“Any news on Brodie?” I asked as Ryan sat there stunned.
“He was in surgery most of the night. We don’t know much, the police aren’t giving anything away, but it sounds like he had internal bleeding and swelling to the brain. They were trying to ease the pressure or something, but he went into cardiac arrest when he was under and they couldn’t save him. He fucking died, Em.”
I couldn’t speak. I put my arm around Ryan as he leant forward in his chair and ran his hands over his head in pure exasperation at how shitty this whole situation was. I’d woken up to a nightmare that just kept getting darker and more hopeless.
“Shit. He’s gonna go down for this.” Ryan looked up at Zak and Finn and then hung his head again. “He’s gonna go down for life and it’s all my fucking fault.”
“This is not your fault.” I shook him, so he’d look at me, but he couldn’t.
“It is. If I hadn’t gone in on him like that last night, he wouldn’t have had that fight.”
I looked over at Zak and Finn, willing them to help me out. I couldn’t risk letting Ryan spiral down a dark tunnel into a pit of despair. I might never get him out again.
“She’s right, mate. Brandon was gonna do whatever Brandon wanted to do. The beef with Lockwood and Yates had been brewing for years. Something like this was always gonna happen,” Zak said, and Finn nodded in agreement.
“And if we’re pointing the blame at anyone, I’m as much to blame as you,” I added, holding his hand with both of mine. “I said some pretty shitty things to him myself, remember?” I wasn’t about to let Ryan take the fall for this. I didn’t want him blaming himself. We needed to work together to get through this awful mess. Blame wouldn’t help anyone now. Not Brandon and certainly not Brodie or his family.
“Have you spoken to the police yet?” Ryan snapped his head up, going from dazed to alert in a split second.
“We’ve both given them a statement,” Zak said. “They’ll probably be round here soon to take yours. We told them the truth. We saw him earlier in the evening, but we left him around ten o’clock. We weren’t anywhere near the Murphy’s barn. We saw nothing.”
“Let’s go to the station now and get it over with.” I didn’t feel like waiting around for the police to come to us and I wanted to find out what’d happened to my dad after last night’s arrest. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Ryan agreed and the four of us headed out, leaving Connor to the now stone-cold breakfast.
We both gave separate statements, telling the police exactly what we knew, which was nothing. They questioned us about where Brandon could be, but we had no clue on that either. When we left a few hours later, I headed back to the main desk to ask about my father, telling Ryan to wait for me in the car park. I needed to do this alone.
The last person I expected to find sitting in the reception when I got there was my mother and the woman who my dad had kept as his dirty little secret for so long. The two of them sat in awkward silence, and when mum saw me she jumped up and grabbed me into a hug.
“Em, thank God you came. I’ve been trying to call you all night.”
I highly doubted that. I think I was a long way down on her list of priorities today.
“They’re keeping your dad in. The solicitor is with him now, but he doesn’t think he’ll make bail.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did she really want him out? Was she delusional? Obviously she was, seeing as she was sitting with his mistress like nothing had happened.
“I couldn’t give a fuck, Mum.”
“Language, Emily,” she scolded, and my eyebrows shot up.
“Really, Mum? After everything that’s happened you’re gonna pull me up on saying the word fuck. That’s fucking rich.”
She tutted and rolled her eyes. “I know he’s made some mistakes…”
“Mistakes? He killed my brother, your son. Or did you conveniently forget that part?”
Her eyes misted over, and I felt a twinge of sadness for her. “I know what he did. And no, I’ll never forgive him for that. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss Daniel. I cry every single day. But maybe, with counselling, your dad-”
I cut her off. “My dad doesn’t deserve to walk out of here. He deserves to rot in hell for what he did. He left Danny there. He knew Dan needed help and he did nothing. He didn’t even call an ambulance, Mum. He scurried away like a rat to save his own skin. I hate him. He’s dead to me.” My mother seemed intent on seeing the good in everything when it came to my dad and I didn’t have the energy to argue with her anymore.
I moved past my mum to stand in front of the woman my dad had kept hidden from us. His dirty mistress. “Did you know?”
“I did what I had to do to protect my daughter,” she said holding her nose in the air with fake airs and graces. She needed to cut the bullshit and stop pretending to be a lady and own who she was; my father’s whore.
“A daughter he never acknowledged, and we knew nothing about.” She glanced past me to look at my mum, and that’s when I snapped. I spun round to face her again. “You knew? What the fuck, Mum?”
“I had a feeling.”
“And you stayed with him? Do you enjoy being a doormat? This is messed up, even for you.” I couldn’t believe my own mother had suspected my dad of having an affair, fathering a child, and she had turned a blind eye. No wonder she’d taken to the bottle and become a shell of a woman. I would’ve shook some sense into her, but I think she was beyond help.