Chapter 79: I Need Help, Liam
The sleep hit him the moment his head found the pillow.
Not the gradual descent of a tired man winding down — a full, immediate shutdown, the kind that bypassed every thought he’d been carrying and simply took him under. He didn’t dream. Didn’t shift position. Just eight hours of complete, uninterrupted sleep.
He surfaced slowly.
He lay there for a moment taking stock of the ceiling.
Everything ached in the distant, manageable way of a body that had been pushed and had recovered rather than the sharp complaint of one that hadn’t. The hospital visit had confirmed what he suspected — nothing wrong that rest and consistency couldn’t address. He felt, underneath the morning stiffness, genuinely good.
He thought about the $210,260 sitting in his account.
About Mrs. Harriet’s dinner, still unscheduled, still coming.
He smiled at the ceiling without meaning to.
The doorbell rang.
Liam sat up immediately — not alarmed, just alert. He reached for his phone first. The time read 9:14 AM. No missed calls. One message from Sophia, timestamped 1:22 AM.
[Sophia: Tonight was everything. Thank you.]
Below it, a reply from his own number at 1:47 AM.
[Liam: Glad you think so. Sleep well.]
He had zero memory of sending it. He’d been unconscious by midnight at the latest.
He set the phone down and moved to the door, stopping to check the peephole before opening it.
"Darren?"
Liam opened the door and the word he’d been about to say dissolved before it arrived.
Darren stood in the hallway looking like a man who had spent the night somewhere his mind hadn’t fully returned from. The eye bags were severe — not tired, hollowed, the specific look of someone who hadn’t slept because sleep hadn’t been an option rather than a choice. His clothes were creased beyond what a long night produced.
And there was blood on his shirt. Not much. But there.
"Holy shit," Liam said. "You look terrible."
Darren said nothing. He stepped inside when Liam moved aside, and Liam looked both ways down the road before closing the door — a reflex he didn’t examine until after he’d done it.
Darren crossed the living room and sat on the sofa like his body was on auto-pilot. He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely linked, looking at the floor.
Liam went to the kitchen without asking.
He came back with a full glass of water and set it in front of him. Darren took it and drank half of it in one pull and held the rest, and Liam sat in the armchair across from him and looked at him properly.
The bruises were visible now — forearms mostly, one along the jawline that hadn’t been there two days ago. Not the clean bruising of a fight with another person either which was strange.
Liam turned the television on low and said nothing.
The morning moved around them. A news programme cycled through its segments. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Darren finished the water at some point and set the glass down and continued looking at the floor and Liam remained silent, because Darren was not a man you rushed toward the thing he’d come to say.
Fifty minutes passed.
"I need help." Darren’s voice came out lower than usual, rougher. "I need help real bad."
He was trembling slightly. Not dramatically — just a fine, persistent tremor in the hands that Liam recognised as the physical residue of something that had been running too hot for too long and had finally burned down to the wire.
Liam had never heard Darren say those words in that order in his life.
He leaned forward and placed his hand on Darren’s shoulder.
"Anything you need," he said. That was all.
Darren showered and changed into clothes Liam found him, and came back looking marginally more present. He sat back on the sofa and held a second glass of water with both hands.
"I nearly robbed a gas station last night," he said.
Liam kept his face still.
"Had the thing in my hand. Sat in the car outside for ten minutes." Darren’s jaw worked. "I talked myself into it almost completely." He looked at his hands. "Then I thought about you. I knew you would be so disappointed." He exhaled. "I put it back."
"The bruises," Liam said carefully.
"Me." Darren said it simply. "I was so angry at myself." He looked up. "I’m not going to do it again. I just — I needed somewhere to put it."
There was a long silence.
"Darren," Liam called him out/
"I’m broke, Liam. Not struggling — broke. Like, the tank was on empty last night and I couldn’t fill it. There’s a woman I’m seeing and she paid the bill at dinner and I sat there and let her because I had no choice and I felt—" He stopped. "I felt like nothing."
Liam listened without interrupting.
"I’m not asking you for money," Darren said quickly. "That’s not why I’m here."
"I know," Liam reassured him.
"I just needed somewhere to—"
"I know," Liam said again. "I hear you."
They sat with that for a moment.
"I’m going to sort the bills," Liam said. "That’s not a conversation. That’s happening." He held up a hand before Darren could speak. "But that’s not the real fix and we both know it. You need something sustainable. Something that actually pays you what you’re worth and puts you somewhere you can build from."
Darren looked at him.
"My firm," Liam said.
Darren frowned slightly. "You don’t have a firm."
"Not yet." Liam leaned back. "But I will. And when I do, I need someone I trust completely handling operations. Not legal work — the infrastructure. The management side." He looked at Darren directly. "You’re the most capable person I know. You’ve just never had the right room to be in."
Darren was quiet for a long moment.
"You’re not doing this out of pity," he said. It wasn’t quite a question.
"I’m doing it because I need someone I don’t have to second-guess and you need something real." Liam shrugged. "Works for both of us."
Darren looked at the floor again. Something in his shoulders released — slowly, almost reluctantly.
"Okay," he said quietly.
Liam nodded once.
He looked at the window and thought about the firm — about the list of fourteen contacts, about Mrs. Harriet’s referrals coming, about the structure he’d been building in outline form on a legal pad.
It needed to work now for more than one reason.