Marriage of Inconvenience(Knitting in the City Book #7)(128)

“You got those when you were thirteen?”

“Not all of them. But, yeah, starting when I was thirteen. If you see a guy around here with these kinds of designs around his neck, he’s part of my brother’s gang.” Dan glanced at me, a self-deprecating smile on his handsome features. “I didn’t see the similarities when I was a dumbass kid. All I knew was, I wanted to belong to something and be important, respected.”

It was quiet. Quiet car, quiet street, quiet neighborhood. But more than that, it was still. I had an odd sense that we were treading water next to each other, as though in a tranquil lake beneath a starry sky, the cadence of silence manifesting as two beating hearts.

I didn’t want to break the spell by speaking. But my faith in him, and my trust, told me: this might’ve been the first of these moments, but it wouldn’t be the last.

So I asked the question I’d been wondering for a while. “What did you do when you were part of your brother’s gang?”

Dan’s chest expanded with a deep breath, his gaze falling away. “Lots of things. But what I was caught for doing was armed robbery.”

“Will you tell me?”

He nodded, his hand coming to the back of my seat as he angled himself to face me, his attention on my headrest. “We were robbing a house—not the first time—and we thought no one was there. I was smallest, still scrawny at seventeen, so I went in through the basement window. I let them in. Turns out, someone was home. That hadn’t happened before. The lady came out of her room, catching Seamus by surprise and he shot at her.”

“Oh no.” I covered my mouth.

“He got her in the arm.” Dan itched the back of his neck. “He freaked out, moving like he was going to shoot her again, and I knocked the gun out of his hand. Everyone ran, including him. I picked it up, thinking I didn’t want it to be found there with his prints. He’d just been released from jail—armed robbery of a package store caught on camera—and if he were caught again, he’d be up at Chucky’s Place for a long time.”

“What happened to the woman? Was she okay?”

“She needed stitches and was shaken up.” His mouth curved ruefully to the side. “My mom was wicked pissed, she was the one who turned me in.”

My mouth dropped open and it took me several seconds before I could form words. “Your mom turned you in?”

“Yep. Mrs. Zucker, the lady whose house we robbed, she saw me when I picked up the gun. She recognized me. She called my mom.”

“Mrs. Zucker didn’t go to the cops?”

“No. She was scared. She thought, if she went to the cops, we’d retaliate.”

“That’s terrible.”

“That’s Seamus,” he said, as though terrible and Seamus were one and the same. “Anyway, I gave my brother back the gun, but he didn’t get rid of it. He put it in his room. So when I got picked up, my mom let them in the house and they found the gun with my prints all over it.” He shrugged. “I confessed, said I was alone, served three years of a seven-year sentence and that’s that.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” His eyes came to mine briefly, but then lost focus again, his voice distant. “And when I got out, there was my brother, saying I’d earned my place, proved myself.” An expression of disgust and loathing—whether for Seamus or for himself, I had no idea—claimed his handsome features. “Like what we’d done was no big deal, not just to Mrs. Zucker, but to our mom. To our family. Like we should be proud of ourselves, for how tough we were.”

“Is Seamus still—”

“As far as I know, he’s still running scams.” He shook his head, scoffing, his brows drawn together in an angry frown.

“And your mom puts up with it? With him? She turned you in to the police.”

He glanced at the ceiling. “If she had evidence against him, she’d turn him in. But she’s never going to give up on him, her heart is too soft. She’s always going to hope.”

“But you don’t?”

He breathed out. “I’ve tried helping him. I’ve given him money, given him a job. He stole from me, used the money to fund a scam. He’s come to me a hundred times, always with the same story, always with a promise to change.” He shrugged, avoiding my eyes. “At a certain point, you got to draw a line in the sand.”

I studied Dan, the hard line of his jaw, the stark, mournful look in his eyes and realized Seamus had broken Dan’s heart.

I was sure of it.

Maybe not all at once, or by doing any one thing. It had happened over a lifetime and it was possible—even though Dan claimed he’d drawn a line in the sand and had given up hope—Seamus was still breaking his heart.