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Adam. Adam Parrish was the destination of this road trip. Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left.
Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.
Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.
“This is fucking weird,” Ronan said, and Adam laughed in a haggard, relieved way. They hugged, hard. This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.”
“Tell me to go to school closer to you and I will,” Adam said in a rush, the words piled together. “Just say it.”
Declan had been afraid of the idea of a Ronan who moved to Cambridge. Now he was afraid of a Ronan who couldn’t.
Ronan’s phone buzzed. He swept it up at once, which meant it could be only one person: Adam Parrish. For a few minutes, he listened to it very hard, and then, in a very quiet, very small, very un-Ronan voice, he said, “Alter idem” and hung up.
So he just texted him: dreamt of you.
“Thank God,” Declan said, retrieving his car keys. “You can if you like,” Matthew said. “But I dressed myself.”
He texted Adam: you up? Adam replied immediately. Yes.
Adam sounded irritable. “I saved your life because I love you and I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do. That doesn’t sound like Bryde.”
“I just want to know,” Adam said finally, in a slightly different voice from before, “that when I come for break, you’ll be there.”
Ronan lifted the gun. “Jesus, Ronan, it’s me!” The kitchen overhead light came on and revealed Adam Parrish, removing a motorcycle helmet. He eyed the gun. “You know how to take a surprise well.”
He said, “Ronan, I know you.”
They hugged, hard. It was shocking to hold him. The truth of him was right there beneath Ronan’s hands, and it still seemed impossible. He smelled like the leather of the thrift store jacket and the woodsmoke he’d ridden through to get here. Things had been the same for so long, and now everything was different, and it was harder to keep up than Ronan had thought. Adam said, “Happy birthday, by the way.” “My birthday’s tomorrow.”
The idea of Adam Parrish on a motorcycle was more than enough birthday present for Ronan; he was senselessly turned on. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said, “What the fuck.” Normally this was his job, to be impulsive, to be wasteful of time, to visibly need. “What the fuck.”
They hugged again, merrily, waltzing messily in the kitchen, and kissed, merrily, waltzing more. “What do you want to do with your three hours?” Ronan asked. Adam peered around the kitchen. He always looked at home in it; it was all the same colors as him, washed out and faded and comfortable. “I’m starving. I need to eat. I need to take off your clothes. But first, I want to look at Bryde.”
Again, just as when Ronan had been holding the gun on Adam, there was no distress, no anger. Adam would never judge someone else for their skepticism. His default setting was mistrust.
“Parrish,” Ronan snarled. “You aren’t allowed—” He pulled Adam up and held him close, feeling for breath, for pulse. Nothing, nothing. The seconds tilted by. Adam’s body didn’t breathe. Adam’s mind wheeled, untethered, through infinite dreamspace. Wherever it was, it didn’t recall Adam Parrish, Harvard student; Adam Parrish, Henrietta-born; Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch’s lover.
Maybe someone at his warehouse job. Adam picked up skills like other people picked up clothing or groceries. He was always in the market.
“Break will be here in just a few days,” Adam said. He kissed Ronan’s cheek, lightly, and then Ronan’s mouth. “I’m coming back. Be here for me.”
“This painting isn’t of Aurora,” Declan said. “It’s of Mór Ó Corra, and she is my mother.”
“Always the clever one,” the man said. He had a bit of an Irish accent, mostly on the Rs. “Slow to trust. That’s all right. I won’t ask you for trust. I might look like your dad, but I don’t offer things I can’t give.”
Declan physically flinched. The man saw it, looked sorry. “I’m sorry, boy-o. I know I’m not a father to you, but you have to know that you’re my kids to me. I remember you when you were this tall.” Declan finally said, “You’re a copy.”
“Maybe my face. But it’s been nearly two decades; I’ve got different stories than Niall Lynch. But this head still loves you like you were mine. It’s been watching when it can. And you can’t get tied up in this; it’ll be the end of you. They’ll use him till you don’t recognize him.”
“And it has to be. Please go. It’d break my heart and not much breaks it anymore.”
Declan didn’t draw back, and so the man stepped forward and put his arms around Declan’s neck. He hugged him, the simple, complete hug of a parent hugging a son, hand on the back of his neck, cheek rested against the back of his head.
“I’m proud of you,” he told Declan. Her dauntless Declan. “Thanks for meeting us,” Jordan said, because it felt like someone ought to say it. The man leaned and picked up his bag. “Stay alive.”
“If you made this place,” Hennessy said, “why didn’t you make it safer for you?” He reached up to run his fingers along a low-hanging branch. “I had another forest before Lindenmere.” He looked like he was going to confess something, but in the end, he just said, “Bad things happened to it. I made it too safe, because I was a chickenshit. Made it more ordinary. So it had to rely on me to keep it safe and—” He did not finish this, but he did not have to.
When he brought her the coffee, she spread her knees so that he could stand close to her where she sat on the counter, effortlessly sensual, grinning lazily at him. She gestured with the mug around his dining room, toward the visible living area. “Why’d you do this? What a walking tragedy.” Declan said, “It’s stylish and contemporary.” “It’s invisible,” she said. She put a hand under his sweater. “You can’t love this stuff.” “It’s ideal for entertaining.”
It was an attic crawl space, only tall enough to stand at its very tallest point. He’d put a shabby antique rug down on the floor and covered the unfinished plywood on the slanted ceiling with prints. Declan leaned back to plug in an enormous sculptural stainless steel lamp in the shape of a violent, art deco angel. She was as tall as Jordan.
“Hennessy,” Ronan said, “please don’t let me be the only one.” This was the first gap she’d ever heard in Ronan’s armor.
Ronan saw that they were dogs, or hounds, or wolves. They were sooty, dead black, all mingling into each other, less like distinct animals and more like smoke billowing. Their eyes gleamed white-orange, and when they panted, their mouths glowed and revealed the brilliant furnaces inside each of them.
The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. In a way, the Lynch brothers had always been the most important and truest definition of the Lynch family. Niall was often gone, and Aurora was present but amorphous. Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling.
“Don’t tell me not to chase Bryde,” Ronan said. “Don’t tell me to keep my head down.” Everything in Declan wanted to, though. The world could always be broken more. As long as his brothers were alive, there was always worse that could happen.
