Fixing 9 - Tadhg Lynch & Bethany Gibson

Everyone remembers the Lynch fire.
Everyone remembers the bodies carried out.
But no one remembers the boy left standing in the middle of it all.

Tadhg Lynch isn't the golden Lynch boy. He isn't the baby who got shielded from the worst, or the oldest who carved a new life with a family of his own. He's the one in between. The one who saw everything, took the blows meant for his younger brothers, and carried scars no one wanted to look too closely at. Brave. Bold. Mouthy. A joker when he can manage it. And broken enough that nothing ever really sticks.

Bethany Gibson is the girl who shouldn't have lived. She was three when the water took her under, when her father gave his life to save hers. She grew up in the shadow of grief, wrapped in the protection of a brother who bled for her in ways she only half understands. Sweet, funny, too kind for her own good-Bethany knows what it is to survive, but not yet what it means to live.

When Bethany collides with Tadhg at Tommen, it's fire meeting oxygen-sharp words, sharp looks, a pull neither of them can shake. He's crude, cruel with his jokes, too much for anyone to handle. She's soft where he's jagged, sunshine where he's ash. He calls her Barbie. She calls him an arsehole. And somewhere between the laughs and the fights, they start to see the cracks in each other.

But fixing what's shattered isn't simple.
Not when trauma festers.
Not when grief never loosens its grip.
Not when love means putting your hands into the fire all over again.

Funny. Raw. Heartbreaking. Fixing 9 is a story about the girl who wouldn't stop caring, the boy who didn't know how to be cared for, and the brutal, beautiful mess of trying to save each other when the world already tried to burn or drown you alive.