21. Kieran

Chapter 21

Kieran

A n hour into the flight, Sven drops a thick folder in my lap. “Here’s the light reading you requested. I’m going in back to get some sleep. Don’t wake me up unless this tube is going down.” He pauses. “Actually, don’t bother.”

“Thanks.” I tap a finger on the folder before placing it on the table in front of my seat. “And you’re welcome.”

He scowls. “For what? Making me sit in a car until four a.m., then informing me with psychotic cheerfulness that we’re getting on a plane in two hours?”

I smother a smile. “Not that.” I nod my head back and to the left, where Dylan currently sits reading a novel. His eyes are focused on the book, headphones covering his ears.

Sven’s glare intensifies to nuclear levels even as his bristled cheeks darken. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. ”

I chuckle. “By the way, our usual suite at the hotel was unavailable. You two will be sharing a room. I can’t remember if I requested two beds or not. Guess we’ll find out.”

His face is starting to resemble a beet. “Since when do you book flights and hotels yourself? You have an assistant for that shit.”

“I was going to call Doug, but I thought I’d let him sleep. Since I’m such a great boss.”

“Yeah, you’re a fucking peach.” His voice lowers to a tense whisper. “Is this payback for butting in with Stirling?”

My brows rise. “Of course not. I’m grateful for that. So grateful, in fact, I’m thinking you’ll be the best man in our wedding. And before you start worrying about anyone’s job, I’ve known about you two for months and have zero problems with it. You’ve done an admirable job of being discreet.”

Sven stares at me for a pregnant moment. “Sometimes I forget what a scary sonofabitch you are. Not even Gabe suspects.”

I grin and tap my temple. “Genius, remember?”

He makes a sound of disgust. “Only if genius somehow rhymes with meddlesome little shit. I’m going to sleep. Enjoy violating Stirling’s privacy.”

He stalks toward the bedroom at the back of the plane. Dylan doesn’t look up as he passes, but his fingers tighten around his book.

Poor, lovesick fools.

All three of us .

An attendant slips down the aisle toward me. “Would you like more coffee, Mr. Hayes?”

What I’d like is to take a nap and wake up with Talia sitting on my face, but in the interim… “Please. Thank you, Samantha.”

Once she’s gone, I turn my attention to the folder. On our drive home this morning, I woke up Dylan to tell him to pack a bag for Ireland and to print out the attached files of a certain email. Inside the folder is everything my PI has dug up on Talia, the last update having arrived yesterday. From the thickness of it, he went the extra mile. Given what I’m paying his team every month, I expected nothing less.

I should be taking this time to review the latest report on their investigation into the phone call. Sven’s been trying to talk to me about it for days. But I keep blowing him off. I’m too distracted. Something else dominates my thoughts— someone else.

Setting down my coffee, I pull the folder onto my lap and open it. The first page is a list of the contents.

“Jesus,” I whisper.

School transcripts from elementary school onward. Articles in local newspapers and online in which her name has appeared, the oldest more than fifteen years ago and the newest from yesterday. Employment records. Credit history. Properties purchased and sold. Copies of expired and current drivers’ licenses, ID cards, and passports. He even included the abstract for her PhD dissertation.

With a guilty grimace, I close the folder. Sven’s right— this is a major violation of her privacy. A thousand times worse than having him break into her house to assess her security. I should destroy it as soon as humanly possible. It’s the right thing to do. What a good man would do.

Only apparently I’m not a good man, because a minute later I’m reading a series of remarks from early teachers suggesting her parents have her intelligence levels assessed. Her first IQ test was at seven. Another at thirteen. The last at sixteen.

When I see the numbers, when I realize what they mean, my cock stiffens. No fucking wonder I was obsessed with her brain first. Her sharp eyes and sharper tongue.

She’s smarter than me.

So fucking hot.

I’m grinning as I browse deeper into the file, eventually stopping on an article about her graduating high school at sixteen and being accepted into UCLA. There’s a grainy, black-and-white photo of her in the top corner. My smile slowly fades as I stare at a young Talia. With the exception of her coloring, she looks shockingly different—her eyebrows thicker, her face rounder. She’s barely smiling, but I see a hint of braces.

Déjà vu prickles over my skin, the same familiarity I felt when I met her. Only this feeling is a hundred times more potent.

I know this girl.

Which makes absolutely no sense.

I flip through pages without really knowing what I’m looking for, only that I have to find it. My search becomes chaotic—papers hit the floor as I throw entire sections to the side. A cluster slips off the table to the aisle. The sheets scatter, a few sailing across the floor under another seat. Glimpsing color and the curve of a pale face on one of them, I launch out of my chair and land hard on my knees.

“You all right, man?”

Ignoring Dylan, I grab for the pages, ripping through them until I find it: a color copy of her first passport, issued when she was fourteen.

And my heart

fucking

stops.

Somewhere past the boundary of my dying brain, I hear voices.

“I just got to sleep, Dylan.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re the only one who can handle this type of shit.”

