Page 31 of The Reaper
Maybe it’s time to give up.
Throw in the towel.
He won’t ever be yours, you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
There went the voices again, always challenging me, always thinking they knew better, but I knew one thing for sure. This obsession with Devon Brady would either make or break me, probably the latter, but I needed to find out one way or another. I had to see this through to the end, whatever end that may be. I would go down fighting. I was no weak woman, and even if I walked away, never to see him again, I had to prove that.
I had to keep my dignity.
ChapterThirteen
LEAH MAY
Itook out my new notebook from the drawer at the side of my bed and opened it up. At the top of the first page, I wrote the title, ‘Operation find your backbone’, and started to list some of the things that I could do to get a bloody grip on my life. Mum always said it was easier to think when you wrote things down. The ideas wouldn’t get stuck in your head and cloud your judgement. If you put them down on paper, you might start seeing the wood for the trees––at least that’s what she used to tell me. I hated that saying. When I looked at trees, I didn’t even see wood, only nature.
Thinking about nature made my mind wander to other things, and I began daydreaming about one of my favourite memories of watching Devon.
On the last Friday of every month, Devon would call on his neighbour, an old man who looked about eighty years old. The man wore brown knitted cardigans every day of the week, no matter what the weather was like, and used a stick to get around, even if it was just three steps from his back door to the chairs in his back yard. Devon always offered to mow his lawn, do a bit of weeding, just basic gardening jobs that the man couldn’t manage to do on his own. And on the last Friday of every month, I’d make up an excuse that I couldn’t attend the church youth group that my dad ran, and I’d sneak off to go and watch him.
Devon would work hard, pushing the man’s manual mower across the grass. He obviously couldn’t afford an electric one, but Devon didn’t complain. Sometimes, he’d take his top off, often using it to wipe the sweat off his face and chest before stuffing it into his back pocket. As a very naïve and innocent fifteen-year-old, I didn’t fully understand why that made me feel sweaty too. Waves of guilt would wash over me when that happened, but it didn’t stop me watching from behind the wall that I used to sit up against.
After an hour or so of hard labour, the old man always came out with a glass of what looked like lager for the two of them, and he’d call Devon over to have a rest. The two of them would sit together and Devon would listen as the old man talked.
I guessed the man didn’t get many visitors, and from the way he lit up when he spoke to Devon, it was clear that he adored him. He lived for these visits. But that wasn’t what made my heart hurt. It was the fact that I knew every conversation word for word because the old man told the same stories repeatedly. It was the same every week, yet Devon never let on.
The old man would start talking about how much he loved his job at the football club, and how he used to go drinking with Peter Astley and Len Fellows after a match. They were players that I’d never heard of, and Devon was probably none the wiser either, but he’d never say anything. Instead, he’d widen his eyes as if he’d just been told the most exciting thing ever. Five minutes later, the man would repeat the story with the exact same words, and Devon would smile and react as if it was his first time hearing it.
That would happen at least five or six times more during their chat, and it'd be the same the week after too. But Devon treated this man like he was gifting him the most precious stories anyone had ever been told. It made my heart swell, and it made my stomach burn. I loved watching them together, and I often thought that Devon was like the grandson this man had never had, and he was the grandfather Devon deserved.
I knew what this town thought of the Bradys and Devon in particular. I’d heard the kids at school call him the reaper, saying he’d done some horrific things. I couldn’t lie, I’d watched him do some of those things too, but to me, they were never bad. Necessary, yes. But bad? Not always.
If God did exist, like my father preached, then so did the devil. Only, it wasn’t the devil’s work that Devon and his friends carried out. It was righting the devil’s wrongs.
They say the devil makes work for idle hands, but their hands were never idle. Bloodstained sometimes, bruised and battered most definitely, but never idle.
My father spoke about good against evil, God versus the devil. But no one liked to talk about the grey area in-between, not in my life anyway, and that’s where Devon lived, in the darker, greyer shadows of life. Because not everything in life is clear cut. Evil deeds can be done for a good cause, and good people do bad things all the time. What matters is what we do with our lives, what’s in our hearts, and from what I could see, Devon’s heart was pure. As pure as my father’s, despite the disparity in the way they lived their lives. One preached about peace for all men, the other made it his mission to make that a reality for a lot of the people of Brinton Manor.
They called him the reaper because they thought he didn’t have a soul, that he only took other peoples. But I knew it wasn’t like that. I knew the truth. He did have a soul, as well as a heart, and a spirit that shone brightly from the shadows where he hid. He put others before himself. He made the world a better place just by being in it. So, when the kids at school would talk trash about him, I’d never listened. There was nothing they could say, nothing I could see that would ever stop me loving Devon Brady.
ChapterFourteen
DEVON
Itook a few days out, tried to talk myself around and gain some semblance of rationality in my mind. I even succeeded in convincing myself that I was in control. But I wasn’t. Maybe the fact that I was fighting my own thoughts and feelings wasn’t helping, but I didn’t know how to be any other way. My life had always been about me, my family and my friends. Throwing someone into the mix that could potentially mean more to me than all of that had my systems shutting down in self-defence.
In my life, preservation had always been key––Vinnie taught me that lesson early on––so opening up, being vulnerable, it didn’t come naturally. Killing did, and I’d always thought I had compassion too, but maybe I’d mistaken that for some kind of instinctive preservation. Protecting and safeguarding was one thing, but letting my emotions rule my head? It scared me. I didn’t like being powerless and at the mercy of another. To me, it was like handing someone the key to destroy your soul––that was how I saw love. With family, you had no choice; you were born that way, but in relationships, you did, or at least I used to think I did. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
When Liv returned from taking Leah May home that night, she’d come to my room to talk to me. If I were going to open up to anybody, Liv would’ve been the perfect choice. I liked her. She made me feel comfortable. But even she couldn’t break through my walls. She’d tried, but I’d made them impenetrable.
“I’ve never seen you react like that before. You really like her, don’t you?” Liv had asked, but I couldn’t admit anything. I just wanted to be left alone.
“Was she okay when you dropped her off?” I’d asked.
Liv had smiled sadly and taken a few seconds to think before she replied. I guessed she was debating whether to call bullshit on the fact that I’d sidestepped the question about liking her, but she didn’t.
Instead, she said, “She was quiet. She didn’t say much. I talked to her, asked her how she was, but she didn’t really want to chat, just told me she was okay. She must be a quiet one, like you.”
Hearing that had set the wheels in my brain in motion. Leah May wasn’t quiet, not when I’d seen her. That wasn’t who she was.
