Off the Hook (12 page)

“When you what?” Kate asked, her soft voice like a cushion for Liam’s memory.

“It’s stupid,” he said. “I’d made this stupid cake for Ro, but as soon as I pulled it out of the oven, the old man took it and hurled it off the end of the dock, so there was no cake, no gift, not even a goddamn balloon.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so Ro figured, what the hell, he was nineteen, which made him legal, so he decided he’d have his own celebration.” Liam held out his hands, palms up. “Wasn’t like he’d never had a drink before, but the old man was usually too drunk to notice, so Ro took a mickey of rum out of Da’s stash and came down here.”

He flicked his gaze toward her just as she lifted her free hand to her mouth.

“What happened?” she asked, barely over a whisper. “Did your dad find out?”

“Oh yeah, he found out. If it’d been a beer or two, he might not have noticed they were gone, but when it came to his rum, he noticed. Soon as I heard him yell, I hightailed it down here to warn Ro, but he was pretty wasted by then and Da must’ve seen me leave the lodge, because he came ripping in here before I could get Ro out. As soon as he opened that door, Da started swinging, and when I tried to stop him, he came at me, too.”

“Oh my God.”

The memory, so vivid, so strong, made Liam’s stomach roll exactly like it had that night, followed by the same sense of dread that washed over him when Da came at him.

“We’d learned pretty early how to protect ourselves, but we never took a swing at the old man, because drunk or not, he was all we had and we knew it.” Liam cleared his throat hard as the image of his sixteen-year-old self blazed to life in his mind. “Anyway, he had me pinned in that corner over there and I guess I was crying and what all, and the next thing I knew, Ro hit him.”

Kate stared at him with huge eyes.

“It was only one punch, but it caught Da off guard. He went down hard and smacked the side of his head on this.”

Liam tapped his fingers against the edge of the metal sink, making Kate gasp.

“The cut wasn’t deep,” he said quietly. “But it bled like a stuck pig and knocked him senseless for a while.”

“What did you do?” She set the ice on the small square table but left her hand resting on top of it.

Liam dragged the toe of his boot across the spot on the floor where he’d spent so many hours scrubbing up the bloodstain.

“We put him in one of the wheelbarrows and huffed him up to the lodge, stitched him as best we could, and then, first thing the next morning, Ro was gone.” Liam chewed his bottom lip for a long few seconds before finishing. “Was a long time before he ever came back, too, and in all the years since, he’s never once set foot in this damn shack again.”

He’d never had another drink, either.

“Oh my God, Liam.” She took a step toward him, hand outstretched, then stopped, stepped back again, and crossed her arms. “Did you ever tell your mother what was going on?”

Liam shook his head slowly. “I haven’t talked to her since the day she left.”

“But that was like twenty years ago,” she said, her voice hushed with shock. “Surely she must have—”

Liam was still shaking his head.

“But if she’d known what was going on, maybe she could have helped.”

“She did help,” he said. “By leaving, she helped us learn how to take care of ourselves.”

It looked as if Kate wanted to say something else, but then she changed tack and nodded.

“And you think by tearing this shack down and building a new one, it’ll help Ronan when he’s here.”

“It’ll help both of us.” Swallowing hard, Liam ran his fingers along the sharp edge of the sink. “If I’d gotten to Ro faster or if I hadn’t led the old man down here, we wouldn’t have been trapped inside when he showed up. The only reason Ro took that swing at him was to protect me.”

The look on Kate’s face—the horror, the pity—was exactly why he’d never told anyone else what happened. But just like that, her horror turned to something else. Anger?

“And then he left you here? How was that protecting you?”

Liam couldn’t do anything but shrug. “If I were Ronan in that situation, I’d have done the exact same thing.”

“Who else was here with you?”

“No one. He only got ugly-drunk in the off-season, when the guests and staff had all left. Things were usually pretty good when guests were here.”

Kate stood there shaking her head. “And after all that, Finn won’t help you rebuild this thing? What the hell’s wrong with him?”

“He doesn’t know.” When Kate’s mouth opened, Liam shrugged again. “He was away on a school trip when it happened, and as far as I know, no one ever told him.”

