In the world of old families, two events of the year stood out above the rest. Above all the high society galas and competitive fundraisers and stuffy weddings. One was the New Year's Eve party thrown by the Farrow family. The family relocated to America a couple of generations before, but they held the party at their estate still in Scotland. Unlike Alex's family, they weren't the type to host people outside of their immediate extended family often, so the day was a rare opportunity for people to work their way closer into the family's favor, at risk of doing something to work their way out.
The other was Alistair Conrad's birthday celebration. People who were already in the family's good graces were extended invitations, so it was more of an indicator of status than a way to gain it. It was held at the family's main estate in Bedfordshire. It was a rare moment of the year when the entire Conrad clan was gathered in one place, and ever since he could remember Alex has dreaded the day. It wasn't just the party either. In the week before and after the house was filled with every single one of his cousins, aunts, uncles, and more. It was the only time of year the building felt far too small.
His mother and her siblings also took the day as a competition of sorts. Every year a different one would put it on, keen to outdo whatever had been done before. The others would almost work together to subtly undermine the planner. Alex was sure it was the only time any of them worked together on anything.
That year it was his aunt Mary's turn, so she arrived at the estate early, about three weeks before the party was slated for the end of August. She brought her husband Noah and her two children with her. Alex's cousins Sean and Amelie.
If Alex was a bit of a black sheep in his family because he tried too hard to stay invisible, Sean was a black sheep because he did too much to stand out. It was never really anything more extreme than what any teenager did to rebel. Drinking, marijuana, skipping classes, and giving himself bizarre tattoos and haircuts. He used foul language and had absolutely no filter, especially when talking to supposed authority figures. Though you could tell from the way he spoke to them that he saw no authority at all.
Conrads always had a bit of a tendency to overreact to these things, so Sean was one step away from being excommunicated from the family in most of their eyes. He never would be, though. He knew it, and so did everyone else. Not as long as Alistair Conrad was still around, at least. Because Sean was Mary's son, and Mary was Alistair Conrad's favorite daughter. All she had to do was ask and he would turn the other cheek. If Alex had done half the things Sean had, he would have been left on an abbey's doorstep years ago. If his mother didn't kill him first, of course.
Alex used to not be able to stand being around Sean for more than thirty minutes at a time, but not counting the babies he was the cousin Alex always got on with the best. The worst was probably Julia and Laurent. They were his uncle Thomas's kids. Their mother was a French woman named Karina, who never quite got over the fact that her plans to be the next Conrad matriarch were ruined when Margaret was chosen to be Alistair's successor over Thomas. Her bitterness trickled down to her children. The two envied Alex's position as the next in line after his mother. He had tried telling them once that if he could he would give it all to them, but that only seemed to make them hate him more. They were twins, only a couple of months older than him, and constantly used their numbers advantage to make him miserable.
His younger cousins weren't much better. Victoria and Patrick were his uncle Sebastian's kids. Victoria was one year behind him, and Patrick three. Sebastian and his wife Beatrice tended to travel a lot. Even though they had their own home in Yorkshire, more often than not Victoria and Patrick were there at the main estate. Victoria at least was a bit too self-absorbed to spend much time bothering Alex, but when they were forced together Alex had to resist tearing his hair out with how much she went on about herself. Always in ways that were meant to make Alex feel like an idiot in comparison to her brilliance. Alex was convinced Patrick was some kind of certified sadist. The tortures small animals in his free time kind. The amount of bigotry and malice he had by the age of ten was almost impressive.
His aunt Claire was the youngest of all her siblings, so her children were the youngest of Alex's cousins. Moira was ten years younger; Tiana was twelve years younger, and then Louis was just a newborn by the time Alex was fifteen. Alex only saw them once a year, at his grandfather's party, because they all lived in Spain with Claire and her husband. They seemed cute and relatively normal so far. Claire was always one of his mother's more laid-back siblings, probably because she was the youngest. Their father Emilio was also a pretty good-natured guy, more concerned with his horses, vineyards, and children than the politics of the old families.
Then of course there was Amelie, Sean's younger sister. Alex loved Amelie, but he wondered often how much that had to do with her, and how much it had to do with pity over the way everyone else always talked about her.
His aunt Mary's marriage to Noah Brennan was plagued by rumors since it started. He had a reputation for being a playboy as a bachelor, and nobody expected that to end just because he was married. Not even when his wife was Mary Conrad. Pretty soon every other old family wyvern had some kind of story about seeing the two of them in the middle of a spat somewhere. Sometimes even at each other's throats. When they didn't have any more children right away after Sean, it just looked worse. Soon they were hardly seen together at all. Affairs on both sides are speculated now. Whispers of divorce even. And then Amelie.