“What type of— Christ. ” Footsteps pound toward me, and Sven’s hand clamps on my shoulder. “Kier? What happened?”

I whisper hoarsely, “I’ve died of shock.”

Then I start to laugh.

I laugh and laugh until tears stream from my eyes, while Sven and Dylan gape at me like I’m a lunatic.

But if I’m a lunatic, then so is she.

My match—my queen.

Birdie.

I remember the day well. It was a Saturday. Early evening. Mam told me to go for a walk and stay gone for an hour. When I’d grinned and asked if she wanted me to act surprised when I came back and found a party, she smacked me upside the head.

I was leaving for Oxford on Monday. Alistair had helped me pack over the last few days, bitching the whole time that I should have enrolled at Galway University with him. It was a great school, but I’d been set on for Oxford for years.

Before I left the flat, I knocked on my brother’s door. He was on the phone with his on-again, off-again girlfriend; I could hear her belligerent yelling from six feet away. I pantomimed a walk and smoking a joint, but he winced and shook his head.

I shrugged and went on my way, extra-glad I was entering university unattached. Girls were great fun for a night or two, but any longer and they became a distraction. With the five-year plan I had, I couldn’t afford distractions.

The rain outside was more mist than downpour, perfect for a stroll. Content to wander, I didn’t have a destination in mind until I came around a corner and saw the graveyard.

It’d been a while since I’d visited Gran, and it seemed fitting to say goodbye before I left for England—and smoke a joint on her behalf.

The girl looked like a wet bird curled up in front of Gran’s headstone. A hummingbird , I decided, because even though she was sitting, she was in perpetual motion. Twitching feet. Jerking shoulders. Repeated swipes of pale hands across her face, smearing wet bangs.

She was making noises like sobs only angrier, and she was mumbling to herself about someone named Olivia. American accent, if my ears weren’t misleading me.

Was she drunk? Crying? Or lost?

I scared the shit out of her when I asked. She jumped up, then almost toppled right over. Drunk, then. Or maybe all three: crying, lost, and drunk. A winning combination. As I contemplated whether or not I was annoyed by this unexpected diversion, the girl stood there, staring at me like I was someone famous. She was cute in a crazy way, with frizzy hair, big eyes, and red cheeks.

Then she giggled out of the blue—a husky sound that made me up her age by a few years—and slapped a hand over her mouth. The abrupt motion almost took her to the ground. It was hard not to laugh, but I managed it.

Resigned to helping her, I killed my joint and tossed it to the ground. The little bird chirped that I shouldn’t litter.

“You shouldn’t be hammered and wandering around a graveyard at dusk, Birdie, but here we are.”

Her eyes got even bigger at my nickname for her. She wobbled sideways, toward the row of headstones.

“My name isn’t Birdie,” she slurred angrily.

“It is now.” I grimaced as she swayed again. It would be a real shame if she fell and cracked her head open on Gran’s final resting place. “You’d better sit back down before you fall, Birdie .”

Like her bones turned to liquid, she melted downward and slumped back against the headstone. Despite the dreamy drunkenness of her expression, to me she still seemed angry. Sad and angry.

I’d always been good at reading people.

Sighing, I trudged along the row of graves. I’d give her a while to sober up, then get her back to the parents who’d pissed her off.

Plopping down next to her, I misjudged my trajectory and ended up closer than intended. My shoulder bumped against hers. I thought about moving but decided against it. Her arm was soft and warm, Gran’s headstone rough and hard, the ground cool and wet. I wasn’t a danger to her—and she was clearly harmless.

She was staring at me again. Smirking, I let her. I didn’t think there was anything special about my face, but I’d figured out a few years ago that girls liked it. Plus, this girl was American; they went crazy for an accent.

I waited to see if she’d be brave enough to talk to me.

“Do you have another joint?” she asked in a weird, forced voice.

Oh, she was brave. Possibly stupid, too. I decided against lecturing her about asking strangers for drugs.

Smothering another laugh, I looked at her. “Not a chance, Birdie. ”

She gazed into my eyes, swaying toward me like I was gravity. A vibrating, drunk, sodden bird who didn’t know where the ground was.

Cute. And sad.

“How old are you?” she slurred. At least her voice was normal-sounding this time.

“Eighteen.”

I could tell she wanted me to ask how old she was—probably so she could lie. I didn’t ask. It didn’t really matter. Even if I wasn’t leaving town in two days, she was far too young. An innocent kid. From the way she kept looking at me, all bashful and awed, I doubted she’d ever kissed a boy.

Daylight was fading fast, making it hard for me to see the color of her eyes. Light brown, I thought. They were pretty. Her mouth was nice, too. I had a feeling she’d be a stunner one day.

Her shoulders slumping even more, she dropped her gaze. Loneliness radiated from her like a perfume. She stared at the ground like she wanted to sink through it and have a chat with my gran.

It made my heart hurt.

I coughed a little to get her attention. “What brings a wee bird out of her nest to fly among the dead this fine evening?”

“Vacation.”

