Epilogue
Over the next few days, the FBI interrogated Cillian and me.
As we agreed, we withheld the details of Maeve’s confession that the Love Knot Killer was actually a duo and of her involvement.
However, I divulged that she blamed Cillian for the death of her mother.
That, compiled with the hatred she had accumulated on my behalf as his scorned wife, had sent her into a psychotic episode when I announced my change of feelings for him.
Based on the FBI’s profile of the killer, the sudden change in LK’s MO, and their dead-end lead on Laoise Healy, aka Morrigan Hackett, considering her death seven and a half years ago, the FBI provisionally accepted our version of events.
It took four days for Cillian’s FBI contact to grant us access to visit Maeve in the hospital under guard.
By then, I was hobbling up and down the hospital corridors but opted for a wheelchair just in case.
Cillian rolled me up to her door, guarded by two agents, with Special Agent Joey Cranwell taking up the rear.
He had yet to obtain a confession from Maeve, and with the O’Learys cryptically concealing information, he hoped my relationship with her might help loosen her tongue as to how and why she imitated the Love Knot Killer.
As if. For Cillian and me, this was as much about seeing how she fared as it was about building on the groundwork established the day of the attack toward her insanity plea.
Maeve sat stoically on her bed, her gaze lost to space and her face twisted into one of absolute boredom.
One of her wrists was cuffed to the bed while the other hand tapped along as she hummed “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse.
Her hair was tangled in morbid, greasy strands over her shoulders, void of its usual exuberance, looking like it hadn’t been washed since the day we arrived.
“Maeve?”
Her head slowly turned my way as I left Cillian behind the curtain at the door and wheeled to her shackled bedside.
A peaceful smile snuck up her cheeks, little by little exposing her teeth.
For a long minute, we stared at each other, unblinking.
The silence wasn’t tense or foreboding. Instead, it felt like a simple lull in a conversation.
“You shot me,” she finally said.
“You stabbed me.” And tried to kill my husband, but that was beside the point.
Her mouth curled up.
“Touché.” She tapped the bed. “Come on. I’ve been dying for company. Tell me everything, you beautiful sight for sore eyes.”
It chilled me to see her so calm after what happened, as if either she’d already put it behind her or it meant so little to begin with. I forced a smile.
For a while, it was like nothing had happened.
We spoke of Erel’s departure, and she waved it off, the cuff clanking against the bedside, unbothered and delivering a simple “I assumed.” It was so different from the happy couple image she’d convinced me of for the last two years, almost as if she’d never felt anything for him at all.
Yet when we talked about my surgery and my recovery over the last few days, genuine concern wrinkled her brow, and she bit her nails.
She asked after my health—no one else’s—and teared up when she learned I’d make a full recovery with a little physical therapy.
I snicked my thumbnail along the rubber of the wheelchair’s wheels. “Do you worry about all your friends like you do about me?”
This was something that had been bothering me. I couldn’t recall her ever mentioning another confidant over the years.
“What do you mean? You know you’re my only person.”
“You must have some other friends.”
She shook her head. “Why would I? I had you.”
I bit my inner lip. “Work friends?”
“I’m the boss. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“There’s always business contacts or suppliers. Those make decent friends.”
“Yes, which is why you had so many of them.” Her sarcastic glare had me scratching my neck, mouth puckered in unease.
“College classmates then.”
“No one ever measured up to you.”
“Childhood friends?”
She sighed and tilted her head back against the pillow. “Mam didn’t like others coming into our home or around me. She said they’d be a bad influence, and we couldn’t risk anyone speculating about her mission and trying to put an end to it.”
“No one? Ever?”
She shrugged. “I got used to it. We did better just the two of us anyway.”
I’d forgotten Maeve had been home schooled.
It was something I’d admired Morrigan’s tenacity for, when Maeve first told me, but now, I realized that in her case, it had been another way for Morrigan to isolate Maeve from others.
It had made Maeve untrusting of those around her to the point where she’d developed so few worthwhile connections.
“You can’t believe that.”
“Of course, I do,” she huffed incredulously.
“If that was true, you never would have been at the Skradinski Buk waterfalls figuring out a way to escape what she wanted from you.”
“That was only because she never let me choose,” she snapped, tugging on the cuff while waving her other arm about.
