Chapter One
Madden
Madden Price would be drinking wine or even beer if he wasn’t determined to leave as soon as possible.
Coming here had been a terrible mistake, though he had no concrete reason to think so.
Maybe it was the clenching of his asshole that automatically happened when he saw the first sign for his hometown, Troham.
The fact that he was coming for his father’s funeral didn’t help either.
‘Really?’ someone half whispering not far from him.
‘Yeah, we’ve started looking for a place. A rental, but it looks like the only way to go,’ the other person replied.
Madden found their voices vaguely familiar but didn’t turn to check if he knew them, afraid they might pull him into their conversation.
‘It’ll be a big change for you and the kids, though,’ the first woman said.
‘Bill got offered that job and it’s a good opportunity.’
‘I thought he was due a promotion in the factory.’
‘He was, but you know I heard…’ There was a moment before the woman started again, her voice lower. ‘I heard the owner is dumping his shares and that there are serious issues in the financial department. Bill thinks they’ll…’
Madden didn’t stay to find out what Bill thought or didn’t think.
He had enough business talk every other day of his life.
He liked it, though, and was extremely successful at what he did, a fact that had gained him the stares of everyone in church when he had arrived.
And they hadn’t stopped even as he had sat with his family.
He had felt the crazy urge to pretend he was crying, just so they’d look away, though he doubted he’d fool anyone.
Thankfully they left it at staring and didn’t try to make conversation.
Even now, as half of town was crowding his childhood home, currently his brother’s, no one dared come near him. Just how he liked it.
His watch vibrated again. He didn’t need to look at it to know it was Vicky calling.
His secretary was the only one who knew where he had gone and why.
He sent her to voicemail. He’d have to catch up with work when he got home.
It’d be a very late night if he didn’t find a way to extricate himself soon, but he had only been there for half an hour after the service.
An hour felt like the minimum he should suffer through this, but he wasn’t sure he could tolerate more.
Bored, he started pacing through people talking in hushed conversations, as if they could bother the dead man by being too loud.
Though if there was a man likely to climb out of his grave just to have a shouting match with a neighbor, that would be John Michael Price.
His old man had been known to take a shotgun to the birds in the garden because he found them too noisy in the mornings.
And he didn’t discriminate. He would willingly point his weapon at the birds or at his sixteen-year-old son when he found out he was gay.
At least he didn’t get shot, Madden reflected drinking the last of his coffee.
The kitchen was the quietest part of the house, which explained why he had gravitated to it. Susan, his sister-in-law, was busy pulling a tray out of the oven, while balancing another one in her spare hand.
‘Let me,’ he said, taking it from her. Susan looked up, her short blond bob falling over her face, and smiled at him.
‘Thank you, Maddy,’ she said, now able to finish what she was doing more comfortably. ‘I didn’t think so many people would come and we’re a bit short on food.’ She sounded tired, a shiny film of sweat coating her forehead.
‘I expect they came to make sure he was dead.’
‘Maddy!’ she reprimanded him, smacking his chest with the back of her hand, but there was no real anger in it.
He opened the fridge. If he could put something together, maybe it’d be of help and he’d be entertained for half an hour. The fridge was almost empty. He checked the cupboards, but there was only a packet of mac and cheese mix and the bottom of a packet of rice.
‘Do you want me to order extra food?’ he asked, uneasy.
Susan was about to answer but his brother interrupted instead. Michael didn’t seem to be planning any driving that day. The man swayed into the kitchen, a beer in his hand. If the color on his face was anything to go by, his brother had had quite a few.
‘Sure, order more food, brother! Why not? That way everyone can see how generous you are and how much money you have, with your Rolex,’ he threw a hand his way, pointing at the watch on his wrist, ‘and your expensive suit. What Italian car did you come here in?’ His brother, all six feet four of him, took a couple of unstable steps until he could hold his considerable weight against the breakfast bar.
‘Next time you should have your little black card set on a clip, hanging from your pocket.’
He’d have to have another word with Vicky. She had promised he would regret it in the future if he didn’t come, but right now he felt he would take the regret gladly.
He already had one conversation, though.