Truth was, they probably would have found a way to keep it from Finn even if he had been home. Of the three of them, he was hit the hardest when Ma left, so from then on, Liam and Ronan had taken it upon themselves to shield him from as much of Da’s shit as they could.

Da had woken up the next morning with no memory of how he wound up with four stitches in the side of his head, so Liam had given him a half-truth: He told him he’d fallen in the fish shack and cut his head.

Funny thing was, Da never asked where Ronan was. Not once. And when Finn asked, Liam couldn’t come up with anything other than “He just left.”

By the look on Kate’s face, it was clear she was still trying to wrap her brain around all of it, but after a second she inhaled slowly, straightened her shoulders, and nodded.

“Okay, then. What do you need me to do?”

—

The entire story played over and over in Kate’s mind as she lay in bed later that night. She’d never met Jimmy O’Donnell but she’d seen the pictures hanging in the office, and he was clearly no lightweight.

It made her sick to her stomach to think of him going after his boys that way, of giving them no other choice but to fight back the way they had. They must have been terrified being out here alone with him. And what the hell was wrong with their mother that she’d just walk away from her own children?

Kate hadn’t said anything about it down in the fish shack, but she wondered if Liam realized he’d done exactly what his mother did when he’d walked away from Kate. The circumstances might have been different, but the outcome was the same.

Apparently that’s how O’Donnells dealt with things: Walk away and don’t talk about them again.

He’d talked tonight, though, and as much as it sickened Kate, it also touched something deep inside her. He didn’t have to tell her what happened; he could have easily said she needed to help with the shack and that would’ve been the end of it. She’d been sent there to do whatever they needed her to do, and at the end of the day it was his family’s name on the deed, not Jessie’s.

At least that’s how it was for the moment; a few months from now it could well be Paul’s name on the deed, and then this need of Liam’s to rip down the shack would have been for naught. And it wasn’t the first time thoughts like that prickled her conscience.

They were busting their butts to get this place in shape, and the only one who was going to benefit from their sweat was Paul Foster. And, God willing, Kate.

—

By the time she finished her workout and made it up to the lodge the next morning, Finn and Jessie were just sitting down to breakfast.

“How was the book?” Kate asked. “You were pretty into it when I went to bed.”

“Ahhh.” The sigh Jessie released made Finn roll his eyes. “Have you ever read Caroline Linden?”

“No.”

“I’ve got a whole stack of them you can borrow. She writes Regency romances, and they’re like…
wow!
”

“Historical romance, eh?” Kate tipped her head from side to side. “Not my usual genre, but I’m always happy to try something new.”

“There’s eggs.” Apparently having had enough of the romance talk already, Finn pointed toward the frying pan on the stove.

“Thanks, but Liam’s already at the shack, so I’ll just grab a thermos of coffee and get going.”

“I was hoping to get an inventory of the kitchen today,” Jessie said. “If Liam’s going to do a run to the mainland sometime soon, we need to send him with as complete a list as we can.”

Kate heard what she said, even nodded along with her, because Jessie was right. They did need to get the inventory done.

“Finn’s going to have to help you,” Kate said as she screwed the lid onto the thermos. “Liam needs my help today.”

“But—”

“Sorry, gotta go.” Armed with her work gloves and an extra pair of socks, she hustled down to the shack, where Liam had already started ripping things out. The sink was on the dock close to the same boat they’d stored all the old shingles on, and the wooden countertop it had been attached to was now stacked in pieces on the grass.

If there was one thing she’d learned in her short time at the Buoys, it was that nothing got wasted. If they couldn’t reuse it themselves, they either took it to the Return-It place in Port Hardy or they burned it. But there was no logical reason to get rid of what looked like a perfectly good sink, which meant Liam was going to have to do some pretty fast talking when Jessie or Finn asked. And Kate had no doubt they would.

Liam was inside the shack, furiously thumb-typing something on his phone and muttering under his breath, when Kate walked in. The second he saw her, he pushed something (she assumed it was the
SEND
button), then tucked his phone in his pocket and tipped his chin up at her.

