Decline (Declan Reede: The Untold Story #1)

by Michelle Irwin

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: DESTINATION

  THE HOURS DRAGGED by as I forced my car through the dark of night up the M1 toward Brisbane as fast as I dared. Despite the weight of sleep on my eyes and the sorrow in my heart, each holding me in a tight embrace, I only stopped for fuel. The only time I slowed was when I came to the stretch of road with a number of fixed speed cameras because the last thing I needed on top of everything else was to have my licence suspended. Not that it mattered anymore. Nothing mattered anymore.

  My heart ached for Alyssa, for Phoebe, and selfishly, even for myself.

  How did I not know?

  My mind was still stuck on the details of the birth certificate, and I was thankful for the lack of cars on the road. The fact that the name, Flynn Olson, was listed under father’s name had pissed me off when I’d first seen it, but even that wasn’t what compelled me forward. It wasn’t the reason I drove my car as fast as I possibly could in the direction of the one place I’d sworn I’d never return to.

  For so many years, I’d felt as if going back would somehow signal failure. Failure to stay away from Alyssa. Failure to live my dreams to the full. Staring at the moonless night, with the darkness completely circling both around the car outside and within my soul, it was crystal fucking clear that the true failure had been not going back. Not fucking being there for Alyssa when she’d needed me the most. She’d said those very words before I’d thrown her out in London and in the messages she left on my answering machine. Now, I’d learned the precise meaning of them, and hated myself for letting her down so fucking badly. After hours of being stuck on the plane, and then squeezing myself into the car, every inch of me hurt. The ache that blossomed on the outside of my body was nothing compared to the agony trapped inside though.

  For the first time since learning about Phoebe, I tried to put myself in Alyssa’s shoes. She’d been left not only without the father of her child, but without her best friend. How did she cope with that, pregnant and alone?

  “Fuck!” I smacked the steering wheel.

  Even though I guessed she was never completely alone, because her family would have supported her, it still had to be tough. It was more than I’d ever had to cope with.

  I am such a fucking arsehole.

  And then to fucking have to cope with . . . with . . .

  My mind shut down, refusing to allow me to think about it. I swiped the tears away again. For the moment, I had to fight the sorrow off. It wasn’t doing shit to help me stay focused on the road. Eventually though, I would have to let the sorrow win—no fucking person in their right mind would be able to cope with shit like this without tears.

  More than ever, I longed to talk to Alyssa, if only to understand what happened and why. More than anything, I had to know if it was my fault. If I could have somehow prevented it by being around. If things would have been different.

  THE SUN was just cresting the horizon when I crossed the border between Queensland and New South Wales. It was climbing higher in the sky as I drove past the Gold Coast and up through Yatala. I couldn’t believe how much everything had changed and yet somehow nothing had. So much of the highway had moved and shifted, stomping through in a mass of concrete and cutting off so many corners and twists to be just one big expanse of road. Yet all the landmarks I remembered remained unchanged. I wondered if I would find the same thing when I returned home—that somehow everything would be different and yet nothing would.

  When I saw the sign for a travel centre along the side of the highway, I pulled in to wash up and change. I really didn’t want to stop until I reached my destination, but it didn’t feel right turning up in my current attire either. I pulled on my team shirt and black pants—it was the nicest outfit I had. It was crushed to buggery having been forced into my suitcase after my failed night out, but it was at least cleaner and more presentable than sweats and a tee.

  After dressing, I splashed my face with cold water. When I glanced up, I saw my reflection. Behind the stubble and the bags under my eyes, I looked haunted. The fact remained that I was.

  My eyes were still filled with unshed tears. I wondered if they would ever leave, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted them to. The birth certificate had shattered my heart into a million pieces and each piece wanted to have its turn at expressing the grief etched into my very being. Meeting the failure and fear in my own gaze, I was sorely tempted to let go then and there. With another splash of water, I beat the tears back into submission. Turning away, I raked a wet hand through my hair and decided I was as presentable as I could hope to be under the circumstances.

  At the attached cafe, I grabbed a coffee and then I was back on the road. My heart pulled me in, dragging me to Browns Plains faster even as I closed the distance. It was almost as if it knew some part of it had been left behind. A fucking bigger piece than I could have ever believed possible.

  Finally, after a little over twelve hours on the road, I was within the borders of my home town. The place where I had spent my entire life, save the last four years. The place that would now forever hold a wretched chunk of my heart.

  Biting my cheek to hold back the tears that threatened, I moved onward with my mission. I was too late to be useful, too late to change anything, but I wouldn’t budge from my course until it had been run.

  I DROVE past the street that would take me to my old house—my parents’ house. My hands started to shake as I edged closer to my destination.

  Too late, and yet also far too soon, I arrived.

  Parking the car, I tried to take a few deep breaths to steady myself. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. Wasn’t sure I could. I knew I needed to though. There was nothing that could stop me from seeing the evidence of my failure. Not after all this time, not with all my regrets laid bare in my soul. For all I knew, he could have been in a hundred other places, but somehow I knew he wouldn’t. He’d be close to my family; Mum would have insisted. It would have been easier for Alyssa that way too.