Sending an RSVP to events without consulting with him was a no-go.
In Vicky’s defense, had he had a normal family and a reasonable father, he’d have agreed with her that attending a parent’s funeral wasn’t a matter that needed discussion, but his family was anything but normal.
Any notion to the contrary had been irrevocably dispelled when his father had called him a sissy-good-for-no’hing at age five for letting a ball slip out of his fingers when his brother, then starting on his school’s football team, had thrown it at him with his full strength.
Vicky had questioned how hard that could be to catch, considering his brother had been only seven at the time, when he informed her that Michael was already above four feet tall, and was made of muscle, while he was barely three feet above the ground and made entirely of fluff.
‘You’ve caught up well,’ Vicky had said, biting on the end of her pen, staring him up and down above the rim of her glasses.
He had rolled his eyes at her. Madden might have stretched up over the years, and bulked up even, but his brother was still a whole head taller than he was, and twice his bulk. The man could still slam him into a wall, even if half of the bulk difference now was a beer belly.
‘You’re the type to flaunt your achievements, Michael.
That’s why you have Shane follow you around like a pup.
’ He pointed at the man only one step behind his brother, crisp white shirt on, and beer in hand.
Shane had not lost his looks since high school, he’d give him that.
‘Your best friend becoming a doctor is about the best thing that’s happened around you. ’
‘You piece of…’ his brother said, taking a step toward him, a gesture that left Madden underwhelmed. It would hardly be the first beating he got from his brother.
‘Uncle Maddy, uncle Maddy!’ came a small voice, as a little girl ran into the kitchen, curly pigtails bouncing at the sides of her head. ‘I want to see the horses, I want to see the horses!’
Madden watched the girl apprehensively. She was a three feet tall ball of never-ending energy, constantly running around the house at full speed.
At least, she hadn’t stopped since Madden had arrived.
Her older brother, Mike, followed her more meekly, looking around with big wide eyes and not sure where he should stand.
‘What horses?’ he asked the girl. Mike shrank on himself at the sound of his voice, but Lily didn’t mind that he had no knack for children and simply continued with her awestricken expression, jumping at his feet like one of those small, yappy dogs.
‘Daddy says there are loads of horses in your car, I want to see them! Is there a white one? I want a white horse one day. My doll has a white horse. Hold on, I’ll go and get it!’
And just like that, she sped out of the room, leaving them all in an awkward silence. He exchanged a look with his brother. Michael looked away, taking a deep swig at his bottle.
‘Why don’t you stop drinking, man?’ Shane was whispering to him, but not low enough to escape Madden.
But Michael didn’t listen. Michael rarely listened to anyone.
When he was still scared of him, he tried to listen to dad, but that hadn’t been the case for a long time.
He also listened to one of his friends. Part of his high school posse, together with Shane, another football player stuck to Michael’s ass, their fancy blue varsity jackets on whether it was hot or cold.
‘Where is Adryan?’ Madden asked, surprising everyone. They must have forgotten he was there. ‘Did he drop you? He was the only half-decent friend you had.’
‘Was he, now?’ Shane asked, grinning stupidly. ‘Did you have a crush on him, Maddy? Little Maddy was wetting the sheets over Adryan, was he?’
Madden rolled his eyes and shoved his hands into his pockets, looking for his keys.
He was pulling them out, ready to go, when Lily came back rushing into the kitchen, three toy horses in her arms. Madden was then dragged into a whole performance of plastic horses from which he didn’t have the heart to extricate himself.
Lily went on and on, involving her dolls later, as they did acrobatics worthy of the best circus, while Mike stood around, staring in confused awe between his sister and the uncle he hadn’t seen since the day he was born.
‘Do you like horses too, Mike?’ he asked, trying to be somewhat amicable.
Mike looked at him in full panic and shook his head. It made Madden smile in an affectionate sort of way, but he caught himself in time to flatten his expression.
He didn’t need to make an effort to seem detached for long as his brother called for everyone into the living room and Madden feared what would come next.
In the living room, the décor dark and worn out, his older brother stood by the fireplace, the TV on with the football match on mute, at least half a dozen empty bottles lining up on the mantelpiece. He didn’t dare guess how many of those his brother had drunk.
