56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

23 Days Ago

He doesn’t want to scare her, or upset her, although both are surely unavoidable.

What’s important now is that she lets him tell her the truth, that she stays long enough to hear it. He needs her to know that he’s not a physical threat, that the things he’ll speak about are so far in the past, so separate from the man he is now, that they may as well be on another planet. To increase the chances of her believing this, he gets up and moves toward the kitchen, standing near the breakfast bar, leaving a generous space between his body and where she is still sitting, on the couch.

“I am who you think I am, Ciara,” he says. “I promise you that. But a long, long time ago, when I was very young, when I was just a child, I was involved in something that . . . that I deeply, deeply regret. That I should never have done. That I wish I hadn’t every single moment since.”

He risks a look at her face. She’s sitting perfectly still, blinking rapidly.

“The most important thing,” he continues, “is that you know I would never hurt you.” Her eyebrows rise slightly, in surprise he thinks. “I couldn’t. That’s not who I am. It’s not who I was either, but getting people to understand that . . .” He takes a deep breath. “The other thing I need you to know is that this was real, you and me. It is real.” His hands are shaking worse than ever; he sticks them in his pockets to try to hide this fact. “Look, I’m just going to come out with it, okay? There’s no easy way to say this . . .”

But he doesn’t know where to start.

With what happened, or what people say did? With his role in it, or the outcome?

“Have you . . . ?” He has to stop here and lick his lips; his mouth is suddenly devoid of even a hint of moisture. “Have you ever heard of the Mill River case?”

Total silence, as if they’ve both been transported to the airless vacuum of space.

Then she says, very softly and slowly, drawing out the vowel sound, “No . . . ?”

Good, he thinks. That’s good. Blank slate.

He can control the sequence in which he shares the pertinent information, build up to the big shock.

“It happened in 2003,” he says. Ciara would have been eight years old, already living in the Isle of Man. “In Kildare. Mill River was this new housing estate—hundreds and hundreds of homes—that had been built just outside Ballymore. On the banks of the river. There was a . . .”

Oliver stops. He has never had to say this out loud, never had to explain what happened to him to anyone else in his whole life. They always knew already. Either because that’s why they were meeting, as in the case of Dan, or because they were demanding answers from him after someone else had already told them, as in the case of Lucy, in London, just a few months ago.

And now he finds that he’s not sure he can.

“There was a murder,” he says. “Of a boy. Aged ten.”

Ten.

The older he gets himself, the worse that fact becomes.

The more it drips with horror, the heavier the droplets become.

“And—” He takes another deep breath, feeling like his heart is about to break out of his chest cavity, wondering if this is what a heart attack feels like, if he is on the verge of having one. “And two other boys, aged twelve, were convicted of it.”

He can’t look at her.

He looks at the floor.

Tears he didn’t know he was crying blur his vision, start to drip onto his cheeks.

When he finally says the words that matter, his voice is barely a whisper.

“And I . . . I was one of them.”