At first, everyone saw it as a sign of them mending fences. But then Amelie was born and, well... She didn't look like Noah, and she didn't particularly look like Mary either. If there was anyone she resembled, it was an American named Christopher Dominguez whom Mary had dated in her school years. They had been in Ireland on a business trip right before Mary got pregnant, and happened to run into Mary at an art gallery in Dublin while he was there.
Amelie's parentage then became the worst-kept secret in the United Kingdom. Noah Brennan came pretty close to filing for divorce. Why he didn't wasn't common knowledge, but Sean had told Alex in a rare moment where they were able to talk like friends.
It was back when they were at school, the week after returning from the Christmas holiday. Sean and his family hadn't been at the Farrow New Year's Eve party, which most people expected, but Alistair Conrad had been noticeably absent as well. Sean had shown up at Alex and Jack's flat with a six-pack of contraband beer, which Jack was more than willing to help him with without question. Alex had a feeling Sean was there to do more than just break the rules with the company, so once Jack was snoring on the floor and Sean was halfway drunk, Alex got up the nerve to ask him what he wanted.
"Our family is fucked up Lexi," Sean said instead of answering. His accent and slurred speech forced Alex to work extra hard to understand him. "You ever notice that?"
"I have," Alex said simply.
"Julia and Laurent torment you just because our granddad decided to give your mum more of his money."
"Yeah."
"Our parents marry us off to the highest bidder before we've even finished pissing our beds."
"Yes."
"They keep your dad drugged up because they're embarrassed by him."
"They do."
"Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Embarrassed by your dad?"
"... Sometimes. Most of the time I'm just scared, though."
"Of him? Or for him?"
Alex thought of the ways he had been watching his father deteriorate over the years. Constantly tired, unable to walk long, losing weight, losing his mind. The first two things that came to mind when he thought of him were seeing him half-conscious in bed and the middle of a fit, attacking his caretakers like he had intended to kill.
"Both," Alex finally admitted.
Sean nodded as he understood, and Alex had a feeling he did. In a way that no one else could. He quickly downed the rest of the beer that was in the can in his hand and crushed it.
"I'm embarrassed by my dad," he said, looking down at the warped aluminum. "He's a fucking joke. A small man who thinks he's big just because he fucks every other thing with two legs."
Sean paused, but Alex didn't say anything. He just let the silence fall over them. It was heavy, but Alex knew it wasn't his place to break it. Finally, Sean gritted his teeth and threw his empty can toward the garbage bin across the room. It hit the wall behind it and bounced in, causing a bit of racket as it did. Jack stirred slightly, and Alex was sure he had woken up.
"Alistair showed up at the house on New Year's," Sean explained, not even noticing that Jack had stopped snoring. "He knew my dad was waiting for the holidays to pass before making the divorce filing official. Even he seemed to have the sense that doing it at Christmas was a bad PR move. Alistair came to stop him. To convince him that regardless of any scandal or embarrassment, being married to Conrad was still more advantageous than being divorced from one. But my dad wasn't having any of it. He wanted out. He had wanted out since he got in, and now he finally had a good reason. Why wouldn't he take it?"
Sean paused again, reaching to open the final beer left in his pack. When he got halfway through it without finishing his story, Alex decided to prod him further.
"Why didn't he take it?" he asked quietly.
Sean looked like he was going to down the rest of his beer before he answered that, but he brought the half-empty can away from his mouth and sighed.
"Because Alistair did his fucking homework. He found at least half a dozen of my dad's bastards scattered around this whole goddamn country! And the way he was talking made it seem like the PIs he hired were still tracking down more. The oldest of them was twenty. Her name's Louise. She lives in London. She's a baker." Sean's voice started to lose its edge slightly, but before Alex could think on that too much, it returned. "The youngest is two months younger than Amelie! Can you believe that? He gets all high and mighty about my mother having one affair, while not only has he had at least six different ones, but one of them was more recent than hers! Where does he get the fucking nerve? Like he hadn't been doing the same thing this whole time? Like he wasn't the one who fucking started it?"
The hand Sean was holding his beer with started shaking, so badly that droplets were starting to pop out. Sean tried to steady it by tightening his grip on it, but he tightened too much and crushed it, sending half the remaining contents flying out.
"Shit!" Sean angled the can away from Alex to keep the stuff from spilling on him, but then it just ended up on the carpet. "Shit. Sorry, mate."
"It's fine," Alex said, holding out his hand for the crushed can. Sean gave it to him and Alex took it over to the kitchenette, dumping the rest down the drain before wetting a towel. He felt Sean watching him as he dabbed at the beer stain.
"I can do that," Sean whispered.
"It's fine."
"You say that a lot."
"Sorry."
Alex saw Sean crack a smile out of the corner of his eye. "You say that a lot too," he said, his voice carrying a strange sound with it. Alex looked up to see that his cousin had started crying. "You always mean it, though, don't you?"
