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“No!”
The last time I sat down and listened to him attempt to absolve himself of any wrongdoing was more than eight years ago, shortly after witnessing him brutally rape my mother against the same table we were forced to eat at every day since. I’d taken a hurley to him in my pathetic attempt to protect her, and the fight that ensued had been so loud and vicious that the neighbors called the Gards.
As a result, the social workers had been called in, and I had been forced by the very woman I had tried to protect to sit at that same kitchen table that still remained in our house and listen to her abuser reel off a convincing tale of how the ring on her finger gave him dominion over her body and mind.
I had instantly called bullshit on that and was then treated to an in-depth and graphic play-by-play of what happened to a small boy when he went into care by my father.
Darren, being the diligent and conscientious son and having endured the suffering, had been spared the warning. So had Shannon and the small boys.
Not me, though.
Not the black sheep of the family.
The liability.
The fuckup.
I lost my childhood that day.
I’d never had much of one to begin with, but whatever innocence had been there, all my boyhood hopes and dreams, had been snuffed out in an instant. Mentally and physically scarred to the point where I couldn’t picture myself trusting another human being. Terrorized with grave details about what would be done to me if I didn’t keep my mouth shut or, worse, what would happen to Shannon and Tadhg, I’d buckled under the pressure and lied through my teeth like the good soldier I’d been trained to be.
The fucked-up part was that I couldn’t see then what I was starting to see now, that I was trying to protect those kids from rapists by living with one. Because that’s what he was. He was a fucking rapist.
The things he did.
The pain he caused.
The lives he ruined.
No, I would never again listen to another excuse that man made.
“Your mother is in the hospital,” Dad said, dragging my thoughts back to the present and bringing with them a flood of panic. “She had a bleed the other night. A bad one.”
I gripped the phone so tightly that I thought the skin around my knuckles might crack. “She’s where?”
“Are ya deaf, Joey? I said she’s in the fucking hospital,” he barked. “Placental abruption, apparently.”
Jesus Christ. I felt faint as I pressed a hand to my brow. “When did that happen?”
“Friday night,” he replied, confirming my worst fears. “The hospital rang me to come in to be with her.”
My heart sank into my ass. I was calling her a cunt while she was bleeding out in the hospital.
“She went in with bleeding, but when they went to examine her, her waters broke,” he added, sounding genuinely human for once. “She, ah, she was in a bad way with the bleeding, so they took her down to theater to sort it. According to the consultant, it can happen in older women who’ve had a lot of children, and your mother had a C-section on Tadhg.”
“And the baby?” I heard myself squeeze out.
“What do you think, ya bollox?” he snapped. “It’s fucking dead, isn’t it? It wasn’t much bigger than the size of my hand.”
Jesus Christ.
“It?” I choked out, feeling my legs tremble beneath me. “It?”
“What do ya want me to call it…your brother?” he demanded.
So, it was a boy.
A baby brother.
