Chapter 20: The Lock

Declan was carrying boxes out of my father's workshop when I came down at seven.

He had stacked eight of them in the corridor already, and each one had Ciara's handwriting on the side.

A new brass lock hung on the workshop door, and he was kneeling in front of it with a screwdriver.

"Don't help," he said, without turning around. "I'm doing this one."

I leaned in the doorway and watched.

The workbench was how I'd left it, with the vise and the lathe and the rack of Dad's guns on the wall.

Her boxes of ledgers had been shoved in front of the rack.

Declan got the new lock off the door and dropped it on the floor.

From his pocket he took the old lock, the black iron one Dad had bought when I was fifteen.

"I kept it in my sock drawer," he said. "I took it off the day Conor told me to, and I couldn't make myself throw it out."

He fitted it with big hands that shook a little, and the door swung on its hinges, and the old lock clicked home.

Then he stood up and faced me.

"I told my men this morning at six," he said. "In the yard, with the shift change watching."

"Told them what?"

"That I took my sister's key in front of a hundred and twenty people. That I did it because Conor said to, and because I wanted him pleased with me."

His jaw worked.

"They said nothing. Nobody had ever heard me say I was wrong. I can say it to you, too. I was wrong, Mae."

He unholstered the Colt at his hip and laid it on my workbench.

I knew it by the scratch on the grip.

I had rebuilt it at fifteen out of a pile of parts, and Dad had given it to Declan the next week.

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