Chapter 245 The History of a Gamester
POV: Cormac | Memory, then present
I am forty-one years old and I have been making the wrong bets for most of them and I understand now, in the specific way that understanding arrives when it is too late to change the things it pertains to but not too late to change what comes after, how the pattern began and what it produced and why today is the day I make the bet that matters.
The beginning is Callum.
Not the beginning of the problem, which is a misreading of it that I spent thirty years doing, but the actual beginning, which is that we were brothers who loved each other with the uncomplicated love of children who do not yet know that love requires work to maintain against the things that come to complicate it, and the love was real and it was the foundation of everything, and the foundation was sound.
I was six when Callum was born and I spent the first years of his life in the specific relationship of an older brother to a younger one who is interesting and occasionally inconvenient and who is fundamentally yours in the way that siblings are yours, and he was interested in everything and he asked questions about all of it and I answered the questions with the authority of a six-year-old who has been alive three years longer and who therefore knows significantly more about the world, which is not as much as I thought but which felt definitive.
We were close until we were not, which is the simple way to describe what happened and which is accurate in the way that simple descriptions of complex things are sometimes accurate, which is in the outline without the content.
The content is our father.
Ronan Brennan loved both of us. I believe this and I have believed it even in the years when I would not have said it out loud, the years when I was building the case against Callum and when anything that complicated the case was being managed rather than accommodated. He loved both of us and he loved us differently, the way parents love children who are different from each other differently, the love calibrated to the person rather than identical across the category, and the specific difference in the way he loved me versus the way he loved Callum was the thing I took the wrong lesson from when I was seventeen and when I was twenty-five and when I was thirty and when I was thirty-eight.
The lesson I took was that the difference meant I was less.
The lesson the journal said was that Callum was always meant to lead, that our father saw it and did not change the tradition to accommodate it, and that our father was sorry.
I took the wrong lesson for thirty years and built a life on it.
The frame-up was the worst choice. I understand this clearly now, in the way you understand things clearly when you are not managing your distance from them, which is that the frame-up was not a strategic decision, it was a panic decision, the specific panic of someone who has been betting on the wrong foundation for thirty years and who can feel the foundation shifting and who responds to the shift by trying to remove the thing that is causing it rather than by examining the foundation.
Callum was not causing the shift. The foundation was always wrong. But I could not see that from inside it, and the things you cannot see from inside them are the things that produce the worst choices.
The Alpha reign was five years of deepening the hole that the frame-up dug, each decision producing the next decision in the specific way that bad decisions produce each other, the logic of a position that requires constant reinforcement because it is not actually sound, and by the end of the five years I had lost Moira and I was losing Finn and I had lost the community's trust and I had lost myself in the specific way that people lose themselves when they have been performing a version of themselves for long enough that the performance has replaced the person.
The bottom was the Rookeries, Callum's crew, the specific moment of understanding that the person I had been performing was the wrong person and that the right person was available if I was willing to do the work of becoming them, which is not a simple work and which does not feel like the work you expected it to feel like, which is that it feels like grief for the time you spent being wrong and like the specific unfamiliar quality of a person who is doing something for the first time that they should have been doing for years.
The present is this preparation room and this blade and four hours until dawn and the specific understanding of what I am betting today, which is everything I have on my brother and on doing what is right.
Not on winning. On being right. On being the person who fought on the correct side for the correct reasons, which is a bet that pays out regardless of whether you survive it, which is the specific quality of the right bets that distinguishes them from the wrong ones, which is that the right bets are worth making even when you lose.
"Today," I say, to the preparation room and the blade and the thirty-eight years of wrong bets and the three years of different choices and the morning coming up grey over London, "I bet everything on my brother. On doing what's right."
I hold the blade.
"Even if it kills me."