Page 101 of The Unlikely Spare

I sink onto the sofa, suddenly exhausted by it all.

“Do you still feel guilty?” I ask. “About not being there when it happened?”

His gaze is startlingly direct. “Every day.”

His honesty rather knocks me for six. There’s no careful calculation of how much to reveal. Just the truth, bare and unvarnished.

Is this what has attracted me to Eoin, right from the start? He’s straightforward, upfront, honest. No false charm, just the truth as he sees it, delivered with an Irish bluntness.

“I feel guilty that I’m here now, halfway around the world, while he’s back in Belfast,” he continues. He moves to sit in the chair across from me, but seems to reconsider at the last moment, choosing instead to sit on the sofa. Not quite touching distance, but definitely closer than professionally appropriate. “I feel guilty that I have a career that takes me away from him, even though he insists he doesn’t need looking after.”

“Does he? Need looking after?”

Eoin’s lips twist in a complicated smile. “Not in the way I think. He’s more capable than anyone I know.”

Seeing the pride radiating from him causes a flash of jealousy to shoot through me.

What would it be like to have a man as capable as Eoin proud of you?

“But I still worry,” he continues. His hand rests on the sofa between us, close enough to touch if I shifted slightly. “It’s hard to break the habit of feeling responsible for someone.”

“I can imagine,” I say.

Eoin meets my gaze again. “Did you feel that way about your sister?”

The question lands like I’m the recipient of a particularly brutal rugby tackle. Amelia. The sister who colluded with Welsh nationalist terrorists to attempt to kill our brother Callum.

I don’t know what Eoin sees in my face because his brows come together.

“Forget I asked. It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s…” My hand finds my signet ring, twisting it around my finger. “It’s just that I try not to think about her too much. Because it drove me crazy after it happened, wondering if I could have…helped somehow before it went so far. And it makes me wonder if you can ever truly know anyone.”

Amelia’s betrayal eviscerated me more than I’ve ever expressed to anyone. Callum was the only other person who understood, but it wasn’t quite the same for him. He’d grown up across the Atlantic Ocean from Amelia. He hadn’t been there when Amelia and I had conspired to sneak extra puddings from the kitchen at Balmoral, when she’d covered for me missing curfew.

When our father died, Amelia had been almost three, and I’d been five. I still remember her hand clutching mine when we’d been forced to stand with our mother on St George’s chapel steps reviewing condolence flowers while photographers circled like vultures.

That image of us—two tiny figures in black holding hands against the vast stone building—became the defining shot of a nation’s collective grief.

Although the cameras missed how Amelia’s fingernails had drawn blood from my palm.

“You couldn’t have known what would happen,” Eoin says.

“Couldn’t I? We grew up together. How did I miss that my own sister contained so much cunning and ambition that she was prepared to participate in a murder plot against our brother?”

Eoin’s hand moves as if he might reach for me, then stops. Instead, he shifts closer, our knees almost touching.

“People can hide a lot, even from those closest to them.”

“Is that meant to be reassuring?” A bitter laugh escapes me. “Because it rather confirms my point about never really knowing anyone.”

“No,” he says quietly. “It just means people are complicated. The sister you knew growing up is still real. What came after doesn’t erase that. People can be many things. Most of us are.”

“So, we’re back to everyone containing multitudes? Marvelous. Though some people’s multitudes are rather more homicidal than others. I don’t recall Whitman mentioning that particular caveat.”

Eoin fights a smile now, but his eyes betray him, crinkling at the corners. I find myself leaning toward him unconsciously.

Because it appears that is my spectacular weakness: Eoin O’Connell happy.