“Hey.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Nah, it’s…it’s nothing.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye, presumably to stop the twitch she saw flicker across his lid. “You ready for this?”

“You bet. I brought coffee.”

“Thank God.” With a quick wink, he unscrewed the lids and filled the cup, while she tried to figure out if there was a system to what he was doing. Didn’t look like it.

Handing her an old yellow milk crate, he pulled open the cupboard door and lifted his coffee cup toward the mess inside. Lures and weights were scattered over, under, and around a couple of pairs of rusty pliers, half a dozen water-warped books, and three tipped-over metal coffee cans. And all of it was tangled up with miles of unrolled fishing line.

“Most of this stuff we can reuse; we just need it out of here for now.”

Kate wasn’t sure any of it was any good, and when she started running the place, she’d make damn good and sure that Paul replaced all of it. When the crate was full, she walked it out to one of the boats and set it inside the back, under a tarp she’d found in the shack.

Turned out she and Liam worked pretty well together, falling into an easy but steady rhythm of removal and sorting, and the whole while their conversations flowed with a growing ease she didn’t have with many people.

He told her about his early days in Little League, and she told him about her failed attempts at cheerleading. He told her about how hard Ronan cried the night Liam got drafted, and she told him how hard she’d laughed watching
Shrek
the first time—and, yes, since he asked, that meant she’d watched it more than once. More than half a dozen times, actually. He’d never seen it, but he
had
seen
Moneyball
four or five times, as well as
Field of Dreams
and a bunch of other baseball movies whose titles were only vaguely familiar to her.

By early afternoon they had the place completely gutted and sorted into different salvage piles, and even though they were both starving, neither one was keen to go face Jessie alone, so they did it together.

“Exactly how long is that shack going to take?” Jessie asked as they quickly threw a couple of PBJs together. “You’re not ripping the whole thing down, right?”

“I’m not really sure,” Liam said. “And, yeah, whole thing’s going.”

“God almighty, Liam, we can’t afford for you to be wasting time on things like that when there’s so many other things that need to be done.”

“He’s not wasting time.” The words were out of Kate’s mouth before she realized it. Regret immediately followed. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”

“We’ve got about a thousand things on our to-do list,” Jessie snapped. “And that stupid shack doesn’t even make the top twenty.”

“I know what’s on that list, Jessie; you show it to me forty freakin’ times a day.” Liam slammed his knife down on the counter and turned. “But you better get used to it, because this is what I’m doing right now. Today. And I’m not asking you to like it and I’m not asking you to help, but since I’m the one footin’ the bill for this shit-show, you might want to cut me a little slack here, all right?”

Silence.

Kate didn’t dare turn around for fear of what Jessie’s expression might be, but by the time Liam picked his knife up again, Kate could hear Jessie’s footsteps fading in the direction of the office, followed immediately by the sound of Finn’s rapid approach.

“Oh shit.” Liam’s mutter made Kate snicker. “Here we go. Better brace yourself.”

So Kate did. She braced herself for both flying words and fists, even winced when she heard Finn stop just inside the kitchen, but nothing happened until Liam glanced back over his shoulder at him.

“Hey.”

“I just got off the phone with Ronan.”

“Yeah?”

Kate could hear the apprehension in Liam’s voice, even though he’d mumbled the word out over a huge bite of his sandwich.

“Yeah. He called to see how things were coming along, so I started bitching at him about you and that goddamn fish shack.”

Liam stopped chewing, set the rest of his sandwich down, and turned slowly, his hands gripping the counter behind him. Kate turned, too, shocked to see the look on Finn’s face. Gone was the smart-ass grin, and gone was the accusing glare he’d pinned her with the other night.

Leaning up against the wall, his hands tucked behind him, there was something in his eyes, an ache that made him look like he was about eight years old.

“He told you,” Liam said quietly, then cursed again, louder, when Finn nodded. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“The hell with that!” Finn blasted back. “You should’ve told me when it happened!”

“It wasn’t your problem, it was ours. You didn’t need to know what happened in there.”