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I wished it were different.
I wished she hadn’t done what she’d done and that things could revert to how they’d been, but… “I choose her, Lena. I’ll always choose her.”
This was her punishment.
The only punishment she’d ever get, and she should have endured it sooner.
It was on my shoulders that she hadn’t.
“As you should,” she whispered, her gaze darting to mine. “Go on with you now, son. Be the husband she needs and the man she loves. She deserves to have both.”
Agitated by her understanding, and needing to see with my own eyes that my woman was okay, I slinked away and headed over to the conservatory to check on her.
Lena’s grief hit me hard, and as guilty as I felt, it was nothing to the abyss growing larger inside me. Something that made whatever Lena was feeling seem inconsequential.
Out of nowhere, I felt the ticking of a clock start to rumble in the back of my mind.
It had been fainter before, but now, it was like tinnitus.
The countdown to when Aoife left me.
It was, I knew, only a matter of time.
Striding down the hall, trying to tune out that goddamn noise, along the way, I saw Victoria and Shay hanging out in the family room, watching an MCU movie.
The volume was so loud that they might not have even heard the racket going on outside.
As I heard their laughter, I found myself jealous—had my life ever been that simple? I didn’t think so. But I prayed theirs stayed like that.
Wasn’t that what I was striving for?
An easier path for the next generation—not just my own kids, but my brothers’ too?
When I made it to the greenhouse, I found Aoife surrounded by her sisters-in-law.
Inessa cooed over Jake, all while they drank coffee and kept their heads together, a motley crew of women who were clearly discussing what had just gone down in the yard.
Aoife sat there, straight-backed, her face tense, but her eyes clear. She didn’t see me because I retreated once I saw she was safe, once I realized she wasn’t upset or crying.
Destroying the flowerbeds had clearly brightened her mood, but that was only a temporary fix.
Destructive behavior only derailed and grew more erratic.
That was what scared me the most.
Preferring to deal with Paddy’s bullshit, I escaped to the office but found there was more of that eerie fucking silence.
When I headed inside, Senior was turned away from the room, his gaze on the wrecked yard as he drank from a tumbler that was sloshing around the brim with whiskey.
The rest of my brothers were dotted around the office-cum-library, each of them nursing a whiskey of their own, all while staring at Paddy who was the only man standing.
I headed in, poured myself a good measure of whiskey, did the same for Paddy, and as I passed it to him, I leaned on the edge of Senior’s desk.
After I took a sip, I drawled, “You should start at the beginning, Paddy. Maybe that’ll help us make sense of it.”
