Beginning of the End
Brian notices the way his mother is wasting long before she does.
She spends the time away from the office in her room or at her desk, papers strewn in front of her as she desperately tries to make connections between events and faces and actions that are simply not connected. An alibi here, an email illegally obtained from somebody's account there. The strings refuse to pull together, they can not be made sense of. There is no sense to be made of them.
One day she does not wake up to take him to school, and when he peeps into her room she is asleep on the floor and the wall is covered in the same pieces of paper she once stared at on the kitchen table. Now there is string stretching between them, pen scrawling across it in different colours, impossible for him to comprehend. Brian catches the bus to school that day. She never asked how he got there.
Marie and Tony's old music teacher comes over sometimes when she's crying in the kitchen into a glass of red wine. She never could touch red before, not for the last five years. One day when she spills it on the cream carpet in the hall she rubs bleach into the stain until her skin cracks and bleeds, but there's a patch there, paler and pinker than the surrounding floor. It looks like blood. Brian fails to make the connection. Diane gets the carpet removed, the floor under sanded. "It looks cleaner, now," she tells him.
She replaces the CCTV system and watches back the footage every morning when she crawls from her room. Diane has stopped sleeping again, and instead substitutes stupor or sex for this time.
Brian accidentally calls the teacher 'dad' one day after he had stayed there a couple of days in a row, and he doesn't come over again for a week or two. Brian feels guilty. Diane cannot cry without Thomas there any more.
The time she spends out of her room begins to decrease. A frightened-looking man in his twenties comes over a couple of times and though he does not stay over, he doesn't leave until the early hours of the morning. Brian desperately hopes they are not sleeping together. His worries are unfounded, of course, but the concern is there.
He hears information sometimes at two in the morning that he shouldn't.
"Hey, I did some digging, Ms Cavanaugh, and apparently The Sidera were pretty on the Merveilles. A name that came up is Cassandra."
She asks the scared man to leave, and he does, hands curling into nervous fists.
When Claude, that charmingly horrible police officer, finally tells her that Kathryn's death was not planned, she asks him to prove it. When he obliges, she sees that the police may be correct this time. Diane lets Kathryn go.
Diane begs for help this time, she finally gives Alaric the humiliation he was hoping for, and he agrees to her plea. When the information he gives her comes back, everything connects and she spends an entire day off work, sobbing in elation. It was her, Cassandra, that witch, who had him killed.
But there's no revenge to be had on somebody who is already dead. So she finds her old address and pays somebody to burn that beautiful house down. Watching the chaos, feeling that accomplishment, Diane has never felt so alive.
Following the day that the house on Gregory Avenue burned to a shell, Brian notices his mother trying not to smile when it appears on the news. He pretends not to notice. Somehow after that, she seems normal - okay, even. She schedules a family meal for that evening, and kisses Brian and tells him she's proud that he's so grown up when he leaves for school.
Over dinner, she tells her children that she is changing her name back to Ahearn. Marie is shocked but Tony seems pleased, and Brian asks if he can change his, too. She beams at him, saying, "Of course, darling."
Two days after the fire and the house's maiming, she quits her job with the Konings and finds a vacancy in a small accountancy firm. The money is not as good, but the hours allow her to again take care of her son, and the work is leisurely.
The teacher comes over for dinner, sometimes, but not very often. All the same, Brian decides he likes the man. Now he's in high school, Mr O'Mariet ruffles his hair in the corridors and gives him extensions on his homework.
The arrangement seems to work, and whilst Brian Cavanaugh-Ahearn quietly hopes for a wedding, there is not one. But his mother is happy, now. She never drinks, not even with her meals, and when Brian goes into her room to find her one day, the wall is adorned with frames filled with family photographs. The windows are open, it feels airy and freeing. On her dressing table is a vinyl named 'I Just Called To Say I love You' by a singer Brian has only barely heard of, signed 'Love Richard'.
