Page 77 of A Figure of Love

His shoulders slumped. “Oh, it’s you.”

Gareth breathed through his mouth. “Did you expect somebody else?”

Dec tossed the bottle onto the bed beside him, where it clinked against something. “I knew there would be no money without a lecture.”

Gareth shut the door and picked his way across to the window, which he opened, filling his lungs with air that did not smell like a sewer.

He turned and propped himself up on the sill, not wishing to get too far from the source of air. “If I recall correctly, it was you who was lecturing me the last time we spoke.”

Declan didn’t answer. He looked worse than Gareth had ever seen him; gaunt, unshaven, skin yellow and unhealthy.

Gareth looked at his best friend in the world. The only person who knew everything about him, and still stood by him.

“I don’t want to lecture you. I want to help you.”

The Irishman turned on him like a rabid cur that had been kicked. “Well you can’t help me, Gareth! I am beyond it.”

“Nobody is beyond it. What happened?”

“What the bleeding, fucking hell do you think happened?”

“You lost a packet in some hell?”

“I lost it all in some hell.”

Something cold crawled down his spine. “All? What do you mean, all?”

“You’re the goddamned genius, you figure it out.” He shot him a poisonous glare. “Don’t worry, I didn’t touch anything belonging to you or the company. Everything I lost belonged to me.”

Gareth hadn’t even considered the possibility that Declan could have gambled away everything he had. But it was true, the other man had signing rights on all Gareth’s accounts. Still, the amount of money Dec had gambled away must have been in the hundreds of thousands. Half of everything they had ever made, in point of fact. How long had this been going on? How could Gareth have been blind to it?

He rubbed his temple, which had been dully throbbing for a good part of the day; the ache had suddenly turned sharp.

“So, it’s not all gone.”

“Your half is yours. I won’t take your bloody handouts.”

“I couldn’t spend all the money I have in a hundred years, and there is more coming in every day. According to my calculations, our new pottery may be our most successful venture yet. With the contracts Mister—”

“I don’t care.”

“Declan, you have always been the one who understands other people, their foibles, nuances, expressions, wants, desires, machinations. It is a great weakness in me that I cannot see to the heart of any problem that involves people.” Serena’s face flashed into his mind and he ruthlessly banished it. “Even you, the one person who knows me, a person closer than a brother, I do not truly know. I look at you and am mystified by what drives you, what interests you, what would make you happy. I trust you with my life, with everything I have, and I would give my life to save yours.” He shook his head, his fear deeper and more chilling than any he could recall since they were both boys. Since that night when everything had changed. “I know you feel the same. I know it. As surely as I know the Fibonacci Sequence or the Pythagorean Theorem.”

He looked up from his clenched hands to find his friend staring, his eyes blank and dead.

“Let me help you Declan, please. Because if you die, you will be killing both of us.”

They sat in silence for so long Gareth thought he would never answer.

“I don’t know what ails me, Gare. I don’t,” he said, as if Gareth had argued. “I could not believe it the first time we bought a company, turned it on its end, and made money.” He shook his head as he stared into the past, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I felt rich—so rich.” He looked up. “But the hole inside me—you know?”

Gareth did know.

“The money didn’t fill it. It just seemed to make it bigger.”

Gareth nodded. He had no better words for what Declan was describing, but he knew the feeling as surely as he knew his reflection in a mirror. He’d quickly figured out money wouldn’t fix the problem. For him it had been the quest for knowledge that had filled the void—at least as long as he stayed buried inside the quest. Any time he ventured into the wider world—any occasion without a book or formula or journal—he would look down to find the hole had advanced, that he was standing on the edge looking down into something worse than the dark.

“I had to do it, didn’t I?” It was a question Declan hadn’t asked him for nineteen years.