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After Dino was born, my mother didn’t leave her room for almost half a year. I was the one who stepped in to hold my crying brother. Who tried to get my mom to pay attention to us.
I was four.
Four, holding my infant brother, who screamed like a motherfucker.
So seeing Roisin, day after day, refuse to get up, it fucking hurt.
That’s why. The childhood trauma. No other reason.
The water in the spring sloshes slightly, bringing me back to reality. Roisin nods. “Well, I guess I can accept that.”
“You don’t have an option,” I growl. “I wanted you to feel better. So feel better.”
“You do know that you don’t have the ability to control my feelings, right?”
I snort. “I can’t control them, but I can be the reason they change.”
“That sounds manipulative, Marco.”
I pause. “What?”
Roisin sighs. She sips the champagne. “Do you want my feelings to change because you’re worried about me, or because me having feelings makes you feel uncomfortable?”
I genuinely do not know how to answer that question.
Roisin nods. “That’s what I thought. Because if you care about me, and you are trying to cheer me up because you do, it’s sweet. But if you’re trying to make me feel better becauseyou can’t handle someone else’s feelings, and it makes you feel out of control, that’s enmeshment and you should probably see someone for it.”
“Enmeshment?”
She nods. “Poor emotional boundaries. Someone who was brought up to take care of theirs, their parents, might be enmeshed. Families that lacked distinctions between parents and children. That kind of thing.”
“How do you know this, Dr. Phil?”
She laughs. “I went to therapy, dummy. For years. Because I lived with Kieran MacAntyre, and I fucking needed therapy to get past that.”
I don’t have a response to that.
She sighs. “You know, Kieran told me that he knew where my mom was. And that he’d kill her if I tried to leave to find her.”
The water makes a slight noise as I shuffle around. “What?”
“My dad didn’t know where my mom was. Probably because he didn’t think that far in the future. I think it bothered him. He’d made this bargain with her, she dropped me off with him, collected her payday, and was gone. Kieran told me that if I left to try and find her, he’d kill her.”
“Do you think he knew?”
She barks out a laugh. “No. I think Kieran was just cruel. I think he liked holding his new little sister in some kind of hold. I think he wanted to torture me.”
I growl, thinking of how terrible Kieran was to her. I’d kill that fucker again, if I could.
Then, I tilt my head and study her. “How did you come to live with your father and Kieran?”
She sighs. “When I was about ten, my mum told me it was time to finally meet my dad. I was thrilled. We lived in Dublin, so heading out to the manor house was basically the longest trip I’d ever taken. When we got there, my dad just… nodded. Like I was acceptable. He and my mum went to talk, and Kieran appeared. He was nice, I guess, at first. He’s so much older than me, he seemed like a god. He gave me candy and kept me in the kitchen. My mum and I slept in what would become my room. When I woke up, she was gone. And I stayed there.”
Jesus. “That’s awful, Roisin.”
She shakes her head. Little drops of water cascade out from her hair, and I watch them splatter into the water around us. “I mean it makes a whole lot of sense now. I really thought that when my mum left, she’d run away. That somehow she’d escaped, or she was just going to come back for me later. When I got older, I wondered if Kieran or my dad had killed her that night. But this was the whole reason I became an Interpol officer. I thought that maybe she’d made it to safety. That she was trying to find me too, and she was just in hiding somewhere. Biding her time until it was time for her to find me. So I thought I’d make it easier, and join the police, so that I could find her first,” Roisin murmurs.
“No wonder you’re so fucked up over this.”