“You will not use him to own me,” I say, and my voice is a whisper and also a knife.
“I am not a man who deserves you,” he says, and his mouth twists like the truth hurts his teeth. “I am also the man who can keep him breathing. Both can be true.”
I close my eyes because looking at him makes my chest hurt. I feel Liam’s breath slow. I feel the tired sink into my bones like a cold pool. I think of my restaurant and of Sinead’s curls and Niall’s jittery goodness and of the investors who wanted to talk about heritage brands and of the rabbit who does not listen to men. I think of the day three years ago when a gun sounded like a door slamming on my future.
I open my eyes and see Declan by the window, quiet and unblinking, and I understand with a clarity that makes my stomach turn that this is not a reunion, it is not forgiveness, it is not the simple story people tell when they are tired and want the world to be a circle instead of a line, it is captivity that comes with cocoa and clean sheets, it is the start of a season where I will have to be cleverer than I have ever been and softer than I want to be, it is the moment the tide changes direction and you either dive or drown.
Liam sighs in his sleep, turns his face into my chest, and I hold him tighter, willing my heartbeat to stay slow so his can match it. Declan does not look away from the glass. The harbor blinks like a living thing. I lie there and feel the cage settle around us and tell myself that I will keep counting the bars until I learn how to bend them.
The kettle clicks off again because I forgot to unplug it, a small domestic sound in a room where nothing else is simple. I do not move. I breathe. I memorize the pattern of the carpet and the way the curtains hang and the exact spot on the ceiling where the paint is not as perfect as the rest, because a woman who plans to survive learns a room as if it were a recipe, and I intend to live through this meal, no matter who thinks he ordered it.
I carry this sentiment with me even when he brings Liam and me to his place and tells me to treat it as mine. Moira watches like a bird of prey, just ever so slightly and cleverly out of sight. Declan’s house is many things. It is not home.
12
DECLAN
Aweek later
Aoife and Liam are home, which means the most puzzling phase of my life has begun. I tell myself this is about my son. Liam deserves his father. Aoife deserves walls that cannot be breached. That should be enough to quiet whatever else wakes with me. It is not.
She moves through the kitchen in my shirts that she has picked from the closet in the room allotted to her. Presumably, this is because she has not unpacked half her things although I suspect she also enjoys goading me. Bare feet on limestone, hair in a quick twist that refuses to stay, eyes scanning the counter for a whisk as if she could summon one from thin air. She hums while she cooks, not every day, never the same tune, and the sound threads under the copper pans and the gentle click of the espresso lever like a secret she is still deciding whether to keep. I stand in the archway with a file in my hand and pretend to read while she fries oats in butter for porridge to give them a toasted edge, while she drops a clove into the pot and then changes her mind and fishes it out with a spoon because she does not want the clove to bully the rest of the morning.
“Good?” she asks without looking up as the first bowls land on the long butcher block. She’s playing nice.
“Perfect,” I answer, and Liam copies me while he swings his legs on the tall chair, spoon already disappearing into steam.
My men adjust to the new rhythm with more grace than I expected. They step wider in the hall. They lower their voices when they pass the schoolroom door. They study their boots a little harder when the chef sends a tray up from downstairs and finds her already cooking for herself and the boy, because they understand the pleasure of a person who makes their own heat.
I sleep in the east wing because I told myself I would, because distance is a kind of discipline and I have always prized discipline. The space between our doors should be a harbor. It sharpens into a knife instead. I listen for her footsteps without meaning to. I think of the small lines at the corners of her eyes when she laughs at something Liam says and feel something like hunger settle where tiredness used to live.
She avoids my gaze when she can, always polite, never brittle.Thank you for the driver. No, I can walk to the market. Yes, he finished the story about the selkie. No, I do not need anything from town.I watch the refusal travel across her face as softly as shade across a table and I swallow it because I am the one who set the terms and she is keeping them better than I am.
The city keeps doing what cities do. It tells on people when they are careless and hides them when they pay. I move through my days with the same precision that has kept this family intact for years while my mind drifts back to the smallest things, to the way she tilts her head when she tastes something and decides whether it is worthy, to the way she keeps her palm on the back of Liam’s neck when they cross a room as if she were guiding a boat through a narrow channel, to the way her shoulders lock for an instant when the doorman calls her “missus” in a voice that carries just a shade too much familiarity. The old rage is easy. Ilook at Doyle, who has the front door today, and he looks at the floor and says, “Apologies, sir,” before I speak. I do not fire him. I should. I let the moment pass because the man has children and because the violence that would have satisfied me ten years ago is not the same thing as protection now.
“Let it go,” she says.
“I am letting it go,” I say, and she gives me a look that tells me she can pick locks with her eyes.
“You look like a thunderhead,” she says.
“I am Irish,” I answer. “We favor weather on the face.”
She laughs then, quick and bright, and for one breath the resentment that lives under my ribs unties itself.
Liam absorbs the house as if it were a fort he has always had the map for. He learns the back stairs first and then the secret closet under the third step and then the dog that belongs to one of the gardeners who is not supposed to come inside and does anyway because Liam carries an apple in his pocket for him every afternoon. He asks questions I want to spend the rest of my life answering. He pushes small cars across the library rug and tells the cars the old names for places because I tell him the old names at night. He is a mirror I did not know I needed and a wound I do not know how to touch.
It would be easy to turn the key and keep them both. I was raised by men who understood that a closed hand holds more than an open one. I know every pressure point in this city. I know how to shut a gate and softly call it love. I also know the sound a cage makes when a person like her stands inside it. I would hear it every time she set a pan on the stove. I would hear it every time she took a breath.
So I do something that feels like ceding ground and tastes like strategy. I give her back the thing that is cleanest in her, not as restitution because there is no restitution for the day shesaw me put a bullet in Wallace, but as recognition. I cannot buy forgiveness. I can place an altar in front of her and step back.
I start with a phone call to a broker who talks like a polite thief and dresses like a professor. “I want countryside,” I tell him, “inside city limits. Old bones. Room to plant. Space for a proper kitchen and a second one. Parking. And water if you can find it.”
“River or pipe?” he says in a voice that makes a question sound like a compliment.
“Both,” I answer. “And a dining room that can be loud without going hollow. And light. I want light you can eat.”
He laughs the way men laugh when they want you to know they would like to be the one to tell this story later. “You want a small kingdom.”
