Chapter 18
Billie
Private tier. New message. The preview loads in my notifications before I can stop it.
One line.
your daddy's friend know he's sharing you with everyone?
I read it once.
The room doesn't change. The lamp is still on. Declan's desk is still under my hands and his house is still quiet and the fridge is still humming and nothing in the physical world has moved.
He knows about Declan. He's been watching the building. He's seen Declan come and go. He's connected us. And he's chosen the word daddy and I don't know if that's a coincidence or if it isn't and I don't know which possibility is worse.
I close the notification and immediately get up and walk down the hallway to Declan's office.
The door is open. He's at his desk, phone to his ear, a document on his screen. Work. Normal. The low cadence of his voice making a point about something that has nothing to do with me.
I stand in the doorway.
"Declan," I say.
One word.
He looks up. Whatever he was saying into the phone stops mid-sentence. "I'll call you back." He puts the phone down and is on his feet before he's finished setting it down.
He doesn't ask what happened. He crosses the office and takes the phone from my hand and reads the notification on the screen.
His face changes. This is the face of a man who has been waiting for this escalation since he started the file and has now received it and is done waiting.
He looks at me. Then he picks up his phone and dials.
"Activate the full team," he says. Four words. Then he hangs up.
He puts his hand on my face. Just that. Palm against my jaw. His eyes steady and dark and absolutely furious and absolutely calm.
"We're going to handle this," he says. "Starting now."
***
For the next two hours his house becomes an operations center.
I sit on his couch with my laptop and I watch Declan Maguire work, and what I mean by that is I watch a man who has spent twenty years running security become the version of himself I've only seen in pieces.
He makes six calls. Each one is short, calm, the voice of someone issuing instructions he expects followed without discussion.
His team. It feels weird to use the word team.
I didn't know he had a team, not really, not beyond the abstract concept of Declan has a firm.
I can hear the reports coming in through his phone.
He doesn't include me in the calls. He does something better: after each one, he comes to the couch and sits next to me and tells me what happened, what it means, and what comes next. Plainly. Without softening it. Without managing me.
I appreciate this more than I can say.
After the sixth call he sits down and doesn't pick the phone back up. He looks at me for a moment. The working-something-out expression. The one where he's decided to say a thing and is choosing how.
"I need to ask you something," he says.
"Okay."
"I need you to think about taking the private tier down. Just until this is resolved."
He says think about. Not you need to. Not I want you to.
He says think about and he waits. And the fact that he's asking instead of telling — after the conversation we had in my apartment about wanting me smaller, after that fight, after my voice cracking on the word smaller — the fact that he learned from that and is applying it right now, in this moment, when he's scared and angry and every instinct he has is screaming at him to lock the doors and take my phone and wrap me in something bulletproof — that costs him. I can see exactly what it costs him.
"Okay," I say.
He blinks. "Okay?"
"I said okay. Don't make it weird." I close my laptop.
"Someone who knows where I live and who I'm sleeping with just sent me a message referencing both of those things.
I'm not an idiot. The tier goes down until you tell me it's safe.
" I look at him. "That's not you winning. That's me making a decision."
"I know the difference," he says.
"Good."
Declan lets out a breath. I feel him working himself up to say something. "When this is over," he says. "When this is over, I'm not keeping this a secret anymore."
I go still.
"My dad?"
"I know."
"Declan, my dad!"
"I know." He looks at me. "I know what it costs. I know what it does to thirty years. I know. And I'm not keeping you a secret anymore."
He says I'm not keeping you a secret and he means it the way Declan Maguire means things, which is completely, without exit strategy, having already calculated the cost and decided to pay it.
He cares. He cares enormously about my dad, about the friendship, about everything this will destroy.
That's why it lands. Because he's choosing me over the thing he's most afraid to lose.
It's late.
The team is working. The tier is down. There's nothing else to do tonight and the house is quiet and we're on his bed, fully clothed, and he's holding me.
I'm lying against his chest. His arm around me. My hand on his stomach, rising and falling with his breathing. The lamp is on. Neither of us has made a move to turn it off because turning it off would mean this is a normal night and it isn't.
The declaration is still in the room. I'm not keeping you a secret anymore. It sits in the air above us like something with weight and shape. He said it and I said okay and he exhaled and now we're lying here with the full cost of what comes next pressing down on both of us.
My dad at the kitchen table. Sunday dinner. The pot roast. Declan in his chair. Thirty years of a friendship that has been the most reliable thing in both of their lives.
That's what he just offered to break. For me.
"Declan."
"Mm."
"You know what this does to you and him. Not just to me and him. To you and him."
He's quiet for a long time. His chest rises and falls under my hand.
"Ronan is the best man I know," he says. "He's been the best man I know for thirty years. He was there when my marriage ended. I was there the night your mother died. There's no version of my life that makes sense without him in it." A pause. "And I'm still telling him."
"He might not forgive you."
"He might not."
"That doesn't scare you?"
"It terrifies me." His arm tightens around me. "But hiding you scares me more. I've been hiding things from Ronan for months and it's the worst thing I've ever done to him and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. He deserves the truth. Even if the truth costs me everything."
I press my face into his chest. His hand comes up to my hair. Strokes it. The same slow, repetitive movement from the night he showed me the file, when I was scared and he held me until I stopped.
"He loves you," I say. Into his shirt.
"I know."
"More than he'll be angry."
"That's the part I'm counting on." He says this with the quiet certainty of a man who has thought about it. Who has probably been thinking about it since before he said the words. "Your dad loves you more than he loves being angry at me. Eventually. Maybe not at first."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then I'm wrong. And I'll still be here."
I close my eyes. His heart under my ear. Steady. Going slightly faster than resting, because Declan Maguire just told me he's going to risk the most important friendship of his life for me and he's lying here in the quiet aftermath of it being as calm as he can manage.
His phone lights up on the nightstand. He picks up the phone. Reads the screen.
"Progress," he says. "They've narrowed the pool."
He gets up. I watch him from the bed. He runs his hand through his hair and picks up his phone and his laptop and he looks like someone who has a long night of work ahead of him and is relieved to have it because work is the thing Declan Maguire knows how to do when everything else is uncertain.
I'm not scared anymore. Or I am, but the scared has something next to it now that's bigger.