Page 82 of Alfie: Part Two

Shan rumbled a laugh. “I can imagine it.”

“I can’tunhearit.” I grinned and opened a cupboard. “Are you hungry? The last thing I ate was a half-crushed Biscoff in the lounge at Logan.”

“I crumble them in my ice cream,” he admitted. “I had a late breakfast, but this looks good.”

Two plates, it was.

“So he actually believes we’re playing golf now?” he asked. “It’s frigid outside.”

“He might have too much on his mind to question my golf habits,” I replied. “He told me about the, uh…you know.”

He nodded. “I figured. I’m glad they were caught.”

Even though he was here to help me with my proposal plans, I wanted his views on what I’d struggled with lately.

I filled the two plates and set the first one in the microwave. Then I opened the bread box, because you couldn’t have marinara without bread.

“May I ask how you justify the urge to kill someone who’s hurt a loved one?” I asked. “Because that’s all I can think about. I keep telling myself I want them dead without me—or Alfie—pulling the trigger, but I…” I sighed heavily. “I told Alfie I don’t want to go near them. What I didn’t tell him was that I fear I wouldn’t be able to hold back.”

He nodded slowly. “The urge is easy to justify. I think it’s normal to want someone dead after they’ve harmed a loved one. The act itself is another matter.”

Fair.

“I trust we’re speaking in hypothetical terms here,” he added.

I chuckled through my nose, remembering my reality. “Yes, of course. I know you’ve never actually taken a life.”

“Right.” He sat down at the island and seemed to ponder his response. “When I was fifteen, my old man sat me down. He said I was going to pursue three things in my future to get all the perspectives I needed. One, family. I grew up in the syndicate—it was all I knew. Number two, something that took me away from everything I knew. That’s why I joined the Army. And three, a second world to create a balance. And, given the nature of my first world, I chose what, to me, represented innocence. I chose to work with children. I wanted to do good.”

I had read about that, starting with an old article in which Shannon O’Shea had attended a banquet with his wife, where they raised money for families dealing with trauma in children. Shan had been a much-respected voice in that field before he’d retired.

“I can’t tell you how many children I’ve met who were angry, downright murderous, because Daddy hit Mommy all the time,” he said. “Children who’ve been abused and neglectedthemselves, children who’ve come here from war zones, children who’ve been abandoned… The urge to protect themselves or a sibling, or a mother, is there from such a young age, West.”

The microwave dinged, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to move. I just stood there on the other side of the island and listened.

“I had one patient—a boy, seven years old,” he went on. “His mother had recently lost custody, so the boy and his older sister were living in a group home. And every session, he spoke of wanting to kill Mommy for what she’d done.”

I folded my arms over my chest as something deflated within me. He wasn’t about to give me a magic solution to all my problems. He was merely going to paint the whole world gray. Or what little black-and-white I had left.

“He had grown up with violence, neglect, addiction, and sexual assault,” he said. “As far as I know, he never pulled a trigger—but would you blame him if he had?”

So much for his world of innocence.

“We grow up hearing that life isn’t fair, which is certainly true,” he continued. “But we do our best by being part of a society that pushes for fair laws for all. We decided that murder is wrong, no matter what. Still, several states have the death penalty. We support our troops, many of whom come home after ending lives on a battlefield. We look back on history and watch interviews with Nazi soldiers who were simplyfollowing orders.”

I scrubbed a hand over my face.

He cleared his throat. “The short answer is, I gave up. I stopped pretending I could be what even a modern society’s structure couldn’t. Society isn’t fair at all. I’m not convinced it’s actually possible. There will always be hypocrisy and injustice. Because we keep trying to make things black-and-white when humanity is anything but.”

And there it was. The damn black-and-white.

“In other words, you’ve created your own society with the Sons,” I deduced quietly.

He inclined his head. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

“And you’ve given up justifying reasoning as much as acts. Hypothetically speaking.”

He let out a chuckle. “We didn’t give up. We reevaluated. The giving up part is personal. We have our own laws, and they revolve around protecting our interests, including our community, our families, and our values. This is nothing you haven’t heard before.”

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