single swear he’d ever learned. The cow, eyes closed, oblivious, innocent, gently drifted toward the sun.
“Chainsaw!” Ronan shouted, although he wasn’t immediately sure what words he thought would follow that one. “The—the—krek!”
Chainsaw winged out of the barn, circling him and barking gleefully, “Kerah!”
“No!” He pointed at the cow, which had now floated to the level of the barn roof. “The krek!”
Chainsaw flapped upward to circle the cow ascendant, looking at it curiously. What a fun game, her body language suggested. What an excellent cow, what strong decisions it had made this morning, how delightful that it had taken to the air like she had. With several cheerful barks, she swirled close before wheeling back playfully.
“Bring me the krek! There’s a cookie in it for you! Snack! Beef!” Ronan offered everything in his potential treat arsenal. “Cake! Cheese!”
Cow and raven appeared ever smaller as they ascended.
“Trash!” Ronan offered desperately, the one thing Chainsaw always desperately wanted and was not allowed to have.
Chainsaw clamped claws onto the drawstring.
For a second, Ronan was worried the leaf blanket’s levitation would be weightier than the raven. But then Chainsaw made headway, flapping just a little more strenuously than usual as she towed steadily. He stretched a hand out to her supportively. At the end, there were another few fraught moments as he worried that she’d let go of the string right before he could reach it—Chainsaw could be a quitter—but then the drawstring was in his hand and he had towed the cow inside the barn.
Flicking out his pocketknife, he sliced the blanket off the cow. She dropped the final few inches to the dirt floor.
Finally he allowed himself to be relieved.
Out of breath, he kicked the lid off the metal trash can to fulfill his promise to Chainsaw, and then he stalked over to his fallen phone. The caller ID still showed an active call with DBAG LYNCH.
Ronan put it on his shoulder. “You still there? I was —”
“I don’t want to know,” Declan said. “Get here when you can.”
12
Declan Lynch was a liar.
He’d been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He’s an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He’s in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can’t Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who’d stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, ’cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great.
At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, and Secrets.
He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers.
Well.
More often he simply didn’t tell his brothers the truth.
“It’s always so nice here,” Matthew said as he got out of the car, shoes crunching on gravel.
The three brothers were on the Virginia side of Great Falls, a densely wooded national park only miles away from Declan’s town house. The attraction featured both a pleasant walk along a historical canal and the opportunity to witness the Potomac holding its nose and jumping over a seventy-foot ledge as it churned busily from West Virginia to the Atlantic. The sky hung down low and shaggy and gray, intensifying the late fall colors. Everything smelled of the nostalgic, smoky scent of dead oak leaves. It was pleasant, particularly if you had never been there.
Declan had been there many, many times.
“I always like coming,” Declan lied.
“It’s a regular carnival,” Ronan said, slamming the passenger door. Why shut anything, seemed to be his motto, when you can slam it. The Harvard debacle had shoved him deep into a black mood. It was not always easy to tell how bad it was with him, but Declan had become somewhat of a connoisseur of Ronan’s moods. Slamming meant the heart was still pumping blood. Silence meant danger moldered slowly in his veins. Declan had been afraid of the idea of a Ronan who moved to