  Willing my legs to carry me over the final distance, I moved to find my nana’s grave. It was near the back of the cemetery and she’d been buried with plenty of room around her. Mum and Dad had bought a number of plots when Nana had passed, just so that they could all be together in death. My legs were on autopilot as I stepped forward, the line from the birth certificate rolling on repeat through my mind.

  As prepared as I was, my heart shattered when I saw what I’d come in search of.

  The first thing that captured my eye was the cold, white marble cherub. So tiny. No bigger than the size of a newborn baby. The cherub had his head buried in his hands and white wings extended out from each shoulder—reaching up for the sky.

  Carved onto the stone plinth beneath the little angel were two horses. Each the mirror image of the other, they faced inward with their forelegs reared. Each had a name engraved beneath: “Castor,” and “Pollux.”

  Underneath the horses was an inscription that made the line of the birth certificate achingly real. I fell to my knees as I saw the words.

  “No.” The word was barely a breath. I shook my head as my chest tightened. The grief I’d experienced during the drive was nothing compared to the cold chill freezing my body and stopping my heart.

  Even though nothing was different in the world compared to the day before, the little monolith, with the angel perched on top, changed everything. The day before, I hadn’t known about him. I’d been living in a state of oblivion as fucked-up as it had been blissful. I’d had no knowledge of the levels of pain that a heart could endure and yet still continue to beat. Had the keen sting of the agony of truth not been twisted around my body, tightening like a tourniquet, I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible to hurt so much and still be alive.

  The twenty-nine words and two dates on the plinth were tangible proof of just how badly I had let everyone down. Of just how badly Alyssa had needed me when I refused to talk to her.

  A name: Emmanuel Pollux Reede Dawson.

  Two dates: 11
th June and 14th June.

  And an epitaph: An angel opened the book of life and wrote down my baby’s birth. Then she whispered as she closed the book, “too beautiful for earth.”

  They were all that was needed to make everything final.

  They were what marked the grave of my son.

  I fell to the ground with a wail as each of the million pieces of my heart let loose their agony in a simultaneous release, rendering me helpless to the waves of grief that battered upon my soul.

  My fingers raked at the grass, gripping hard and trying to ground me. Trying to hold myself in place—to stop myself from floating away. I crawled over and placed my hand on the cold marble of the tiny angel. I bent toward it and rested my forehead against the top of his petite head, baptizing him with my tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, as I moved to kneel at his side.

  They were words I owed him, Emmanuel, a thousand times over. Words I owed Alyssa and Phoebe.

  “I’ll tell them too,” I promised. “I swear to you, I’ll tell them until they know how fucking sorry I am.”

  Even though I’d never met him, had never even dreamed he’d existed, the agony of having lost my child was unbearable. I had no doubt that my pain was only a fraction of what Alyssa would have suffered.

  Had suffered.

  Alone.

  A sob ripped from me and I fell to the ground again.

  “I’m so, so fucking sorry, Lys,” I murmured, wishing the words would find their way to her ears.

  They will. I’ll tell her. I’ll make her see how truly sorry I am. Somehow.

  My gaze lifted back up to the stone angel. But it won’t fix this.

  All the physical torture in the world would be preferable to the pain ravaging my soul. I would have faced a hundred of Josh’s beatings to avoid the pain. A thousand. Being burned alive at the stake would have been preferable to the fire that consumed my lungs and left me unable to breathe around the ashes in my throat.

  Anything would have been preferable to the absolute agony that twisted inside my stomach as I looked at my son’s tombstone. That one line from Phoebe’s birth certificate, “Siblings: Emmanuel Pollux Reede Dawson 11th June (Dec’d),” would be burned into my brain forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: HOMECOMING

  I HAD NO way of knowing exactly how long I’d sat beside Emmanuel’s grave. All I knew was that it had been midmorning when I’d arrived, and it was almost dark again when I heard footsteps behind me. By then, I was practically curled around the cool marble of the headstone, taking comfort from the pain of the sharp edges digging into my body. It drew my attention away from the fog that had taken residence in my brain.

  Raising my head, I glanced up to see who had arrived. The outline was unfamiliar. Although the guy was tall and muscled, it wasn’t Josh. This guy was a little bit shorter and a little less bulky, but not by much. His jet-black hair was short and spiked. When my eyes adjusted to the low light, I could see that it was the fucker from Queensland Raceway, Flynn. The fucking arsehole who’d claimed paternity of my daughter, and no doubt my son too.

  A small voice inside my head, the one I usually drowned in alcohol, reminded me that he’d claimed that place only because I hadn’t. Because I wouldn’t answer the phone when Alyssa called. Because I’d been so damn scared that she would drag me back into a suburban life—where I would have to settle for a dead-end job rather than doing something I loved—that I didn’t even consider she might have her own shit going on.

  Another sob escaped my lips. I didn’t know how many that was; I’d lost count long ago.

  My tears were long since dried though. Not because I didn’t want to cry or anything like that but because there were just no more tears left inside me. All that remained was an empty husk filled with bitter remorse and empty regret. I wanted nothing more than to fill the void with half a bottle of whatever sleeping pills I could lay my hands on and a bottle of whiskey.

