And before I know it, I’m driving alone down the road that takes me to Stone City. My bag’s on the seat beside me. Eve’s diary’s in there.
I can’t get it out of my mind. I miss my friend so badly, it’s a gnawing ache inside. It isn’t fair that she’s gone. It isn’t fair she doesn’t get to see her baby grow up or see what a wonderful father Carson is. I don’t realize I’m crying until my eyes are blurry.
I pull over to the side of the road. Halfway between Stone City and Ballyhock lie green pastures and farmland, dotted with white fluffy sheep, lined with rickety, handmade fences.
I wipe my eyes. I take a breath and hold it, nervous about what I’m going to do. What I have to do. It isn’t wrong, reading the private thoughts of someone who’s no longer here, is it?
I want to hear her voice again.
With trembling fingers, I take the diary out of my bag. I turn the first page gingerly.We found out today that we’re expecting a baby. Well. A second time.I blink in surprise. She was pregnant before? The entry goes on.I hope this time I can carry the baby to term.I close my eyes. Oh, Eve. I didn’t know.I hope Carson never finds this, and if he does, it means I’m gone. I don’t ever want him to know what I’ve done while I’m still here. Betrayal to the brotherhood of his Clan would be the deepest of betrayals, second only to an affair. Maybe even equal.Betrayal? My mind is swirling, spinning. There’s a heat in my chest I can’t quench, a burning in my eyes. It feels like someone’s tightening a rope around my midsection. But still, I read on.I have to tell someone, even if it’s the blank pages of a book.
It began with blackmail. Cian O’Gregor knows who I am. He knew my mum and knew that I was raised in the back of a brothel. My mum did what she could. She raised me to read and write, even though I didn’t go to school as a child. I was an awkward teen, never having been in a school environment. I kept to myself. It was easier to have no friends than to try to pretend to be like the others. Mum gave me books upon books and orchestrated my education. But I knew who she was. I knew how she got her money. And I knew that the track lines on her arms that she told me were scars weren’t old. She serviced the O’Gregor men, and she did it for drugs.
I shake my head. I had no idea. No idea. I read on and on. I read about her mother’s prostitution, Eve’s growing up in the rented room in the back of the brothel. How Eve would go for walks or out with friends to clear her mind when her mother was “working,” how she came to know what her mother did for work. And how the year she was ready to graduate, she found her mother’s dead body. Killed by overdose.
The pages of this book are so sad, so tragic, my heart feels as if it’s being torn into a million pieces. I hate this for her. I hate this for me. A part of me would have preferred to stay ignorant of this. So I could have remembered my friend as the innocent she was.And then there was Carson.She writes about meeting him. One night in a pub, they shared a drink. It was an immediate connection, immediate attraction. She didn’t know then he was a man of the Clan. He didn’t know she was born and raised in Stone City, one of the most run-down, impoverished cities in all of Ireland. But they made it work. They moved off-site near the McCarthy family mansion. He kept his work separate from his personal life, and she did the same. They fell in love with each other, both ignorant of the fabric that wove their pasts together.
She begins to write about more, about the Clan, about Clan expectations and norms. She writes about the Clan’s battles at Stone City. About Nolan and Sheena, and how she was interested in their story because Sheena was from Stone City as well.
I read on until I see one entry that hits me with the force of a thunderclap.
I read the line over and over, unsure of what I’m seeing.
Carson told me tonight. That they had a battle at the O’Gregors, in Stone City. And how the O’Gregors told them the McCarthy Clan has a spy in their midst.
I close my eyes. A spy? Dear God.
A spy?
The Clan is everything to me. My family, my friends. My whole world.
This can’t be.
Were they lying?
I put the diary away. I’ll read more later. It’s too much right now, trying to understand all this, to piece it altogether. I have to get out of my head.