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place. Losing you was one of the most awful events in my life. I can’t go through with it again. If you don’t want to be with me then let me know now because I can’t deal with heartache a second time.”
    Evie touched his face with her hands and kissed his lips once more. “Don’t worry. I don’t plan to break your heart again.”

 
     

     
    S hortly after my heart to heart with Finn, I took a shower and dressed in a pair of cut-off pale blue jeans and a white short-sleeved peasant blouse. I’d had a couple of shots of Jack Daniels and was feeling no pain as I grabbed my phone to call my mother.
    Finn grabbed my Ulysse Nardin and whistled out loud. “Wow, this makes my iPhone look like one of those pay-as-you-go piece of shit phones. How much did this thing set you back?”
    I would never get used to the sound of his voice. He’d lived in Northern Ireland until he was ten years old when he and his mother moved here with the help of Cleona. His mother and my grandmother were second cousins but I always thought there was more to them moving to the States than met the eye.
    Though they technically arrived shortly before the famed Good Friday Agreement that was signed in 1998, he and his mother had returned to Northern Ireland often though no one really referred to the two separate entities as such, not around this part of Boston at least. When they’d gone back to see family, they merely were going back to Ireland to see family. The only difference between my grandmother and grandfather was geography. Granddad’s family came from County Kerry where as Grandma’s family originated from County Tyrone, Omagh to be exact.
    Finn had spent his first ten years of life in Omagh and had lost good friends when the bombing happened in August of 1998 by members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army opposed to the Good Friday Agreement which had been signed the previous April on the tenth.
    Ironically, Finn also had friends who went on to join the very same organization. The IRA was, technically, a disbanded terrorist organization and now only known by its political wing, Sinn Féin. Ironically, while most Americans had spent the first decade of the millennium addressing the “war on terror”, the IRA had received most of its financing from Irish-Americans. Drugs and guns were the main source of where most of the financing came from and Boston was at the heart of it all. It was impossible to grow up Irish, especially in south Boston, and be clean of all gangster activity unless one was just a working stiff. Even then, one was still touched by it through a family member or loved one.
    Unfortunately, my mother’s family was heavily involved in gangster activity though most of my uncles and great uncles had legitimate jobs. This wasn’t quite the truth for a lot of my cousins. Some had gone on to become Yuppies and they promptly cut ties with the family, similar to what my mother had done. She was basically the shining star of the family. If Athena Donahue could do it then why couldn’t they? It was a bit ironic me, being my mother’s daughter, found myself right back in the middle of the “family business” and in love with a criminal.
    Did I still love Finbar Reilly?
    It wasn’t so much a question of whether I loved him because he was my first love but whether we were willing to try for a second time to make our relationship work now that we were adults. If he continued his criminal enterprise activities then obviously the chances of us having a functional relationship were slim to none. My mother would rather have me murdered herself than to have her only child wrapped up with an Irish thug.
    I promptly grabbed my phone from Finn and replied, “I didn’t buy the damn thing—my dad did for my nineteenth birthday.”
    “Wow. He really thinks a nineteen-year-old needs a fifty thousand dollar mobile phone?” he inquired in a sarcastic voice.
    “Whoa, check out the big brain on Finn. How the hell do you know how