“I never talk about this,” Deklan says as he pours whiskey into a glass and returns to the couch.

I can see that he’s nervous, but all I feel is excitement.  Deklan never talks about himself, and I know almost nothing of his background.  He’s turned off the television, and the silence is too much for me.

“I just want to know you better,” I say softly.  I reach out and place my hand on his arm.  “Most people find out all this stuff before the marriage, not after.”

“Yeah, we aren’t exactly conventional.”

“We aren’t.”  Deklan reaches for my hand and pulls it into his lap.  “We’re okay though, aren’t we?  I mean, this might not be what we had planned, but it’s worked out okay.  At least, it has for me.”

Deklan stares into my eyes, and I see a rare vulnerability in his gaze.

“For me, too,” I say softly.  I touch the side of his face with my free hand.  “I’m glad I married you, Dek.”

“I’m glad, too.”  He squeezes my hand and leans his face against my palm for a moment and then looks away.  “I admit it, Kera…I’m afraid to tell you shit.  I’m afraid that if I tell you too much—tell you the wrong things—that you’ll change your mind.  I’m afraid you won’t want to be with me if you know the truth.”

“I know what you do.”  I can’t meet his eyes as I say the words.

“No,” Deklan says, “you really don’t.  I hope you never do.  I’m not going to tell you any of that, but I will tell you how I got here—how I started working for Fergus Foley.”

Deklan reaches over and pulls me close to him, his lips brushing over mine as he closes his eyes and hugs me tightly.   After a moment, he releases me completely and reaches for his whiskey.  I settle back against the couch and wait as patiently as I can for him to begin.

“I just barely remember my birth parents,” Deklan says.  He takes a long breath as he stares into the liquid of his glass, swirling it around as he speaks.  “When I was four, there was a break-in at our house.”  He pauses and takes another long breath.  When he speaks again, his voice is shaking slightly.  “I was upstairs with my mother—I remember that part clearly—but I don’t know where my sister was.  My mother had just put me into my pajamas and was reading me a book when we heard the front door slam open.  There was a lot of shouting, and then I heard the loudest sound ever.  My mother shoved me into the back of my closet and threw a blanket over me.  She told me not to move or make a sound.  I don’t know how long I was there.  I heard more shouting, and I heard more loud bangs.  A while after that, someone walked into my room.  When the closet door opened, I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe.  A couple minutes later, I heard footsteps going out of the room.”

Deklan drains his glass.

“I don’t know how long it was before the police showed up.  Maybe a few minutes.  Maybe an hour.  I don’t know.  I never moved from that spot until they showed up.  They took me out of the closet and out of the house.  We had to go through the living room to get outside, and I saw blankets lying over lumps on the floor and a lot of red.  At the time, I didn’t realize they were my parents’ bodies.

“I was taken to a house where a woman and three other children lived.  I remember the swimming pool in the back yard.  It felt like a vacation to me, but when I asked about my parents, no one would tell me anything.  It was weeks before I really understood everything that had happened, and even then, I only understood as much as a four-year-old could.  My parents and my sister were gone, and they weren’t coming back.

“There wasn’t any extended family for me to go live with, so I got shuffled around in the system.  Five different foster homes the first two years.  Once I started school, I was never in the same place for more than a semester, never made any friends or anything.  When I was nine, I was put in a more permanent home.  That’s when I started really looking into what happened to my family.

“It was years before I knew the whole story.  No one would ever give me any information when I asked.  My foster mom would take me to Mass, and the priest would tell me my family was with God and that they were happy now.  I tried to focus on that, but I needed to know what happened.  It ate at me.  When I was ten, I figured out how to get ahold of court documents, and I found the police reports of the break-in.  A neighbor had called the police when he heard gunshots, and he saw three men leaving the house before the police got there.  He didn’t get a good look at them and couldn’t ID them or anything like that. When the police arrived, they found three bodies in the living room and one four-year-old boy hiding in the closet.  My sister had been…had been raped before they killed her.”

“Oh my God.”  I reach for Deklan’s leg, but he doesn’t look at me.  He drains the glass and continues.

“No one was ever charged with the crime.  I might have dug into it more then, but that’s about the time my foster father died of a heart attack, and my foster mother went nuts.”

“What did she do?”

“She was convinced my foster father died because the rest of us—herself, me, and another boy in the foster care system—had sinned against God, and we were all being punished.  She was convinced that she was going to die as well unless we all atoned.”

“Atoned?”

“The other boy was Brian.  He only had to put up with it for a couple of months before he was moved to another family.  I was left there to take the brunt of it.”

“Brian?  As in the guy who took me to see you at the hospital?  You were in foster care together?

“Yeah, that’s him.”

I ponder this for a moment.  In essence, this makes Brian Dek’s brother, and I see him in a slightly different light now.

“What did your foster mom do?”

“I was a sinner,” Deklan says quietly.  “I had to pay for my sins.  It’s not like I ever did anything—she was just a nut, ya know?  But I had to pay for whatever she thought I’d done.  At this point, I figure I still have a few more sins to commit before I catch up to the punishments.”

“How did she punish you?”

He looks at me with dark, narrowed eyes.  There’s a long pause before he answers.

