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“Ma couldn’t afford the lifestyle she wanted to live, and after sellin’ all our things, we left our home so that Ma could move onto a new man. She tried to sell the castle, but she couldn’t.”
“And why not?” I ask, none of this making any sense.
“Because it wasn’t hers to sell. It’s yours, Puck. Da left everythin’ to you.”
The room spins, and I grip onto the table, scared I’m going to faint like a wee pussy.
“Here.” She offers a plastic cup of water, which I throw back as best I can while still cuffed.
“Cian came to see ye with a lawyer. But ya kept refusin’ to see anyone. The castle now sits abandoned, a place where kids go, expectin’ to see the Kelly ghosts.”
I can’t tell her why. I can’t tell her that was the deal I made to keep them all safe.
“I’m sorry, but there are things ya don’t understand.”
“Explain them then,” she poses, refusing to back down.
When I don’t elaborate, she shakes her head, annoyed.
“Ya think we could all just move on without ya? Like ye never existed? Well, we couldn’t. We didn’t want to. I know Connor wasn’t yer da.”
I shift uncomfortably. I don’t want to talk about this. But Hannah doesn’t give me a choice.
“But neither is Brody Doyle.”
“Don’t talk about things ya don’t understand,” I gently warn as she’s bringing up memories I wish to forget.
Her tenacity makes me bleedin’ proud, even though I want to wring her neck.
“Officer, take me back to my ce—”
“No, not this time,” Hannah interrupts, sliding a piece of paper across the table to me. “Aye, these results are of that of yer da, but it’s not Brody’s DNA.”
Looking over the paper, I see the test results I last saw ten years ago. I don’t know what’s changed. “Whose is it then? If it’s not Connor or Brody, then who is my dad?”
Hannah works her bottom lip. “Ma didn’t get rid of everything. Cian, Rory, and…Cami, they made sure of it.”
Why did she pause? Does she know what I did?
“It’s taken me ten years to find this, but I knew he was still alive. At first, I thought it was a ghost. Or that I was seein’ things. But when Ethan disappeared without tellin’ me where he was, I knew there was only place he’d be.”
“Hannah, what’s happened to Ethan?” I reach across the table, and with my heart in my throat, I touch her hand.
We flinch as the touch is foreign to us both.
Tears trickle down her cheeks as she passes me a leather-bound journal. There is a ribbon bookmarking the page she wants me to read.
“Read that and tell me what ya think.”
I have no idea what I’m about to read. I have no idea how this will change my life forevermore.
He will find out what I did. Sooner or later, he’ll know that I killed her. He’ll know that Cara died because she found out I was dealing to the Catholics. To the Doyles. She betrayed me after she told me she loved me. After she promised she’d never leave me. That I was the one she wanted, not him.
She was going to leave him, she told me so. But she lied. She was going to leave us both. All she wanted was to save her wain. That’s all she cared for. I couldn’t let her go. She had to die. She’d have told Connor the truth.
So I killed her, asking the Doyles to help me. Brody knew what that would do to Connor, so he agreed. But he also knew this secret would destroy us both. If Cara told Connor the truth, he would put an end to the Doyles and to me.
I told Connor she was having an affair with Brody, however, and that’s the reason he never avenged her death. But she never touched Brody. She never would. He believed me because their marriage was already broken long before—that’s how I managed to seduce her.
