Page 156 of Mangled Memory
“Wehave money.” I know that voice.
“You know how I feel about that,” Ayla responds.
Scratching across the camera’s microphone muffles the recording.
“This isn’t up for debate. Just do what I told you to. Don’t make me tell you again.”
Oh, I think the fuck not. My blood boils, and my temper explodes. I will kill him.
“Don’t make me remind you that I don’t take direction from you. I don’t need your permission to live how I choose.”
I’d celebrate my wife’s backbone if it weren’t for the sound of a fist hitting flesh at the same time her name bellows from the fucker. There’s crunching of metal met with the shattering of plastic, but it’s what follows that I’ll never unhear. The thunk of my wife’s body landing from what we know unequivocally was not a fall. It’s the soundtrack of my nightmares
Her hands fly over the keys and her incessant mouse clicking is so loud I want to ask her to stop. But I don’t have to. She spins the screen around, and there, upside down as the camera fliesfrom the ridge, is Seamus Murphy’s face, as anger morphs to horror.
“He tried to kill me?” Ayla chokes out on a whisper. “My own dad. Or he didn’t care that he could have.”
I sit, doing everything I can not to fly down the stairs, get in my car, and find the fucker to kill him slowly and painfully. But I can’t think of torture worthy of him.
I stare at my wife, and she stares back at me.
“What do you want to do?” I finally break the silence. I’ve rubbed my mouth raw, when I say, “Franklin, come.” I pat my chest.
Ayla tilts her head. “I thought you didn’t want him on the furniture.”
“I don’t. I also need a way to calm the fuck down so I don’t commit first-degree premeditated murder and go to prison. So…”
“So Franklin is the lesser of two evils.”
Yeah.
“I want time to think. Like loads of time. Not react. Not fly off the handle. I want time.”
“Do you want time alone or are you okay with company?”
“Company’s good.” She clicks her computer several times, her eyes brimming with tears that defy gravity and never fall.
Many minutes later, I’m dying to know. “Princess, what are you doing?”
“I emailed myself copies of everything. I emailed Cian and Liam with instructions not to open unless directed to. I added a copy to the server. And I moved a copy to my desktop.” She pops the card out. “This needs to go somewhere for safekeeping. It has timestamps and cannot be manipulated.” She sets it on her desk as if it were coiled snake that will strike at the barest disturbance.
She rises from her chair, moves to sit on the sofa at my side, stroking her dog who is fast asleep in my lap. His tongue sticks out from his muzzle and he’s sucking as if he’s nursing.
“When does he go to boot camp?”
“Two weeks.”
“Can you take some time off work at that point?”
“Sure. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we should go to Greece. Leave all this bullshit here. Make no decisions before then. Just head to the Mediterranean, lie in the sun, wander the old towns, eat, fuck, drink, fuck some more. And celebrate living.”
How she manages to make things better for me, drain my anger and vitriol, while turning me on, even in the midst of one of my life’s worst moments, I’ll never know.
“I’m in for that, Princess.”
I lean to kiss my wife, drinking deeply from her. Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is my past, my present, and my future. And that everything, even the stuff that could be horrible alone, with her will be picture perfect.
