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“Butit is what it is, right?” She smiles wryly at me.
“Apparently so.”
Neve shrugs. “So, you think that should be our new Kildare family motto? ‘Well, fuck it. Guess I have to’?”
I chuckle quietly, sipping my drink. “I’ll look into commissioning a family crest with that on it. Maybe even have it translated into Latin, to sound more posh.”
“Perfect.”
I smile at her. She smiles back.
“She’s not her father, Neve,” I murmur quietly. “For whatever that’s worth.”
Her lips curl into a small grin. “I suppose it’s worth something.”
We finish our drinks, I get up to leave, and Neve stands and hugs me tightly.
“You have my understanding already, Cillian. I’ll work on the blessing.”
“Your understanding is all I ask for.”
I pull away and head for the door.
“Cillian—”
Neve’s voice stops me halfway out. I glance back to see her grinning a dry, amused smile.
“Welcome to arranged marriage life. Congratulations.”
17
UNA
It’s been five days.I think. Maybe four. Six? I don’t know. I’ve stopped keeping track.
Finn is dead. It’s not a nightmare. It’s not a trick of the mind. It’s my bleak reality.
My twin—the other half of me—isn’t here anymore.
When I collapsed in Cillian’s living room, I vaguely remember screaming that it wasn’t true. That itcouldn’tbe true. And I wanted to believe—so badly—that Cillian really would stoop so low as to make me think Finn was gone when he wasn’t.
Until he called the halfway house on speakerphone and let me talk to Sister Angela—one of the nuns who worked there. An older-sounding woman whose voice filled with compassion when I told her, yes, I was Finn’s sister.
A Finn they knew as Finn Smith, a sweet but severely troubled addict who couldn’t ever shake his demons.
Finn Smith had Finn O’Conor’s same eyes. The same hair. The same birthmark in the shape of a triangle on his upper left arm, and the same “Unbroken” tattoo on his forearm that I vividly remember watching him get done in a tattoo shop in Venice Beach.
Finn Smith, who died eighteen months ago from a shot of heroin cut with fentanyl.
In a way, the pain is diminished. Dulled. Because in a lot of ways, I lost him years ago. We’d been living on the streets in Los Angeles when he started to get deeper into heroin—something I tried once with him, and personally couldn’t stomach.
But heroin was how Finn covered up his pain. It’s how he managed to make it through each day. Yes, I hated that he used it, and tried so many times to pull him away from that life. But I understood why he did it, because I of all people knew the demons and the horrors that kept him up at night.
Except something went wrong with a dealer he owed money to, and we both had to get out of town, fast. The plan was to go north to Seattle. But then, at the bus station, Finn told me I’d be safer if he rode out the heat away from me.
Getting on the bus that day,without him, was the worst moment in a life full of terrible moments. It was like losing a piece of myself. I’d been with him my entire life, through so much.
And just like that, our cord was cut.
