“I thought I already knew. He was forty-one.”

She shot me a tired smile.

“I found out three weeks after we started sleeping together that he was married with a kid. See, he didn’t wear a wedding band and lived in an apartment complex on campus, alone. He looked young and stylish and hung out with the students so often…” she picked a cuticle around her fingernail, tugging on it nervously “…I wanted to lose my virginity to someone with experience, and I knew he had it. We continued seeing each other after we had sex. Until one day he just disappeared into thin air. Stopped answering my calls. Just got up and left. He didn’t even complete the academic year. I needed some sort of closure, so I found him. And, well, I found out why he left. Because of me. Because his wife, who taught at another university two states away, had found out and dragged him back home by the ear. When I found his new address, I made the mistake of driving down there and knocking on his door.”

Bad call. But I had plenty of life experience, and Aisling lived in a protective bubble. Of course she wanted answers, closure, and all the other mumbo jumbo you read about.

“She opened the door and threw the phone he’d used to call me. She started screaming at me in front of the entire neighborhood, calling me a whore, a homewrecker, a spoiled bitch. She said my mother is a slut, that everyone in America knows one of us doesn’t belong to Fitzpatrick, then promised she would let all the hospitals in Boston know what I did. It was humiliating. Especially since I never knew this man was married.”

“Is that why you never tried for a hospital here?” I asked.

She bit down on her lower lip, pulling more and more dead skin from the side of her fingernail. “Partly. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not the entire reason, anyway. Since then, I limited my interaction with men even more.”

“Good,” I deadpanned. “We’re all fuckers.”

Silence hung in the air. I wanted her to leave. She wasn’t going to tell me anything about her parents’ relationship, about Gerald. This was pointless.

“Tell me something personal.” She rested her cheek on her shoulder. “Just one thing, Sam. It will make me feel better. Please.”

“Aisling, it’s time for you to go.”

“Why?”

“Because this is going nowhere fast. We fucked. It was a mistake. It’s time you move on. Whatever you think is going to happen, I can assure you it won’t happen. I don’t have a soul, or a heart, or a conscience. We had fun, yes, but women are all the same to me. I will never choose you above all others. If you think life with Gerry is a nightmare for your mother, imagine your father at his worst and keep going. That would be me.”

That was when it finally happened.

She finally cried in front of me.

It was just one tear. It rolled down her cheek, flying off her chin like a cliff, landing with a splash on her knee.

“Goddammit, woman,” I hissed, looking away, feeling … feeling. It wasn’t a big feeling, just a little discomfort, but I did not want to see her cry.

One time.

This would be the one and only time I was going to humor this infuriating woman. No more.

I stood up, snatching the whiskey bottle by its neck and taking a swig as I began pacing the room.

“When I was a kid, before Troy and Sparrow took me in, back when I lived with Cat and my grandmother, we had a painting in our house. Just the one. It was a very cheap painting. A faded old thing of a cabin on a lake—basic and not very good. Anyway, the painting was in front of the bed in the master bedroom. It had the tendency to fall from its nail onto the floor every time the door creaked or someone breathed in the house. Cat was the only person with a key to the master bedroom, and she hadn’t figured out I’d learned how to pick a lock.”

I stopped. Took another swig. Realized I was halfway drunk and put the bottle down on the coffee table, noticing Nix was fingering and touching more of the bullets in the jar, breathing the initials out with her lips. Like she was mourning those people or something.

“When I was a kid, Cat used to punish me by starving me. In order to do that, she made the spot under her bed a makeshift pantry. That’s where she kept all the food. Condiments, chips, pretzels, ready-made meals. Grams wasn’t strong enough to fight her on this. As you know, I was a shitty kid, so I was virtually in a constant state of punishment. That made me very hungry and very small for my age.”