Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(79)

She glanced at my glass, eyebrows going up delicately. “And a drink, apparently.”

“Oh, no, no. Several drinks. I’m only getting started.”

“I assume you don’t think you can sleep here if you get too drunk to drive.”

“Liv,” I said, “normally I would be more than happy to fight you up and down as many sidetracks as you choose, but tonight, I think I should warn you, I’m going to be sticking fairly closely to the point. How the sweet shining f*ck does Holly know Kevin?”

Olivia started pulling back her hair, winding an elastic around it in crisp deft flicks. She had obviously decided to play this cool, calm and collected. “I decided Jackie could introduce them.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll be having a chat with Jackie. I can see how you might just be na?ve enough to think this was a cute idea, but Jackie’s got no excuse. Just Kevin, or the whole bloody Addams Family? Tell me it was just Kevin, Liv. Please.”

Olivia folded her arms and set her back flat against the kitchen wall. Her battle stance: I’d seen it so many times. “Her grandparents, her uncles and aunt, and her cousins.”

Shay. My mother. My father. I’ve never hit a woman. I didn’t realize I was thinking about it till I felt my hand squeezing the edge of the poofy little bar stool, hard.

“Jackie brought her over for tea on the odd evening, after school. She met her family, Frank. It’s not the end of the world.”

“You don’t meet my family, you open hostilities. You bring a flame-thrower and a full set of body armor. How many odd evenings, exactly, has Holly spent meeting my family?”

A little shrug. “I haven’t kept a tally. Twelve, fifteen? Maybe twenty?”

“Over how long?”

That one got a guilty flicker of her lashes. “About a year.”

I said, “You’ve been getting my daughter to lie to me for a year.”

“We told her—”

“A year. Every weekend for a year, I’ve been asking Holly what she did this week, and she’s been giving me a big steaming heap of crap.”

“We told her it would need to be a secret for a little while, because you’d had a fight with your family. That’s all. We were going to—”

“You can call it keeping secrets, you can call it lying, you can call it whatever the f*ck you want. It’s what my family does best. It’s a natural-born, God-given talent. My plan was to keep Holly as far from it as possible and hope she would somehow beat the genetic odds and grow up into an honest, healthy, nontwisted human being. Does that sound excessive to you, Olivia? Does that really sound like too much to ask?”

“Frank, you’re going to wake her up again if—”

“Instead of which, you dumped her right smack into the middle of it. And hey presto, surprise surprise, the next thing you know, she’s acting exactly like a f*cking Mackey. She’s taken to lying like a duck to water. And you’re egging her on every step of the way. That’s low, Liv. It really is. That’s just about the lowest, dirtiest, shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She had at least the grace to redden. “We were going to tell you, Frank. We thought, once you saw how well it was working out—”

I laughed loud enough that Olivia flinched. “Suffering Jesus Christ, Liv! You call this working out? Correct me if I’m missing something here, but as far as I can see, this whole wretched cluster f*ck is very, very far from working out.”

“For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s not as if we knew that Kevin was going to—”

“You knew I didn’t want her anywhere near them. That should have been more than enough. What the hell else did you need to know?”

Olivia had her head down and a stubborn set to her chin that was exactly like Holly’s. I reached for the bottle again and caught the flash of her eyes, but she managed to say nothing, so I gave myself a great big refill, letting a good dollop slosh onto the lovely slate bar. “Or is that why you did it—because you knew I was dead set against it? Are you really that pissed off with me? Come on, Liv. I can take it. Let’s get it all out in the open. Did you enjoy making a fool of me? Did you get a good laugh out of it? Did you really throw Holly into the middle of a shower of raving lunatics just to spite me?”

That one snapped her back straight. “Don’t you dare. I would never do anything to hurt Holly, and you know that. Never.”

“Then why, Liv? Why? What on God’s green earth could have made this seem like a good idea?”

Olivia took a quick breath through her nose and got her control back; she’s had practice. She said coolly, “They’re her family too, Frank. She kept asking. Why she doesn’t have two grannies like all her friends, whether you and Jackie have any more brothers and sisters, why she couldn’t go see them—”

“Bullshit. I think she’s asked me about my side once, in her entire life.”

“Yes, and your reaction showed her not to ask you again. She asked me instead, Frank. She asked Jackie. She wanted to know.”

“Who gives a f*ck what she wants? She’s nine years old. She also wants a lion cub and a diet made up of pizza and red M&Ms. Are you going to give her those too? We’re her parents, Liv. We’re supposed to give her what’s good for her, not whatever the hell she wants.”