"Not always," Alex admitted.
"Almost always."
"Almost."
"My dad never means it. I don't think most people in our family do. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've heard any of them other than aunt Claire even say it."
"No, I don't think so."
"I'm sorry, Alex. I mean that."
"It's just beer, Sean."
"Not just for the beer. I know I haven't always been very nice to you. You've always been a bit of an easy target, you know? You're just... you're not like the rest of us. And you have to know that's a good thing, Lexi. You're different from us and that's a fucking good thing."
"You're different too."
Sean laughed without humor. "No," he said miserably. "No, I'm just like them. I'm the worst of them, Lexi. Because even they have to answer to the big guy, you know? I'm what happens when a Conrad doesn't have the fear of a god in them. My dad doesn't have that fear either. When all Alistair had was a firm word with him, he didn't budge. It took blackmail to get him back in line. You know, at first, I was so mad about all that. What was the point of them staying married? They hate each other. He tolerates me, but Amelie? He's horrible to her. He'll only get worse as she gets older. You know I was set on letting out the secret when Alistair and my dad made the deal to keep it all hush."
"Was?"
Sean nodded, wiping some of the tears out of his eyes. Alex wondered if it had taken him until now to realize he was crying. "The reason I got back here a day late? It was because I stayed in London longer than I was meant to. I wanted to meet her. Louise... My big sister. Alistair left a copy of all the stuff his PIs dug up on my dad, to remind him of everything he knew. I took them from his office. Her work address was in there. This sickly-sweet little bakery in Stratford. The kind that hosts little girls' birthday parties where they get all dressed up like princesses. They weren't open when I got there, but I saw her through the window display, icing little roses on dozens of tiny cakes. It was just such a... such a normal scene you know? She's at university right now. Her mum is a waitress. As far as I can tell the money my dad gave her to keep quiet was all put into her school savings. If people find out she's Noah Brennan's daughter, if she gets caught up in this scandal, her life would go to hell. She deserves to live the way she is now. Normal. Quiet. Making little cakes for six-year-old princesses."
"Did you talk to her?"
Sean shook his head. "To keep her life from going to hell, I kind of need to stay away from her, right?"
Alex didn't think that was true, but he also didn't think telling Sean that would change his mind.
"Anyways," Sean continued, "seeing her just made me realize it's all bigger than petty fights and the four of us. I want him gone, but if to do that I got to throw all those kids under the bus, then I can't. I just wish it felt less like he was getting away with all this, you know? Oh, poor Noah, he has to stay married to the woman he's been leeching off of for years. He can't abandon one of his only kids he couldn't buy out of his life. He has to ignore some other guy's daughter the same way he ignored his son." Sean looked down at his feet, suddenly very interested in one of the holes in his socks. "If anyone is getting a shite deal out of this it's Amelie. She'll have to grow up with everyone whispering bastard behind her back. Even her nannies are cruel to her. I wish I was there. I wanted to... I want to protect her."
"Maybe you still can."
"Brighton to Dublin's not exactly a quick commute, Lexi." Sean sighed and slid down until he was parallel to the floor. "You know how they found out so quickly?" he asked the ceiling. "She came out too cute to be my dad's kid. Remember when I was a baby? I was the ugliest fecking thing on the planet. But Amelie? She came out too cute. That's how they all knew. This baby's too cute to be Noah Brennan's daughter, they said."
Alex stood up as Sean continued to ramble. He passed by Jack to grab a spare pillow and blanket from his room and noticed his friend looking at him with wide eyes. So, he had heard all that. Alex felt lucky for the first time that Jack was his flatmate because anyone else would have probably told the first person what they heard the very next day. But Alex didn't even wonder for a second if Jack would.
Once Alex had the pillow and blanket, he came back to a still rambling Sean, though his voice was quieter as he drifted closer and closer to sleep. When Alex lifted his head to put the pillow underneath him, he interrupted himself to say "Thanks, mate," and then went right back to his rambling. Alex was having such difficulty understanding him he was pretty sure he was speaking Gaeilge by this point. Once he was under the blanket Alex put on him, though, he trailed off. His words turned into mumbles and then into slightly ragged breathing.
"Shit dude," Jack said once Sean was asleep, sitting up from his spot on the floor. "You handled that well."
"I hardly did anything," Alex pointed out.
"I won't tell anyone, by the way."
"I know."
"You do?"
"Yeah. And thank you."
"All I did was drink a couple of beers and pretend to be asleep."
Alex rolled his eyes. "That reminds me, you need to take those cans away before they do the room check."
"But they're doing one tomorrow morning."
"I know."
Jack sighed dramatically and stood up. "Fine. But if I get bit by another fox on the way to the compactor-"
"I'll hold your hand while you get your rabies shot," Alex assured.