I don’t add that most of the gossip in Tolka relates to me.

“But your grandfather knows,” she persists. “Why would he keep that from me?”

“To protect you?” I pick up a travel magazine and pretend to flip through it.

In my head, there are red sirens blaring everywhere. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. Mini Mals are running around, yanking their hair out.

She’s onto us! Somebody do something!

“I’m going to ask him.” She taps her knee with her fingers, munching on her lip.

“You do that.”

She stares at me skeptically. I think she knows I know, and it’s killing me not to be completely honest with her. I wish I could telepathize to her that I will explain, soon. That there are stages. That she doesn’t know everything about me yet, and before she makes up her mind, she needs to really understand.

We all pitied the American girl with the backpack and the camera and the broken dream.

I screwed her and kissed her and promised her marriage and took all her secrets, while not giving her the only truth she ever cared about and came all the way to Ireland for.

Rory clamps her mouth shut, then opens it again.

“You won’t tell me whose birthday it was, and you refuse to tell me about the rumors surrounding me. You won’t talk about Kath’s death. Can you at least show me a song so I can take a picture of it for my project? It’s coming together well, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

I know it must be a nightmare for her to live in Tolka.

People either hate her for being the girl Kathleen was forsaken for or pity her for being the girl who made that thing with Glen happen. Between me being a massive, purple dick and Richards being Richards, Rory—the only person who takes this project seriously—is helpless.

I lift my arse from the seat and take my notebook out of my back pocket, handing it to her. She opens it to a random page, her green eyes gliding over the text, line by line, as she moves her lips in the shape of the words.

 

He calls you love.

I call you darlin’.

You say you’re happy.

I think you’re drowning.

We promised each other so many things.

Now I don’t even think you know what they mean.

 

Call the press.

You’re a mess.

You make me so fucking depressed.

Trying to make everything right, shiny, pretty, and tight.

So tired of waiting for you to see the light.

 

He calls you love.

I call you darlin’.

You say you’re safe.

I think you’re spiraling.

If you want the truth, kiss me hard.

Or at the very least, lower your guard.

 

She gives it back to me and looks away to the window. The sky is wooly and gray.

“I’ll find my truth, Mal. I will.” She ignores the words she just read.

My chest tightens. I seriously underestimated Shiny Boyfriend’s grip on her. Or maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s the idea of him. The idea of me. Maybe dating an idiot who spent the last decade making a living writing hate songs about her doesn’t sound too hot.

We look in opposite directions.

“My truth shouldn’t be conditional,” she whispers.

I take a deep breath. “Neither should your promise.”

By the time we land in Crete, Richards is back from Spinalonga and throwing a party in his presidential suite. Earlier, he tweeted that he was in town, and a bunch of starfuckers brought down the hotel’s glass doors, leaving them shattered on the lobby floor. Then Richards sent some of his staff out to pick up the hottest groupies and invite them up to his suite, making them dispose of their phones at the entrance.

Rory and I walk in on him getting a blow job from a lass while fingering her friend’s arse. Which, naturally, makes Rory roll her eyes and squeeze hand sanitizer into her palm, passing it over to me. I shake my head.

“Not gonna wash my hands until the next time they’re on you.”

“You mean, never?” she asks dryly.

I give her a little smile. Sometimes we say things because they sound right. That’s what she’s doing right now. I think we both know there will be a second time, and soon.

She shivers, and not from the cold, because she hasn’t been particularly cold since she came to Ireland—something I hope she notices. Knowing full well that Richards’ cooperation is what my entire Rory Project depends on, I saunter in, grip the jerk’s shoulder, and yank him from his blow job. The girl is still bobbing her head with an O-shaped mouth when I shove Richards onto the plush leather sofa by the wall, crowding him with my arms crossed over my chest.

“Party’s over. We’re getting back to work.” I kick the sole of his sliders.

He mimics my movements, knotting his arms together, pouting. “Ever been to Thailand, Mal?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well, I just came back, and let me tell you, it’s a magical place. I had a lot of time to think about shit.”

He was in Thailand exactly twenty minutes, during which he rode an elephant, made an embarrassing video, and decided to visit Greece on a whim.

“I broke up with my girlfriend—who is a duchess, by the way—and now I’m all about finding the one.”

“Do you think you’re going to find her in a stranger’s asshole?” I ask evenly.

Rory nearly coughs out a lung behind me, a combination of laughter and horror.

“Look,” Richards rolls his pretty-boy, bluest-blue eyes, “you got this writing-songs part under control. You told me yourself that the songs are all done and read—”

This time I cut him off by kicking him in the shin before he’s able to do some serious damage. He shuts up.

“Your boss paid you extra to do this documentary project,” I remind him. “He paid me. He paid Rory. You’re screwing up her work, too. You can burn through money and blow and women all you want after we’re done with this. You have all the time in the world.”

He laughs bitterly. “No one has all the time in the world.”

I don’t want to start explaining figures of speech to him. He is not my spawn. So I just look at him, waiting.

“Anyway, Ireland depresses me,” he whines, throwing an arm over his face like a teenage girl who just found out her crush likes the cock, too. “You live in the middle of fucking nowhere, dude. No offense, but you actually do. It’s, like, scientific.”

“Do you know what the word science means?” I ask, just as Rory slides into the conversation diplomatically.

“If we put a good dent in the project, we can all go somewhere else for a while.” She claps her hands together and appears by my side. “A vacation.”

“Really?” Richards drops his arm, his eyes lighting up.

This feels a lot like we’re his parents, promising him a trip to Disneyland if he makes good grades. Only there’s no way we could conceive someone like him, because I’ve met goats more sophisticated than this man.

I hitch one shoulder up, not correcting Rory’s soon-to-be-broken promise.

Richards frowns. “Sex Slave chick needs to give it to me in writing. I don’t want her to run off with her boyfriend and fuck it up for us.”