Page 43

The Final Chapter.

I ’ve walked these halls countless times, covered in blood, battered and bruised at times, too. But even those times would have hurt less than this one. The manor feels different, not the walls or the heavy doors, but the silence that hangs heavier than it did all those years ago. A still, quiet desperation mismatched in the space with twinkling lights and the scent of cinnamon. Even the tree in the corner of the living space, perfectly trimmed, might as well have been a mirror looking into a life we could never return to.

I stand here on the threshold, unable to tear my gaze from the tree, the table set for dinner, everything looking like usual, to feel like how it did before she began to lose herself to the disease. Before life began to shred the last fucking pieces of what we want to pretend we could still be.

I hated it. The pretending. It was harder than being stabbed or shot. Harder than I ever imagined it to be.

“Raf?” Nicholas’s voice echoes from the empty hallway, breaking the silence. I turn to face him, standing there, his posture stiff, his usual light-hearted mask slipping.

“Yeah?” I say, not bothering to hide the exhaustion in my voice.

“She needs you, brother.” His gaze is distant, despondent like it was years ago when he struggled with himself. The truth was there: no one at Falcon’s Keep was the same anymore. But tonight isn’t about us, it’s about her.

Forcing my feet to move, I make it up the stairs and toward the right wing, down the hall and to our bedroom. I know she needs this. She wants to see us all together again before her memory is stolen from her.

But I don’t know which one to agonise over, the fact that this is now a reality she will forget or that I will watch it happen.

Pushing past the door, I see her sitting in her armchair by our large window overlooking Falcon’s Keep, an eerily similar sight. She rests her feet on a small round seat, staring out of the glass with her laptop in her hand, the soft light from the sunset casting a glow over her beautiful features. Her gaze flickers to me as I step closer, and she smiles.

“Raf,” she whispers. “I’m so glad everyone could make it.”

By everyone, she means my brothers, Ezra, Nicholas, and Jackson. Her brothers have been here since her diagnosis. It’s what she wanted and without a thought, they all came.

“Just like you wanted.” My voice cracks, my heart in my throat. There’s nothing I can say to make this better. There’s no fixing this, as much as it kills me to admit.

There’s no curing Alzheimer’s.

“Great,” she says through the visible sadness in her eyes. “I just need another minute.” Her smile falters, sending a knife through my stomach as I close the door behind me.

We all knew things weren’t ever going to be the same. There was no need for an explanation. We all saw it and felt it.

The slow erosion of the woman we all love. The way she would ask the same question twice and how she would trail off mid-sentence, forgetting what the end of it was. As I make my way down the stairs, the living room is now full of voices, but all I seem to focus on is the soft crackle of the fireplace.

“ Papà ?” Stella’s voice breaks me out of my trance, a mirror of her mother at a younger age.

“She’ll be down in a minute.” I force a smile and guide her into the lounge room, Ezra’s son and daughter on their phones on the opposite side, waiting to unwrap their gifts, unaware of the heaviness in the air.

Footsteps enter the room and everyone continues as I watch her take a seat between Aries and Darcy. It’s a version of normal that doesn’t feel normal at all anymore. But to Nera, it didn’t matter that we were all afraid of the future because, for her, she needed this. One fucking night where we weren’t shipping drugs into the sea, a night where we could all be a family.

Before the secrets and lies.

Before the violence and pain.

And for one night, we will be.

For her.

THE END.