Chapter 4 - THE BROTHER WHO HADN’T DISAPPEARED
Kathleen admitted everything before sunrise.
She had asked Declan for help when the bank threatened foreclosure. He had promised he could obtain a short-term loan through someone at work.
Kathleen knew Cassidy’s signature was forged.
She had signed as witness anyway.
“I thought it was paperwork,” she said. “Declan said nobody would ever use it against you.”
“You believed that?”
“I needed to.”
Cassidy placed the fifty thousand dollars on the table.
Her mother stared at it.
“What did you do?”
“What our family keeps doing. I paid for somebody else’s decision.”
Kathleen closed her eyes.
At eight that morning, Cassidy drove to Newark.
The recovery center occupied a converted brick convent beside a Catholic school. Declan waited in a private visiting room wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and the exhausted expression of someone who had practiced apologies without finding one that worked.
He was twenty-seven but looked older than Vincent.
Cassidy did not hug him.
“You let me think you were dead.”
Declan lowered his eyes.
“Mom said you were searching.”
“She helped me search.”
“I asked her to keep you out of it.”
“You forged my signature.”
“I know.”
“You used my name as collateral.”
“I know.”
“And while men followed me home, you called Mom from a prepaid phone.”
Declan pressed his palms together.
“I was trying to get clean.”
“You could have called me.”
“I couldn’t ask you to save me again.”
Cassidy sat across from him.
“Start with the money.”
Declan explained that a back injury at the docks had led to prescription painkillers. When the prescription ended, he found pills elsewhere. Dominic noticed his addiction before Kathleen or Cassidy did.
He offered Declan cash in exchange for managing unofficial accounts.
The loans went to dockworkers, drivers, bartenders, and relatives of men employed by the Coletti organization. Borrowers received smaller amounts than the agreements showed. Interest accumulated in ledgers that never appeared in company records.
“Vincent knew?” Cassidy asked.
“Vincent knew people borrowed money. He didn’t know Dominic was using his seal or doubling the amounts.”
“That’s convenient.”
“I’m not protecting him.”
Declan stood and crossed toward the barred window.
“I took eighteen thousand six hundred for the house.”
“And the rest?”
“There was no rest. Dominic wrote fifty because he wanted leverage.”
“Why me?”
Declan looked at her.
“Because he knew you’d pay.”
The answer landed harder than any punch Vincent had thrown.
“You told him about me.”
“I told him you never walked away from family.”
“That wasn’t a compliment. It was a price.”
Declan nodded.
He admitted collecting payments from people who could not afford them. He had watched Dominic threaten jobs, marriages, and immigration status. At first, Declan told himself he was only keeping records.
Then a driver named Luis Ortega lost his apartment after Dominic inflated a twelve-thousand-dollar debt to thirty-eight thousand.
Declan copied the private ledger.
When Dominic discovered the missing pages, Declan entered recovery under another surname and gave the originals to someone he trusted.
“Who?”
“Our father’s old landlord,” he said. “Mr. Levin still owns the building where the gym was.”
Cassidy remembered Arthur Levin as a thin man who repaired pipes while Patrick trained fighters upstairs.
“Why him?”
“Dad once kept important papers inside the wall behind the speed-bag platform. Levin never fixed it.”
Declan removed a locker key from beneath his shirt.
“I hid the ledger there.”
Cassidy did not take it.
“You said you gave it to someone.”
“I lied.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m still afraid.”
She looked at the key.
Declan’s hands had begun shaking.
Not from withdrawal.
From shame.
“There’s something else,” he said.
Cassidy waited.
“The ledger doesn’t only prove what Dominic did.”
May you like
He placed the key between them.
“It proves I helped him do it.”