‘I’d like to thank you all for coming today,’ he said, slurring even more than he had before. ‘As you know, the old man was a piece of shit,’ he went on.
‘Fuck,’ Madden mumbled. His brother was starting strong.
‘But I couldn’t hate him too much cause I was his favorite, you know…’ He laughed, and everybody laughed along out of politeness, some people just whispering between them. ‘Well, that was till I broke my back, but hey, I had a good run of it, didn’t I?’
Very few people answered with clapping and chuckles, but Madden doubted his brother would have noticed how uncomfortable he was making most of them. Michael took another deep swig at his beer.
‘This being said, many of you have asked me how he died. I personally think he died poisoned by his own bullshit,’ he said, his eyes lost miserably at his feet.
‘It definitely wasn’t because you kicked him out of the bar, Tom.
And it wasn’t because he thought you were a cunt, Helen, so you can all be at peace with that. ’
Madden ran a hand over his face as people gasped and whispered around him. Was there no one who could stop him?
‘It was how much of a disappointment I was for losing my scholarship and ending my football career like I did,’ he laughed a sad laugh. ‘Either that, or it was his younger son being a cocksu…’
He didn’t finish. Madden had seen where he was going with it and had crossed the room in two strides.
Had they been alone, he’d have grabbed that chair by the sofa and cracked it on his brother’s head.
But they weren’t alone, they were in the middle of dozens of people, people who had seen them grow up, for better or for worse, and their children, and children’s children.
Instead of the chair, he grabbed a glass left on the coffee table and emptied it on his brother’s face.
Wine, as it turned out, sloshed down his chin and soaked into his untidy shirt.
Michael spluttered, confused for a moment, until his eyes focused long enough to recognize his brother. He lunged for him, but Shane held him back.
‘Get a grip of yourself,’ Madden told him coldly, ignoring the rage coursing through his veins. ‘You look like a fool.’
And without another word, he turned on his heels and walked out of the front door.
‘Even for this shit you’re not man enough,’ his brother called after him, but he ignored him too.
‘Maddy, Maddy!’
Susan was running after him. He didn’t stop, only allowing himself to slow down and let her catch up.
‘Don’t…’ she started, looking up into his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I can’t find words to excuse him,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘He hasn’t been himself since your father got sick.’
‘Susan, I don’t know much about your relationship with him, but let me tell you this, that’s exactly the person I grew up with.’
The car unlocked with a sharp sound as they stood in silence for a moment, her eyes filling with tears.
‘If you or the kids need anything,’ he said, trying to make her feel better, ‘don’t hesitate to call me. Anything, you hear?’
Susan didn’t answer, only nodding her agreement.
She stepped back onto the house’s front porch and watched his SUV slip out of the driveway.
He paced himself down the road and kept his cool once he reached the main street, but there was nothing stopping him once out of town and he put his foot down, letting his anger flow freely through him, from the top of his head to the pedal.
Speed would take the edge off, that was the rule.
But this was not the highway, and he didn’t know these roads as well as he used to.
By the time he realized he had made a mistake, he was already on the other side of a curve and swerving to get out of the way of the car speeding in the opposite direction.
He lost control, his heart thumping in his chest, adrenaline flooding his system, until he hit something sideways.
He wasn’t sure what he hit but his head banged against the side of the car and it all went dark.
What he remembered next came in snippets. The open sky above his head. Lying down on something hard. Flashing lights. Voices that were vague and distant speaking in quick bursts. Then being inside, moving. A shadow hovering over him.
Hands hovered above his face, a light running past his eyes. He swiped the hand away and the man behind looked down at him with big blue eyes and messy blond hair. The circles under his eyes didn’t dim his handsome features at all.
‘You’re in good hands, I’ll take care of you, alright?’ the man said, looking over his side, out of sight. He found it hard to focus, but he recognized the voice.
‘Adryan?’ he asked, his voice rough.
‘Hey, Maddy,’ Adryan’s face came into focus once more, a big bright smile on his face, the exact smile he remembered.