Obvious, Birdie.

“Let me guess where the bird flew from.” I squinted at her, pretending to decipher something from her clothes, then guessed California. It was the first place that popped into my head, probably because it featured heavily on my five-year plan.

She made a face that told me I was right, and I grinned. But instead of my smile coaxing one out of her—as I’d hoped it would—she wilted even more. Suddenly, I had to know. I had to understand why this little bird was drunk, sad, angry, and alone in a graveyard.

The fact she’d chosen Gran’s grave out of hundreds suddenly struck me as portentous. Like maybe there was a reason she was here, that I was here, that we’d met each other. I’d never been religious or superstitious, but goose bumps rose on my arms.

“Go on then, tell me,” I said.

She frowned at me. “Tell you what?”

“Why your eyes are so angry and sad.”

And she did.

By the end, I knew one thing for sure: this little bird was going to be more than okay. She was going to make the world kneel.

Just like I would.

I was an hour late to my own party, though my parents forgave me when I explained what happened. Only I couldn’t explain it—not really—because what happened was far more than helping a lost girl find her hotel.

I’d been given a gift. Maybe from Gran, as fucking wild as the notion was. The gift was witnessing the beginning of an evolution. The makings of a force to be reckoned with .

As I drifted to sleep that night, my last thought was tinged with regret.

I should have let her tell me her name.

“No way.” Dylan leans back, gaping. “That’s crazy. Are you sure it’s her?”

“As sure as the heart attack I had when I saw that passport photo.”

I take a sip of the fresh coffee Samantha brought out after I stopped raving and waving a piece of paper around. The woman looked half a breath from a panic attack, and my reassuring smile only made her blanch. I make a mental note to up her tip.

Sven’s dark eyes probe mine. “It was seventeen—almost eighteen years ago.”

“It’s her.”

The hummingbird necklace. The way she freaked out when I gave her the carving. And her eyes… it was dusk to dark when we met all those years ago. I never got a good look at their color. But the shape of them. The fire in them.

Talia Stirling is Birdie.

I know it to my very bones.

I turn my gaze to the clouds outside, my head a mess of jumbled thoughts. I remember a lot about that night, but I wish I could remember every single detail. Every word she spoke. Every response I gave. But Sven’s right. It was almost two decades ago.

My life changed dramatically right after. In the following months, the memory of the young, drunk girl in a graveyard was painted over by new experiences and challenges. As the years passed, I only recall actively thinking about her one other time.

It was after Alistair and I moved to Los Angeles. We’d been grocery shopping, aimlessly wandering aisles and missing our mam’s cooking. I’d seen a girl in a baggy sweatshirt. Dark hair and bangs. And for a second—the briefest blink—I’d thought it was her. My graveyard girl all grown up. I’d almost followed her. Then Alistair asked if we could afford steaks, I lost sight of her, and life went on.

“All this time, she knew it was me,” I muse aloud. “That’s why she saw me hours after Gail called her.”

Sven makes a skeptical noise. “Your face was on the cover of Forbes last year, Kier. It’s not like she didn’t know who you were. Not saying you weren’t memorable at eighteen, but that’s… She was drunk and very young.”

“She was still Talia,” I murmur, my mind half in the conversation and half in a rainy graveyard. “She had an IQ of 150. She memorized my face—I told her my name. God, it seems so obvious now. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her.”

Dylan clears his throat. “Don’t beat yourself up, man. She looks completely different.”

Sven adds, “If she does know you’ve met before, there’s a reason she never said anything. ”

Because she wanted to help me.

I think back to that first session. Those long moments when we stared at each other. Had she been waiting to see if I’d recognize her? Had she been relieved? Disappointed? It’s impossible to say. She was a beautiful statue back then. An unsolvable equation.

More memories of the graveyard float to the surface of my mind. Greedy for them, I grab one. Then another.

And suddenly there’s a flood.

“My parents look at me like I was switched at birth. I don’t fit into their pretty, perfect aesthetic. I don’t care about anything they care about, and they don’t care about me. Sometimes I hate them, but most of the time, I just want to be who they want me to be. But I can’t. I’ve tried.”

“I don’t fit anywhere. I’m always on the outside looking in. I don’t have anyone to talk to. Sometimes it feels like I’m watching a movie of everyone else’s lives. I’m separate. Formless. With no life of my own.”

“I feel this pressure inside me. Like there’s a monster trying to get out. Sometimes it hurts so much I can’t breathe.”

“No one talks to me at school except my teachers. Not even the nerds will let me sit with them at lunch. I’m a freak to them. It’s not like I can help the way my brain works! It’s not my fault I remember whatever I read, that I understand stuff.”

“I wish I were normal. I just want to belong, to feel like I’m a part of the world. But I’m scared I never will.”

My heart feels like fire in my chest as the last levels of her puzzle box unlock, the construct unfolding like a lotus flower in my mind. As I knew they would be, her depths are beautiful beyond words.

“I see you,” I whisper. “And you do belong, Birdie. You belong with me.”