“I’ve instructed him to drop a lot of hints about how much money he’s packing. A friendly idiot with a lot of millions to throw around… of course they’ll listen for almost as long as he wants to talk.”
“You have a plan in every situation,” I marvelled. “Okay, Devin… tell me this truth you were too afraid to reveal before.”
He gave me a sharp look. “I did not think it was the right time to share everything. You were struggling to cope with the world outside the home you’d always known, and…” He began to fidget with the collar of his jacket. “I did not consider myself ready to reveal everything.”
I stiffened as his hands moved lower, and began to work on his belt buckle. Suddenly, I was having a terrible flashback to the encounter with the man who had tried to assault me, the way he had looked as he revealed what Devin had done to him. A strikingly brutal punishment from a man who seemed to believe in second chances.
When his hands swivelled to pull down his suit pants on his left side, I let out a breath I had been all too aware I was holding.
The mark, when revealed, was a little below his hipbone, and though it was slightly misshapen and blurred, like it had been stamped down twice, I recognised it. The same mark was carved into a plaque that sat on our mantel at home, on my parents’ letterhead. I had a necklace with the symbol turned into a charm that hung off it, but I didn’t like gold so it had slowly sifted its way to the bottom of my box of trinkets.
I understood now what had been on the edge of my understanding some days earlier: it was a mark for my family like the marks Devin had for each side of his family, though somehow I’d never put the pieces together to see it that way. I always assumed it was some symbol my parents had found and tried to adopt into their lives, the way they tried to take on other things they thought made them appear trendy. It was stupid and ugly anyway: a hypnotic swirl in a circle,
divided by arcs sweeping from near the centre to the edge. Like a symbolic depiction of a fan. If we’d had some sort of ‘Mahoney symbol’, designed only for us, I would have expected my parents to induct me into it so I knew what I was looking at.
These thoughts went through my head as I stared at the scar Devin had been so careful to not let me see or touch. But I couldn’t wrap my head around what all of this signified.
“My adolescence was in some ways a polar opposite to yours,” Devin said. “I had many cousins, and once I got to an age where I could be trusted to follow instructions, they were always trying to get me in on their schemes. I wasn’t old enough to question some of the things they had me do, of course, so I was very useful to them. And one day they had me along on this scheme they were running where they… I honestly can’t remember the details, but there’d been some conflict between the Mahoneys and some other family, not a tremendous surprise given who they are, and my cousins were keen to sow some chaos by getting the lot of them even more riled up at one another.”
I wondered if this was the first thing Devin had ever forgotten.
“I was ten,” Devin said. “Mahoney figured out some of what was up—it might have been the only time he ever had a really good clue—and when my cousins sent me to scout things out, he was waiting for me. Grabbed me and dragged me into the house. I don’t think it was the same house that you live in now, it was in a more rural area like this. You were there, a baby practically.”
This was an unexpected turn to the story. I stared very hard at Devin, trying to bring back any part of that long-ago first meeting. But if he had been ten then I would have been no more than four years old, and the more I focused on the idea the less confident I was that I knew anything.
The house he mentioned, on the other hand… “We lived up north for a while, when I was younger. Quite a long way from here. I barely remember that house though, I don’t think it’s still in the family.”
Devin nodded. “Some of my cousins live up that way, they would pick me up to stay with them knowing it was too hard for my mother to keep track of what I was getting up to. She didn’t like me being around them at all, but my father said it was important for me to be surrounded by male role models. It didn’t matter so much to him whether they were responsible or not… they just had to be a little older than me. So they were responsible for me that day, but they had no sense of responsibility, so once they saw what had happened to me, they retreated to a safe distance. I was kicking, struggling; Mahoney kept saying over and over he’d show me what I would get if I kept trying to cross him like that. I had no idea what he was even talking about of course, I had only the slightest clue about the whole project. And I think he knew that too—I think he had to see a kid like me couldn’t have masterminded this.”
I wanted to beg him to stop, but the scar on his leg glared me down, keeping me silent.
“I think your mother took you out of the room, complaining it wouldn’t be good for you to see, but she came back quickly to watch. I nearly slipped out of his hands entirely in the distraction, he was getting something together I could see in flashes and all I knew was I didn’t like it. He called her in to help and they were fighting about it while he tried to get me in position.”
“Devin, you don’t—”
“He put his little brand on my leg, right there, because it was the part that was most convenient when he was ready. He didn’t get long to do that either, as soon as it touched me I was fighting ten times harder, so they let me go fast after he’d done enough and I was all the way back to where my cousins were hiding before I realised what had happened, really processed the pain. They were trying to get me into their car but I was starting to go a bit mental, I thought I still needed to fight. They just got the hell out of there at first, as far away as they could, rather than seeing what state I was in… by the time I got to a doctor, I was feverish, the wound was a mess. Lucky I didn’t get infected, so they say.”
A crazy story: I had been there when he was brutalised by my parents. Had been within earshot of his screams. I could never have done anything but believe him, though. It was all laid out before me now: the scar he knew I would recognise, the—
In my horror I asked questions that were not the ones I really needed answers to. “I saw what you did to that man who tried to hurt me, Devin. My parents, they hired him to kidnap me back.” The most intense display of horror I had ever seen on his face. “He didn’t hurt me, but he wanted to show me what you’d done. You punished him the way—after—”
“It is the greatest display of cruelty I can think of,” said Devin, “so I reserve it for people whose acts are so lacking in moral depth they deserve nothing better.”
I nodded. It was a better answer than I had ever expected.
“I just can’t believe they did that to you, a child… They must have made a mistake in the heat of things.”
“There was no mistake, Julia. They made that clear to me as I tried to escape. Not too young to learn what happens to little shits who poke their nose in, was something like what he said.”
Daddy was he to Devin: someone he’d been deeply harmed by at an age when it really mattered. It was a horrible thought, and I’d never really believed my father was a ‘good’ man. “No wonder your mother can’t stand me.”
Devin adjusted his pants back into place and began to redo his belt with his chin up high as if to pretend he didn’t know his hands were shaking. “Actually, it has nothing to do with it. She would have given you more of a chance if you’d crawled into the fray as a preschooler and helped them to hold me down. It pisses her off to this day that they were able to do that to me—that I let them do it. I was the one most at fault, in her eyes.”
My first instinct was to look away, but I made a point of turning my face back, meeting his eyes. He deserved to see that I knew what it was like, what it meant. “These parents, Devin. Why do we allow them to continue to have this grip on our lives?”
Devin put his hand out and took gentle hold of my cheek. “If we were ordinary people, Julia, we would have discarded them from our lives already. But it can’t be like that for those of us who were born on this slightly darker path. We cannot afford to burn anyone who might be even slightly more inclined to act in our favour.”
It might have been the first time he was telling me something meaningful about the life I needed to occupy without trying to antagonise me at the same time. I was honest in my response, but I tried to be delicate, too. “It sounds like too much.”