Page 117 of Icarus

“The house is in your name. The whole thing, all the units. You don’t need to keep it, but if you sell it, please consider the people who live there. Don’t raise their rents and take care of them when they need it.”

“What?” Icarus had spent his entire life thinking they were renting. That was ridiculous! They didn’t even have the biggest unit in the building.

Angus continued without elaboration. “They’ll strip the entire unit while you’re in the hospital. They’re taking everything and they’re freezing all my accounts. Yours should be fine. I had separate accounts for the money from our work at the Black house and the money I earned from restoration. That account is under review, but it should be available to you in a few months.”

“They’re gonna take my stuff too,” Icarus insisted. “Mr. Black said he was waiting for me to turn eighteen so he could prosecute me too.”

Angus was shaking his head. “He . . . changed his mind. We had a call.”

“What do you mean you had a call?” Icarus was starting to raise his voice. “You mean you could have just figured this out on the phone all this time?”

“Icarus, you know as well as I do that Mr. Black wasn’t taking my c—”

Icarus wished he could stand up and he wished his arms weren’t broken so he could punch Angus in the face.

“What, you chatted? Had a nice little talk and now everything is fine?” Icarus yelled.

Angus stood up and faced Icarus’s anger without shrinking.

“Do you think that what happened tonight changed nothing?” he shouted. “You threw his son off a building. You both could have died!”

Icarus remembered the sound of hammering before the rope failed. The begging. He stayed quiet.

“The house will be empty, but it will be yours,” Angus said, composing himself and looking at the floor. “When you get discharged, you can go home, but I won’t be there. Stay for a few months, heal up, and then go where you need to.”

“What’s going to happen to you?” Icarus whispered.

Angus grimaced, and he’d never looked so much like one of Ramona’s drawings to Icarus.

“Trials, fines, prison most likely. Depending on what charges are levied against me, I’ll be there for child endangerment as well.” He looked at the coffee on the nightstand. Then he cracked open the lid and took a sip. “Stuart didn’t exactly forgive you as much as he agreed to levy your crimes directly on to me. Which is fine. As I’m sure whatever charges I’m getting for the art alone more than constitute a life sentence.”

Icarus turned away from his dad and blinked hard.

“I wish none of this had ever happened,” he whispered.

Angus stood up and put a hand on Icarus’s forehead.

“I wish I’d done a better job,” he confessed back, stroking through Icarus’s hair just once. “You’re a good kid, Icarus. And you’ll be a better man than me.”

Angus Gallagher opened the hospital window and crouched on the sill. Graceful, even now. Though Icarus knew it must hurt.

“Try not to fall again. You might not get so lucky,” he said.

Then, he disappeared over the edge.

Pasiphaë

The sun on the wood floors was as golden as Icarus had always hoped it would be. It even smelled different in here, fresh and clean.

The Feds had indeed taken almost everything out of Angus’s house. They’d stripped it down to the bones, taken out mattresses and dishes, even things that didn’t have any connection to their crimes, until all that was left was a single spoon in the silverware drawer. They’d even taken Evangeline’s ferns.

Luca, Celestina, Helios, and Icarus ate pizza on the floor in the middle of the living room.

Icarus lay on his back with his head in Helios’s lap. His casts were itchy but he didn’t mind. He couldn’t when his heart was singing like this.

It wouldn’t be so bad to start over in this place.

When it was warm and quiet like this.