Was I supposed to be uncomfortable in my sick bed?
Shit, the site where I’d been operated on was itchy. It wasn’t gross anymore and didn’t ‘leak’ when Finn cleaned it—because yeah, he’d taken that upon himself, too—but it was like when you broke your foot and had a cast on for eight weeks. By the end of the two months, you were sticking God knew what down the cast to scratch your ankle.
I was tired all the time, felt weak and quivery when I exerted myself by using the damn bathroom, and my once enormous appetite for all things edible had diminished considerably. Even if Finn wasn’t intent on feeding me a hundred varieties of soup, each one that made a swamp look tasty, I didn’t even want to eat cake.
Yes.
I didn’t want to eat cake.
Let that sink in for a second.
If any of that seemed like I was at ease, then I wasn’t certain what was going through Finn’s mind.
“Are you sure you don’t need a new sleep shirt?”
I blinked at him. “Later will suffice.” I really didn’t have the energy to get changed. “Tell me what you meant.”
He climbed off the bed, and just as I feared he was going to leave, he started to pace. Back and forth at the foot of the bed, so fast and so often I sank back to observe him in surprise.
I wouldn’t have been shocked to see sparks crackle around him as he worked through whatever he was dealing with, and boy, was he dealing with something.
“Why don’t you hate me?”
Well, that was easy. “Because I love you.”
His nostrils flared, and though I knew, point blank, he loved when I said that, he always responded like a deer in headlights. He also never replied.
I’d decided not to take offense at that.
Fiona, his mom, had loved him. Dearly. But I knew Finn didn’t believe that, and considering what Lena, his adoptive mother, had told me about his father? And that Fiona had known of the abuse? I couldn’t blame him for being confused about love, even though the O'Donnellys had most definitely cocooned him in the love of their family.
“Love isn’t a ‘get out of jail free’ card, Aoife.”
He sounded so impatient, and I had to snicker at him. “That’s a shame,” I told him wryly. “I’m sure a lot of your boys on Rikers Island wished it was.”
“This isn’t a joke,” he exploded again, and once more, he began to pace.
Jesus. It was a wonder he didn’t start running.
I’d known he wasn’t handling my being shot well—yes, I was aware of the irony in that sentence—but this was the closest to combusting I’d seen him.
Trouble was, I didn’t know what to do to make things better for him.
I understood he felt guilty, and because I wasn’t being mean to him or hating on him, he wasn’t sure how to deal with me.
Weren’t men strange?
Would he have preferred for me to stop talking to him?
Then, I realized something I should have figured out before.
Finn, whether he was devout or not, was a Catholic.
Catholics practically got off on penance. It was what we did best.
“Finn?” I asked quietly. “Have you gone to confession?”
That had him braking to a halt. “Huh?”
It was the first time I’d seen him speechless, but it was a week for firsts. I hadn’t seen him so close to losing control, either.
“I asked if you’d gone to confession. Since the shooting, I mean.” How I kept my tone so calm, I wasn’t sure.
From something Brennan had said while my eyes were closed and the guys had thought I was sleeping—I hadn’t been pretending, had just been drifting—I knew Finn had shot and killed one of the Colombians. I also knew that the shooters had, somehow, been tossed out of the moving truck and the brothers had shot them too.
That was a lot for anyone to deal with.
A Catholic?
Someone used to purging their soul after every sin?
It was a doozy.
“I only go because of Aidan. And I’m not going anywhere. You need me here.”
“I do,” I admitted. “But I need my Finn. You seem to want me to punish you, Finn. I’m not going to do that.”
He grew still at that, and with his back to me, he stared out the wall of windows that overlooked the city of Manhattan, and tension crawled down his spine. “Why not?” he asked quietly.
“Because what happened wasn’t…” Blowing out a breath, I covered my face with my hands