Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 96850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
She’d set her cup down with a rattle. Remained in silence for nearly a full minute. “Does he lay hands on his wife?”
“No,” Madden assured her. “He leaves Paul and Sinead alone too. But me being there . . . it’s unacceptable to him, Fiona. The sight of me eats him alive and it causes problems in the house. I’m the poison—”
“You are not poison,” she hissed, her keel uneven for once. “My father once said the same to me because I rebelled as a teenager. Married someone they didn’t approve of and then he gloated when it didn’t work out. Made me feel like I couldn’t do anything right. I’m in this country because I believed myself to be the poison infecting my own family. Now that I realize it was just a lie I was sold to make a small man feel better about his own shortcomings, it’s too late to go back.” She turned in her seat. “You are welcome here, in this house of accused black sheep, but don’t make the same mistake I made. Allowing yourself to be run off when you’ve done nothing wrong but exist.”
Madden carefully considered what his aunt said. Perhaps she was right. But he’d been living with the belief that he was wrong for too long to change his mind. He didn’t want Paul and Sinead and his mother to weather a storm that wasn’t their own making.
They would be happier in his absence. Without the anger he alone seemed to incite.
“I need to stay.”
That was it. She nodded and registered him for school that same afternoon.
In almost every way, being in Cumberland was better.
When Madden was at Aunt Fiona’s, at least. The quiet fell and he could breathe in a way he couldn’t have imagined back home.
In school, however, blending in became very difficult.
Fate had landed him in a house next door to Elton Page, who’d quickly ordained Madden a baseball player and introduced him to his vast network of friends, who also played baseball every bloody chance they got. Madden had never watched the sport before coming to Rhode Island. Now? Every pair of trousers he owned bore dirt stains on the knees. He’d planned on filling in one time for Elton’s friend at a scrimmage, then bowing out. Trying out for a proper sport, like football. Or soccer, as they called it here.
Then he’d been introduced to the catcher position.
He’d liked the mask.
The silence and repetition of being a catcher.
Perhaps the sport itself would never be something he chose—the noise and grit and intensity of it reminded him of home, and he didn’t want to be reminded of that—but he could bear with it from behind the cage. In the background. Observing. Surviving. So he continued to play baseball in this foreign place, playacting like he belonged with a rowdy group of kids with almost freakishly wholesome home lives, trying his goddamn best to blend in, because if he faked belonging long enough, maybe one day he would.
The warning bell rang for fourth period and Madden picked up his pace slightly, needing to get to earth science, so the teacher wouldn’t use Madden’s lateness as another opportunity to tell a story about his senior class trip to Ireland in 2001. Jesus, he probably would no matter what.
Madden rounded a corner of the empty hallway, drawing up short when he saw her.
Eve Keller.
The serious blond girl he’d met in Elton’s kitchen two weeks prior. He didn’t interact with her much in school, due to him being a junior and her a freshman, but they were often at the Page household at the same time, whether in the backyard after classes or colliding in the kitchen. They didn’t speak much directly. It was hard to get in a word with Elton and Skylar’s nonstop lambasting of each other. Eve and Madden were mainly observers, but in an odd way, their spectator status was what gelled them.
A traded eye roll or a quiet, sarcastic comment exchanged under their breath. They’d fallen into a quiet sort of . . . companionship that neither one of them had acknowledged. It just was. And he felt less alone because of it. Still, he’d only been in Cumberland two weeks. Not long enough to consider himself close to anyone.
Which was why he’d found it so odd that the morning he’d asked his aunt to let him stay, Eve’s face had popped into his head.
He’d been oddly relieved at the chance to see her again.
Though it was very hard to explain why. Even to himself.
Madden was sixteen. Eve fourteen.
Too wide of a gap for him to consider her . . . romantically, right? Yet he thought of her, nonetheless. When they brushed gazes in the school corridors, an invisible force kicked him in the gut. Pursuing someone two years younger was fucking creepy and he wouldn’t allow himself to go there, even mentally, but the way she’d been so bold about announcing her father as the strip club owner . . . that defiance tugged at his chest.