The agents and Cillian took a step forward, but I shooed them back. This was nothing more than Maeve blowing off a little steam.
“I always had to follow,” she lashed out. “I always had to obey. I wanted something for me.”
Maeve’s shoulders heaved.
“Ma belle, that’s normal.” I patted her leg. “You wanted independence.”
Her head bobbed up and down as tears flowed down her face. “You get it. You always got me.”
It hurt to see her like this, as nothing more than a beat down puppy.
“How about I wash your hair?”
Her face immediately lightened, and she wiped her eyes and cheeks off on her gown sleeve. “Fuck yes, please. I feel disgustingly naked with it like this.”
It took some convincing on Cillian’s and my part, but ultimately Cranwell agreed. Apparently, this was the most Maeve had opened up in the last four days. If Cranwell was to be believed, she hadn’t uttered a single word in that whole time, except to ask how I was doing.
As I lathered her hair with water, then shampoo, we spoke softly out of earshot about our friendship, and I discovered hard truths.
While the nature of our first meeting was spontaneous, Maeve had chased me to Croatia to assess my potential as a reoccurring lust interest of Cillian’s, following our tryst at the masquerade ball.
It was why Morrigan accepted me into her home a couple of times when I came to visit.
Apparently Morrigan also believed that since I lived an ocean away, even as the friendship between Maeve and me developed, I would have very little influence over her daughter.
Maeve was thrilled that she no longer had to hide it from me, and I gulped it all down at a loss of how to react.
I tried to make her see how Morrigan manipulated her, how she’d been a victim to psychological abuse, but Maeve rejected my claims with hate-filled words and slapped the showerhead out of my hand.
At each burst of outrage, I dug deep into myself for calm and grieved silently for the friend I knew.
In a way, her reactions made sense. Before me, Morrigan was the only one who she felt had understood her, who had cared about her, and who had been proud of her.
I didn’t ask about the murders, not with the FBI present, but I could guess the rules Maeve mentioned days ago were Morrigan’s.
The methodology was all Morrigan’s. The execution was something she believed she needed to do for Morrigan, and nothing I said right now was going to change that.
Cillian was right. She needed help I couldn’t provide.
“Will I see you again?” she asked me after she was settled back in bed, shackled to the metal frame once more.
“Of course.” I smiled softly. “I’m planning on staying in Boston.”
To my surprise, she assumed I meant to live in her place in Back Bay.
When I revealed I meant Cillian’s penthouse as his legally wedded wife, she lost it.
She screamed at me that I couldn’t trust him.
Splotches of crimson flushed her face as she jerked against the cuff and tried to grab for me.
She spat threats at the FBI agents for keeping her restrained, at me for my stupidity, and at Cillian for not dying.
Hospital staff rushed in and held her down amid her shrieking and bucks off the bed.
I tried to go to her, but Cillian yanked me back, revealing himself to her.
It made it worse. She lurched around and kicked.
Her stitches tore open, and blood stained the bed.
Her cuffed wrist broke under the strain.
Despite the pain, she fought and cursed my husband’s name.
The FBI agents threatened her with taser guns, but nonetheless, she wrestled.
She punched a nurse and kneed another as they battled to administer a sedative.
Finally, they managed. Finally, she calmed.
Her body slumped as her eyes drooped. Her words slurred until her last mumbles about the horrors he’d do to me drifted off.
Her head dropped to the pillow, and she fell into a deep sleep, her face tense with anguish.
With a brief apology, Agent Cranwell escorted us out of the room, disappointment clear in his features.
I stared at the shut door, tracing the swirls in the grain of the wood, and dug my nails into Cillian’s arm as my vision misted over.
The whole point was to demonstrate her impaired judgement and delusional behavior, but her reaction was so visceral that it struck me like a blade to the chest and twisted it like a vise.
As her closest friend, I’d never noticed the amount of hate Morrigan had cultivated in her, and my guilt ate at me.
“This was necessary to fit the narrative,” Cillian calmly told me.
I licked the middle of my upper lip, then scratched my teeth over the same spot. “By the end of this, she might hate me.”
“There’s no success without sacrifice.”
I rubbed at my arms. “If I’d noticed before…if I’d gotten her help before…”