And I was still going to do it, precisely because of that.
I really was a masochistic motherfucker.
“Are you all clear with the police and everything?” She sounded worried, but I didn’t fool myself.
“Yeah.” I inhaled, closing my eyes and falling backward on the chair with a soft thud. “I’ll be fine.” Sort of.
I opened my eyes and watched her for the first time since I walked into the room. She licked her dry lips, staring at the box of chocolate. This was us now. After doing the impossible and becoming something, this was us. Two strangers in a clinical room, looking for words that wouldn’t do justice to what we really had to say. Again.
“My mom…” She sighed. “I can’t believe you did that to her.”
“Me neither, Red.”
“Your father made you marry me. Why did you? Was there money involved?”
I nodded, peeling off a dead layer of skin from my palm. “The will said I’d get nothing until I married you. If we divorce, you get more than half.”
She let out a sarcastic chuckle. “I don’t need your family’s money. Everything you Brennans touch gets tarnished.”
“Nonsense. It’s yours. Always will be.”
“Let me go,” she said quietly, her voice cracking. “I need to leave.”
I nodded, knowing she was right but wishing she was wrong. Sparrow was my lovebird, and I couldn’t clip her wings anymore. I have bent her with the weight of my actions and lies for the past few months, and she took it all and took it well, but this was the last straw. If I bent her even more, she’d snap. Forcing her to stay was too dangerous for me and too destructive for her.
Some said that lovebirds could die of heartbreak. That was the myth, anyway. I didn’t look much into that, but I knew my lovebird, my Sparrow. She needed freedom, because even though she was incredibly good at accepting my shit, this was pushing it too far, even for her. I couldn’t hold onto her anymore, even if I wanted to. Now more than ever.
She was my beauty, and I was her beast. But this was not a Disney flick. In real life, the beast goes back to his solitary life, a freak who lurks in the shadows and watches as his girl runs away back to the arms of her family.
She was my only shot at a semblance of normalcy and happiness, and I had to let her go.
Slouching down, my head so low my nose almost touched my knee, I croaked. “You’re free.”
The most painful words ever spoken by me. Sparrow was free to go, to spread her wings and fly. I’d give her everything, as my father’s will ordered. And it still wouldn’t be as painful as seeing her go. “I’m just so fucking sorry. I know it sounds absurd, considering everything we’ve been through, but I never meant to hurt you that way.”
“I know.” Her voice grew cold. She was already slipping away from me. From us.
“My door’s always open,” I added, as if it mattered.
She tilted her head slightly with a nod. “I know that, too. Now, please leave.”
I got up from my seat. Walking in here, I thought I would never want to turn around and walk out. Thought I’d milk this conversation until the very last drop, get more time with her one last time before we said goodbye. But it turned out that when you really care, things don’t work that way. Her pain occupied the whole fucking room, invading my space and knocking me off my fucking ass, and I couldn’t tolerate it without feeling my pulse weaken and my body growing cold.
I reached for the door, about to walk away from her for the very last time.
“Just out of curiosity…would you have done things differently, all things considered?” she asked in her beautiful voice.
“All things considered,” I said, not turning around because I know I’d break and do my usual thing, coerce her, threaten her, force her to stay, knowing that she shouldn’t, “if I had known, I wouldn’t have waited until now, or until our parents were dead. I would have asked you to marry me when you were nine, on that dance floor at Paddy’s wedding, when you had your first slow dance, and damn the consequences.”
She laughed.
She thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t. This is what should have happened. We shouldn’t have spent a minute away from each other while we had a chance. Nothing bad would have happened if I told nine-year-old Sparrow that she was mine.
No Paddy.
No Catalina.
No Brock.
I would never lay a finger on her mother’s body, let alone hide it in the woods.
And now we were going to spend the rest of our lives apart. Damn that “Saving All My Love For You.”
TROY
Two weeks later
LAST TIME I saw him, Paddy Rowan reminded me that I couldn’t run away from my past. He was right. The truth was one hell of a runner, and it would eventually catch up with you. It caught up with him. It caught up with me. It was delivered coldly, like revenge, on a plate of misery, to my beautiful, wide-eyed, innocent, spitfire wife.
