“Sorry. Decades too late, and all I had was sorry.”
“It’ll do,” I say.
It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t a family photo on a mantelpiece. It’s a prickly, suspicious, deeply armed truce held together by the one person at the table who isn’t a Deveaux at all.
It’ll do.
That’s the best we’ve got.