PROLOGUE
TODAY. MORNING.
I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of being happy.
I’m forty-two years old and I can’t remember a time, in the past four-plus decades, when someone has come up to me and said, “You look like you’re in a good mood.” Or, “Hello there, mister. What are you smiling about?” Or, “Wow. You don’t seem totally miserable today.”
Forty-two, and it’s possible that I’ve never been observably happy. That’s kind of amazing if it’s true. Then again, it’s kind of amazing that I’ve managed to make it to forty-two in the first place, so I suppose anything is possible.
To be fair, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually been what someone might call “happy.” And, if I have, I’d likely try to hide it anyway. I’m wary of letting people see my emotions too clearly.
Except anger.
And, as most people know, anger is a bullshit emotion anyway. It’s more of a suit of armor than it is an honest feeling. It gets called on to stand as protection when the real emotions get too heavy to deal with. At least that’s how it is for me. Or was. Has been. Whatever. It’s ingrained and that shit is a hard habit to break.
I’m not saying it’s never happened—that someone hasn’t caught me being, maybe unexpectedly, happy—I’m just saying I can’t remember it if it has.
But memories are unreliable. Memories stumble through the fog of history and get twisted and obscured on their way. Details are forgotten, pieces are filtered out, other pieces are promoted, and past, present, and future all become a tumbling jumble of thoughts and ideas that may or may not reflect anything close to the truth. At the end of the day, what you wind up with is just some combination of fiction and reality all mashed up together and formed into what can only be called your truth.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as objective or universal truth. There is only individual reality that exists for each person inside their own mind and what we think of as “truth” is just some shit most of us agree on. And since most of us are assholes anyway, who really cares?
Whatever. I dunno. I’m no philosopher.
In fact, if I were ever to tell anyone that this is the kind of thing I spend my time thinking about, they’d likely call me a sociopath. But that would only be because they’ve never known any actual sociopaths. I spent a good portion of my life in the company of one, so I know better. I’m not a crazy person. No more than anyone else. I’m just honest with myself about the fact that I can’t be certain about anything. I can’t possibly be sure I know the things I think I know. I’ve seen too much.
Which is very probably why no one has ever suggested that I’m happy.
But, as it turns out, I can be happy. I don’t know if it’s what other people would consider being happy. But, for me, happiness is right now. Sitting here on the beach, at the very start of this important day, watching her walk along the edge of the water in a yellow dress that reminds me of years ago. And even though I know it’s not years ago, and we can never get the past back, and everything changes with every breath we take and all that, sitting here now brings back memories that, whether real or imaginary, cause me to feel… happy. And content. And at peace.
I still don’t imagine someone walking by would look at me and think, That looks like a happy guy, but I don’t need anyone else’s recognition to know it’s real. And, when all is said and done, I wanna believe that’s what true happiness is: Being okay with where you’re at and not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks about it.
She’s so pretty. Beautiful. Like a poem. Or a painting. Or music.
How did we get here? I’m incredibly grateful that this is where we are—that after everything, this is where we’ve landed. But how did we get here?
I ball up my toes and feel the clean, white sand squeeze between them, and I try to remember. We have different recollections, I know. We’ve never talked about it much because living in the past is something we’ve attempted to avoid. Some of the memories are too painful. But it’s time to finally get clear about them. Or as clear as we’re able. Today is the day the story gets told.
So now, watching her walk, pretty yellow sundress blowing in the cool sea breeze, I close my eyes, turn my face upward, and try to remember…
CHAPTER ONE
THEN.
The world gets incredibly small when viewed through the scope of an Accuracy International AXMC Sniper Rifle.
Everything else fades away.
All that exists is you, your target, and the sound of your breathing. In and out. In and out.
I love it.
Because there is no past and no future. No before and no after. You’re present.
You’re in the moment, entirely. Whatever is going to happen next hasn’t yet, and so it doesn’t matter. And whatever has preceded this instant is over now and is of very little importance. No regrets, no hopes, no desires, no emotions.
You are simply… there. All alone, holding a forged-steel, fully suppressed, subsonic instrument of death, waiting patiently to fuck someone’s day up real, real bad.
And that’s it. That’s all there is.
At least, that’s normally how it works.
Here, today, on the roof of this squat, unremarkable, five-story brick building (which could be a bank or a doctor’s office or a bread factory for all I know) in Belfast, I am not as “here” as I might look. I’m somewhere else.
I’m still on a building, holding a sniper rifle, ready to pull the trigger, but it’s not this building, this rifle, or this trigger. It’s a different version of all these things. Someplace else, sometime ago.
Months? Years? Centuries? I have no idea. And I don’t really care. Time has started to get muddy and unimportant to me lately. I want to get back to now. Whenever that is. I want to get back to the me I was. The me who was there, present, in the moment, and not preoccupied with things that don’t matter.
That all seems to have gotten shattered when I was thrown off that roof that night.
Which isn’t really surprising. What’s more surprising is that it’s the only thing that seems to have gotten shattered.
I’m probably lucky to still be alive. We all are.
I suppose it should make me feel unsettled that I still don’t know exactly what happened. I do, in the abstract, but there are a lot of holes that remain unfilled.
Who threw me? Was it Lars himself? Was it someone he hired? Was it no one at all and everything that’s happened since is just a big goddamn coincidence? Even though I know enough to know that coincidences like that don’t just happen?
Why was I thrown? Was it to draw Alec out of the shadows? Probably. That part seems pretty clear. I was used as a chess piece. Not a pawn. I’ll never be someone’s pawn. But maybe I was a sacrificed bishop or knight. Maybe I was even a queen. Pretty shitty way to treat a queen, but it happens.
Why did I hold back so much of what I thought, felt, and believed from Alec and, especially, Danny? When we were on that boat, sailing to find Alec, I had plenty of opportunities to tell him about the gaps in my memory, the filled places in my memory, about Eliza and the kid, Andra, and… and all of it.