“Whipped us with a belt.  Made us stand with our arms out, holding up Bibles, boiled water for the bathtub.  That was the worst of it.”

“She put you in boiling water?  Oh my God.”  I gasp as I place my hand over my mouth.  My thoughts spin around in my head as I put it all together.  “The scars on your leg…”

“I guess the neighbors heard me screaming,” Deklan says.  “Had to have skin grafts because the burns were so bad.  That’s when they took me away from her for good.  I never saw her after that.  She died of an overdose a couple years later.”

“I was twelve then and was placed in a group home.  I ran away and was caught and placed in another group home.  That was the trend over the next couple of years until I figured out how not to get caught.

“I lived on the streets for about six months, just doing whatever I could to survive.  Not long into it, I came across Brian, and we helped each other out sometimes, finding odd jobs, mostly quick manual labor stuff at restaurants or loading docks.  I was big for my age and pretty strong even then.  People seemed okay with giving obviously underage kids a few bucks to haul boxes around.

“I met Fergus Foley at a loading dock.  I’d made a bit of cash there earlier in the day, and it was raining that night, so I stayed in the shipyard and was going to sleep in one of the containers.  Sometime in the middle of the night, Mr. Foley caught sight of me, questioned me, and then put me to work.  He offered to buy me a steak dinner and give me a place to sleep for the effort.”

“I kept loading containers for Mr. Foley for a few weeks after that.  After a while, Brian joined me.  Fergus and I talked more, and he found out what happened to my family.  One day, he came in and told me he knew who had killed them.”

“I’d never felt such rage before.  When he offered to help me locate them…I didn’t even consider consequences.  I wanted revenge, pure and simple.  Fergus Foley helped me get that.”

Deklan glances at me before giving me a wry grin.

“I’ll spare you the details, but believe me, they paid for what they’d done.”

“You killed them.”  It’s not a question, but I still need the confirmation.  He doesn’t answer me in any case; he just stares at the bottom of his empty glass.

“So that’s how I started working for Mr. Foley full-time.  He set me up in this apartment so I would be close to him, got me a car to get around in, and paid me a shit-ton of money.  He gave me a job, a purpose, and helped me get my revenge.  He gave Brian a job, too, which got him off the streets.  I owe the Foley family everything.”

I stare at my hands as I take in everything Deklan just told me.  All thoughts of my encounter with Sean are gone.  All I can think about now is Deklan and what a horrible childhood he had.  I try to imagine Deklan as a child, hiding under a blanket in a closet as his family is murdered, but the image that comes to my head is too horrible.  I think about him as a teenager, loading cargo containers for Fergus Foley, and that’s a much more relatable picture.

 “So that’s me,” Deklan says as he sits up a little straighter on the couch.  “You now know more about me than anyone alive does.”

I swallow hard as I look at my husband’s blank expression.  Despite his efforts to remain emotionless, I can see the tension in his jaw and the tightness in his shoulders.  I pull myself up on my knees and crawl into his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck and laying my head against his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, Deklan.  I’m sorry that happened to you and your family.  You were so young.  No one should have to go through all that.”

Deklan doesn’t speak.  He coils his arms around me and holds me to his chest and rests his head on top of mine.

“It feels weird,” he says, “telling someone all of that.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“I’m not sure.”  Deklan sighs.  “I don’t think you need to be burdened with my past.  You’ve got your own trauma.”

“I don’t remember it,” I say with a shrug.  “My therapist said I blocked it all out.  Sometimes I dream about it, but I can’t recall the details.”

“I didn’t know you had a therapist.”  Deklan runs his thumb back and forth along my wrist, and I relax with the touch.

“I haven’t seen her since we got married.”

“Do you want to see her?”

“I haven’t given it much thought,” I say.  “I used to see her regularly, but I didn’t think I was getting a lot out of it, and Dad bitched about the cost.”

“Maybe…maybe if you talked to her now, you would remember something.”

“Why would I want to remember any of that?”  I press against him, inhaling his scent.  “It’s over and done with.  Remembering it doesn’t make any difference.”

“Maybe it would,” Deklan says softly.  “Maybe if you remembered it, things would be different.”

“I’m okay with how things are now.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”  I tilt my head up to kiss his cheek.  “I like being here with you.”

“I like it, too.  I thought it would be difficult learning to live with someone after being on my own for so long, but it’s nice having someone to come home to.”

“You just like my cooking.”  I giggle.

“I do like your cooking, and that’s no joke.”  He brushes his lips over mine.  “I also like taking you to my bed at night.  I like watching your eyes roll back in your head when you come.”

“They do not!”

“Oh yeah,” he says, “they do.  That’s how I know I got just the right spot.”

I glare at him, and he kisses me gently.

“It’s more than the cooking and the sex,” he says softly as he runs his hand from my shoulder to my wrist.  He wraps his fingers around my arm and rubs the skin with his thumb.  “I like you just…just being here.  I like talking to you.”

“I like being around you, too.”

Deklan stares at me for a long moment before he speaks again.

“I don’t remember my parents well, but they were good people.  They were good to me, and I loved them.  They loved each other.  I want to remember what that was like, so that I can give that to you, too.”