Page 38 of Revive
“I don’t give a shit what he wants. There’s nothing he can say that’s going to make this right. You do remember what he did, right? Smashed my boyfriend’s skull open with a fucking piece of iron pipe and deprived me of my right to bodily autonomy.”
“I’m not disputing that what he did was monstrous. I’m just trying to keep our family together—”
She scoffed. “Our family already fell apart.”
“Alle, he’s fucking wracked with guilt over what he did. He doesn’t want this to be the final nail in his relationship with you.”
“Fucking should have thought about that before. There is absolutely nothing I wish to discuss with him. Nothing.”
Her raised voice summoned Luthor back from the kitchen. She waved him away, but he lingered in the doorway a moment, a pensive furrow splitting the centre of his brow. Only after a second wave did he go back into the kitchen.
“Ewan, stop.” She couldn’t stop her voice from rising in volume. “Whatever reconciliation you think you’re negotiating here, it’s not happening. Those threads have already been cut, and no amount of patchwork is going to pull us back together. I’m sorry if you find that hard to comprehend, but it’s reality. Now, if you don’t mind, and there’s nothing else, I’d like to get back to dealing with the fall-out of his bullshit.”
“You need to understand what Dad was really like.”
His bark stopped her cold. A shiver chased up her spine and through her limbs. “You really think I don’t know he was a tyrant who belted you all? Or that he punished you for my crimes? I know it. Fuck, Ewan, do you not think I regret deliberately acting up and prompting him to take that out on the four of you? I do. There was no justification for it. I just wanted to be treated the same as you all, to be bound by the same fucking rules instead of being held up as some ridiculously sweet princess you all had to defend and protect.”
“You didn’t want it, Alle. Maybe if a few beltings were the extent of it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you need to talk to Flynn. A few beatings was the worst Dad ever did to me…” His voice got quiet and hesitant. She could picture him, her hairy big brother, with his polar bear jumper, fisherman’s beard, and kind eyes. “I didn’t realise how bad it got once I left for uni. If I’d had any idea… I don’t know, Alle. I don’t know what I could’ve done. Got them out. Got you all out. Shit! I knew it was bad, but not that bad. I was barely an adult myself. Fuck, at least they protected Theo.”
He was rambling, his words tripping over themselves in his haste to explain something he was still being vague over. Intrigued despite her anger, which still roiled within her as raw and bitter as ever, Alle pressed the phone so hard against her skull her ear ached.
“You’ve still not given me a reason to give a shit. Some vague hints aren’t going to cut it.”
“It’s not a conversation to be had over the phone.”
She pulled the phone away from her head to stare at it. “Oh, wow! We seem to have gone from, ‘Hey, you should talk to him,’ to ‘You should meet him face to face.’ The answer to both by the way is no fucking way!”
“Alle, please.”
She hung up.
She’d barely had the chance to cover her mouth with her palm before her damn phone started wailing again. “We’ve nothing to discuss,” she bellowed into the receiver. “Just fucking quit.”
“He used to deny them food. Starve them. Leave them chained up in the cellar while he went to work, when they were supposed to be in school, and that’s not even the worst of it.”
“Why are you telling me? Because you think my boyfriend is the same sort of dick?”
“No, Alle. I don’t. I don’t think that. I just want you to understand why Flynn might have flown off the handle without checking his facts.”
She managed to penetrate the fog of anger in her brain to allow her temper to diffuse a bit. “How come they never reported him? Tell me that.”
“How come your boyfriend’s never reported Flynn?”
“He—” She didn’t exactly have an answer to that. Theories, kind of, but that’s all they were. Her suppositions, and rationalisation of an act of violence so horrific, she couldn’t rightly process it. Which was the precise point Ewan was making. “I still don’t want to talk to him, and as for Marsh, before you even bring him up, he can rot in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity.”
“You know thatBang!fired him.”
“Good.”
“Alle!”
“What? I hope the whole damn business folds, and now I’m done talking about this. Don’t call me back, not about this. If it’s all we’ve got to talk about, then it’s probably best we don’t speak at all.”
She hung up without bidding him goodbye. Then paced. “Luthor,” she called after a dozen shuttle runs of the living room. “Are you okay to take a walk with me?” If she went out alone, three goth rockers and one Ronnie would get their collective boxers in a twist, but she needed to walk, and to go throw stones at the ocean.