I wished I could cram all my lies into a ball of venom and shove it down my throat, swallowing the pain she felt, making it all better for her. But I couldn’t.
When I first married her, I didn’t tell her my father was responsible for our marriage because I didn’t want this to shame my family, my mother, myself. I didn’t want her to run off to the police with it. Didn’t even feel like I owed her shit. The truth was mine, and for me to stew in. Alone.
I couldn’t even stomach the fact that Brock and Catalina knew.
But as we got closer, things changed. I no longer cared about the stupid Brennan pride, but I still didn’t tell her. She didn’t need to know that her mom ditched her for a married man. Didn’t deserve to be saddled by more injustice and pain. For all she knew, her mom could have been kidnapped or murdered or just flat-out crazy, living with a herd of cats in the woods. I didn’t want to reopen that old wound for Sparrow. The parent-child relationship was the most complex thing in the human race, I knew that first-hand, and that scab was too deep and tender to dig open.
A lot of puss and blood hid behind that old scab. It was going to hurt like hell for her.
I wasn’t sure which part was the worst for Sparrow—how I hid her mother, got rid of the evidence, or that I didn’t tell her about all this in the first place. One thing was for sure, yet understandable—my apology was not accepted.
Two weeks after I left that hospital room, it happened.
I expected the phone call, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less. I answered the call with one hand, using the other to shove someone’s head into a public toilet full of shit.
Not the best part of my job, but still better than rotting below fluorescent lights in an office all day.
I yanked his head back up and growled into his ear. “Last chance, buddy. Tell me where to find the scum who raped Don’s daughter and I’ll let you keep your balls.”
Jensen, who called me, spoke from the other line. “I don’t know any rapists.”
The hustler I was dealing with didn’t answer, so I shoved his head deeper into the toilet, this time keeping it for longer. Let him miss the privilege of breathing oxygen. Maybe that would refresh his memory as to the whereabouts of the guy who raped my client’s kid. After all, I got a hot tip that he was the one who helped him hide for cash.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I told Jensen. “What’s good?”
“Your soon-to-be ex-wife’s bank account,” he said through tight lips. “That’s what’s good. It just got six hundred thousand dollars healthier.”
She’d cashed Paddy’s check.
“Thanks.” I hung up and threw my phone against the dirty, heavily graffitied wall. I let out a few juicy curses before pulling the man’s head back up. He was a little purple, but not enough for my taste.
“I just received some very bad fucking news, and I’m really in the mood for some torturing. One last time—where’s the fucker?”
“Alright, alright. I’ll tell you,” he whimpered.
Disappointment slammed into me. He was going to cooperate, after all. Shame. I was hoping to have some fun beating the living hell out of him.
Then I remembered nothing was fun anymore.
Nothing was worth doing when Red wasn’t around.
The only thing I wanted to do, and couldn’t, sadly was her.
SPARROW
Six weeks later
“THIS ONE’S PERFECT! Can we have it? Please tell me we can have it. It’s so, so, pretty. I really want it. It’d be perfect for us. So can we? Please say that we can. Lucy, tell her it’s the best. Sparrow, we gotta buy it.”
I leaned against Lucy’s rental car, arms crossed. Laughing into a foam cup full of goodness, I watched Daisy practically hugging the white and pink food truck. It really was beautiful, and honestly, it was also perfect for a pancake business. All sugary and sweet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Daisy started licking it, it looked so tasty.
“You don’t have to decide now.” Lucy bumped her shoulder into mine, laughing when she saw Daisy dancing around the truck like a drunk hippie.
We were standing in the middle of a trailer lot, looking for potential trucks for our new business. I was a few hundred thousand dollars richer than I was when I walked down the aisle with Troy, but also a few hundred thousand times less happy than I was right before our marriage fell apart. True to his promise, he’d never contacted me after that hospital visit. Not directly, anyway. Didn’t make any move on the divorce papers either. But I knew better than to think it was about the money.