  If I could have, I would’ve just lain on the spot and let the earth fucking swallow me. I knew I couldn’t though, and the reasons were multiple and complex. First and foremost was the fucker still staring at me through eyes narrowed into thin slits.

  When I met his gaze his face brightened just a little. “I hoped I might find you here.”

  I grunted at him, but didn’t move to stand. I wasn’t sure if I even could. Instead, I pulled myself into a seated position and rested my head against the side of the headstone. Flynn sat next to me and passed me a beer. I debated whether it was too fucking morbid to be sucking back on a beer in the middle of a cemetery at twilight, but decided I fucking needed it too much to care. I snatched it from his hand before popping it open and sliding the bottle cap into my pocket. I may have been an arse to even consider drinking at the side of Emmanuel’s grave, but I wasn’t going to desecrate it with litter on top of that.

  “I’m Flynn, by the way.” The fucker held his hand out for me to shake.

  I didn’t take it. “Declan.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He fucking smiled. How the fucker could smile when my world had just crashed into tiny fucking pieces was beyond me. He seemed to understand my thoughts because in my peripheral vision, I saw his face flick to Emmanuel’s tombstone before returning to my direction.

  “Sorry about the fucked-up way you had to find out about this. I just . . .” He sighed and then brushed his hands through his hair. “I knew that if it was left to Alyssa you might not have found out the whole story for a while longer. And I thought it’d be better for her if you knew.”

  “You left me the birth certificate.” I wished my voice would be something other than flat and lifeless. It held no emotion, not even anger or sorrow. I couldn’t even ask it as a question. The words came out as a bland, monotonous statement. My gaze remained focused on the grass in front of me.

  He nodded. “I was in Sydney yesterday to meet Alyssa. I flew down a little earlier, so I paid your house a quick visit.”

  I glanced over at him.

  “She told me about the near misses you two had on the flight back. She managed to get herself bumped to first class just because she didn’t want to talk to you.”

  I nodded. Although I should have been surprised, or shocked, or angry, or well, something, it all just seemed too much to manage. Anything beyond hollow, empty, and filled with agony was too much.

  “She will speak to you again, man, she’s just . . . afraid.”

  She was afraid of me. Again, I supposed I should have felt something about that revelation, but I didn’t. I closed my eyes and exhaled everything that was left in me; it wasn’t a lot. I went to ask a question, but once more it left me as a hard, uncaring statement. “She really suffered.”

  I opened my eyes again to see his reaction. His eyes flicked back to the tombstone again. He nodded. “I think you might be beginning to see just how much. The most fucked up thing is she never said a bad thing about you. In the almost four fucking years that I’ve known her, she has never once said anything negative about you. She’s always made excuses for you, man. Even after what happened in London, she tried to justify the arsehole things you did.”

  “What happened?” I touched the horses on the tombstone. Castor and Pollux. I vaguely wondered what the significance was supposed to be. Considering Emmanuel’s middle name, there had to be one.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, that is Alyssa’s story to tell. I just wanted you to get your arse up here so she could tell it.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “If she ever talks to me again.”

  “I told you, she will . . . eventually.”

  “Why the fuck do you even care?” I could feel some semblance of emotion filtering back into my body. That emotion was anger—which probably wasn’t a good emotion to take out on somebody who could very likely beat me to a pulp. It couldn’t hurt more than the gaping wound torn into my heart though.

  “I care because I care about Alyssa. I care about Phoebe. They’ve been a pretty fucking perm
anent feature in my life for the last few years, and she’s my best friend. I hate that this is fucking hurting her. That you are hurting her. The sooner you two figure this shit out, the sooner she can move on.”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t know what I was denying. I knew what he said was the truth. Hearing him use the words that once belonged to me hurt though—there was a time when I’d been Alyssa’s best friend. Then I’d broken her heart. Then she’d moved on. Or so I’d thought. And now, she really did want to move on but needed to sort shit out with me first.

  “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt you know,” he said as he sucked back deeply on his beer.

  “How did you even know I was here?”

  He laughed. “Browns Plains isn’t exactly known for its prevalence of hundred-thousand-dollar Monaros, especially ones with Sinclair Racing on the back.”

  “But why—”

  He cut me off and stood up. “My house is about fifteen minutes that way”—he pointed to the left—“Alyssa lives that way”—he pointed to the right—“I was driving past and saw the car. I figured it would be you. At least, I hoped it would be.”

  “You live here?”

  “Sure. I moved here from Chermside to be closer to Alyssa after the twins were born. To help her out, you know. It’s what friends do. They’re there for each other. They answer calls and they don’t run away.”

  Was the fucker trying to infuriate me? What was his fucking game? Did he want me to fucking attack him so that he could play the innocent card with Alyssa? I stood up and got in his face. Apparently my emptiness had been completely filled with stupidity and rage. “You just want to fucking get in her pants don’t you, fucker!”

  He rolled his eyes at me but didn’t react in any other way. “First, if I wanted to get in anyone’s pants, they’d be yours and not Alyssa’s.”

  My mouth fell open.