Chapter 29
Aidan
Sleep doesn’t come, and I don’t chase it.
I lie on the sofa with my side stitched and throbbing, listening to the penthouse breathe. Annabelle is down the hall in Ethan’s bed, with Callan wrapped around her like a guard dog that learned to love. Ethan is in the armchair by the boarded-up window.
My mind won’t settle. Our father is lying dead in a field forty miles north with a hole between his eyes.
I keep replaying the scene in the camper.
The van rattling under us. Jack’s voice, flat and almost bored, telling me he loved Christa more than anything while I had a gun pressed to his side.
I spent my entire life certain I knew what he was.
Turns out I knew nothing. The man we followed into the dark at fifteen was burying a worse monster than himself, and he let us hate him for it because our hate kept us clear of the thing that would have got us all killed.
That’s what I can’t put down. He let us.
After an hour, I give up on lying still. I sit up too fast, and my side punishes me for it with a hot, vicious pull. I breathe through the worst of it and ease off the sofa.
“You’re leaking again,” Ethan says from the chair.
“Observant.”
“Fresh gauze is in the kit.”
“I know where the kit is.”
He doesn’t move. He sits there in the grey light with a gun on the table and his eyes on me, turning over the same thing I’ve been turning over since the van.
“We go back for him,” I say.
A beat. “I know.”
“I’m not leaving him in a field for the crows. Or for Finn’s lot to bag and tag like he’s a stranger.”
There’s a shift by the bedroom door, and Callan steps into the room without a sound, dressed, eyes already sharp. He doesn’t ask what we’re talking about. He heard enough.
“She’s asleep,” he says quietly. “Properly, for once. I want it kept that way.”
“This isn’t for her,” I say. “This is ours.”
Callan nods once. That’s the thing about my brother. He hates being touched, hates noise, hates almost everyone breathing, but he’s never once needed a thing spelt out for him when it counts.
We leave Annabelle a note that none of us is good at writing. Ethan does it in the end, three flat lines telling her we’ve gone to handle something, that Maeve is one phone call away, that we’ll be back before dark. He props it against the kettle where she’ll find it.
Minutes later, we are in Callan’s BMW.
The drive north is silent. The sun is beating over the fields.
Finn kept the farmhouse quiet for us. One text, a location pin, two words.
Be quick. Bennett’s body is already gone, taken by people who’ll bury the truth of him in paperwork until he’s a line in a file nobody reads.
Jack is where I left him, in the long grass by the rusted seed drill, eyes open to the early evening.
I crouch beside him and look at the face I’ve wanted to put a bullet in since I was a teenager. It looks like ours will in thirty years.
“You absolute bastard,” I tell him, and my voice comes out rougher than I want. “You could’ve just told us.”
“He couldn’t,” Callan says behind me. “Maeve would have known. Or the ring. He kept us alive by keeping us stupid.”
“I’m aware. I’m allowed to be pissed off about it.”
We don’t have a coffin. We’ve got two spades from the boot, a tarp, and the practical knowledge three men like us end up with whether they want it or not. We pick a spot at the field’s edge under a hawthorn, where the ground is soft, and nobody comes. We dig.
It’s brutal work. My side splits its protest with every load, and Ethan watches me strain and says nothing, because he knows if he offers to take my spade, I’ll bury him in the hole instead.
Callan digs like a machine, steady and silent, sweat darkening his shirt, and the only sound for twenty minutes is the bite of metal into dry earth and my own ragged breathing.
When it’s deep enough, we wrap our father in the tarp and lower him in, and for a moment, the three of us just stand there at the edge of it.
“Someone should say something,” Ethan says.
“You’re the eldest. Off you go.”
He stares down into the grave. Whatever he’s got, it doesn’t come. For all his control, all his planning, all the years of welding himself shut, my brother stands at the edge of our father’s grave and finds nothing in the box where the words should be.
So, I do it.
“I held a gun to your head while you told me the truth,” I say to the tarp, “and I still didn’t believe you.
So here’s me believing you. A day too late, which is about right for this family.
” My throat does something I don’t allow it to do.
“We’ve got her. The girl. We’ve got her, and we’re not going to fuck it up the way you and Maeve fucked up everything you touched.
So you can stop carrying it now. Whatever you were carrying. Put it down.”
Callan picks up the first spadeful and lets it fall. “Goodbye, Dad,” he says, like he’s closing a door in a quiet house.
We fill it in together. Then we stand under the hawthorn, three identical men who buried the wrong parent, and nobody says we should go, even though we all want to.
“He’ll have told Maeve where his evidence is,” Ethan says eventually, wiping his hands down his jeans. “If there’s anything left worth having, she’ll know.”
“Then she can hand it to Finn and let the courts choke on it,” I say.
Callan looks at the fresh earth one last time. “She faked her death and let us bury her,” he says. “He let himself look like a killer and let us hate him. Tell me again why we’re trusting either of them.”
“We’re not,” Ethan says. “We’re trusting Annabelle. And Annabelle told me to cherish the mother I’ve got left, because she’d give anything to have hers.” He turns for the car. “So we go home, we sleep, and tomorrow we start cleaning up the rest of it. Including Maeve.”
I take one more look at my father in the ground, and the strangest thing happens. The rage I’ve carried for him my whole life doesn’t lift, exactly. It just goes quiet.
“What about the woman?”
“We’ll do a quick sweep. Chances are, whoever came for Bennett found her, too.”
I walk away from the hawthorn, my boots sinking into the parched earth. My side is a searing burn, the stitches likely weeping into my shirt. I don’t care. The field is vast, the sun dipping lower and casting long shadows over the rusted equipment.
We search for twenty minutes and come up empty. “She was evidence,” I say slowly.
“And Jack wasn’t?” Ethan says.
“Jack was a pain in their arse.”
“They left him for us.”
“Yep.”
“It’s done now,” Ethan says. “Let’s fuck off.”
I climb into the car, my side screaming with every inch of movement. The blood is warm and wet against my shirt. Callan doesn’t wait for us to settle before he guns the engine. He drives with a cool desperation to outrun the shadow of the man we just left under the hawthorn tree.
“Bye, Dad,” I whisper and let my head fall back against the headrest. “Sorry, we thought you were a serial killer.”
“That is the stupidest thing ever,” Ethan mutters.
“Maybe, but there we go. Let’s just get back home to Annabelle and get on with our lives.”
“Gladly,” Callan says, and slams his foot on the accelerator to get us home quicker.
“Tomorrow we are taking Annabelle to her cottage so she can clear it out, and then we’re selling it,” Ethan informs us.
“Sounds like a plan.” This is absurd. We are chatting like we didn’t just bury our father in a shallow grave on an old, abandoned farm. “Does she know?”
“Yes, she knows,” he says dryly.
I nod slowly. “Good.”
The rest of the journey is in silence, and that suits me fine. When we get back, I want to crawl into bed and forget all of this happened, even if it’s just for a little while.