AOIFE
The following morning
Frost flowers over the front windows when I arrive at the restaurant, white veins branching through the glass like someone sketched an herbarium in the night and forgot to erase it. The lane is quiet, tires whispering on salt, gulls sulking on the roofline, a sun the color of skim milk trying to make a day out of it anyway. I unlock the door, breathe in the cold perfume of steel and lemon oil, and for a second I stand in the threshold and think, mine, and the word steadies me the way a good blade steadies in the hand.
The bell rings not a moment later. I turn to see Moira at the window. Lips pursed, I open to let her through. She takes a seat in the center of the dining room like a poem about winter, spine straight, ankles crossed, gloved hands resting lightly on the table that will soon be covered in menus and laughing elbows. She wears black from throat to heel, not a funeral black but that careful lacquer rich women wear when they intend to be remembered. Her coat is draped over the chair beside her, heavy wool with a stand collar and a row of antique silver buttons, each stamped with a tiny harp. She does not take off her gloves. Herexpression says she is not impressed by frost, by mornings, by anything that has ever tried to surprise her.
I leave my scarf looped around my neck and flip on the low lights. “You could have called,” I say, crossing to the sideboard where the tea lives. “I would have arranged a parade.”
She lets the faintest smile pass over her mouth, the kind you could miss if you blinked. “Parades are for politicians,” she answers. “I prefer outcomes.”
“Outcomes require caffeine,” I say, opening the tin. “Irish breakfast, or shall I scandalize you with Assam.”
“Irish,” she says. “Strong. No lemon.”
“Milk and sugar?”
“Milk,” she says after a pause. “No sugar.”
Of course. I set the kettle on, listen to the first low growl as it warms. I collect two cups, gilded but chipped, a small jug of milk, a bowl of sugar cubes for symmetry, and the tea caddy with its neat square compartments. When the kettle sighs, I pour, the steam rising in clean ghostly pillars. The dining room fills with that brisk, tannic comfort that reminds me of my grandmother’s kitchen and the sound of rain on slate.
Moira watches me make it, not out of curiosity, more like an auditor checking the figures. “You open at eleven,” she says, gaze traveling over the banquettes, the bar polished to a glow, the spray of winter branches I tucked into emerald glass last night.
“We open when I say so,” I reply, setting her cup on a saucer with a small decisive click. “Sometimes that’s eleven.”
She studies the tea, then me. “You have good hands,” she says, neutrally, as if cataloging an asset that will appreciate.
“Thank you,” I answer. “I use them.”
She does not remove her gloves to lift the cup, just tilts her wrist, the porcelain balanced on black leather, and I cannot help thinking about all the women who have done the same in rooms where they were not asked to belong but told to perform it. Shesips, approves with a small incline of her head that would thrill a lesser person, and sets the cup down.
“I am not here to quarrel,” she says.
“Lovely,” I say. “We are fresh out of quarrels. We only do tea and toasts on weekdays.”
Her eyes say, be serious. “I am here because you have a talent for mistaking temporary affection for power,” she says, with the kind of calm that makes you imagine someone else is about to be corrected. “And because that mistake kills people where we come from.”
“We do not come from the same place,” I say, keeping my voice even, keeping my breath slow. “We only occupy the same patch of ground for the moment.”
“You occupy what my son allows,” she answers. “The world he was born into does not accept women like you for long. It tolerates, then it punishes, then it forgets.”
My laugh is soft and not friendly. “Women like me? Talented, tired, paid less than we are worth, inconveniently alive?”
She does not flinch. “Unmanageable.”
I pour more tea, for me this time, and tip in the milk so it blooms, clouding the amber until it settles into a warm brown. “You disapprove of the kitchen,” I say. “Or of me in it.”
“I disapprove of sentiment dressed as structure,” she says, lifting the cup again. “He buys you a restaurant and you think it is a fortress. It is a stage. The audience changes. The building burns.” She sips. “The boy does not deserve to learn that lesson on your watch.”
At Liam’s name something tightens in my chest, a string pulled through fabric. I set the cup down carefully so I do not crack it. “Declan may belong to your world,” I say, and my voice is not louder, only steadier, “but Liam does not. My son will never be a pawn for a dynasty that poisons everything it touches.Not the docks, not the church, not this dining room, not the bed I make or the food I put on the table.”
Her eyes flicker at the word son, not surprise, not quite, more an acknowledgment that I have said a thing she has always known but preferred not to hear spoken aloud. “You cannot keep him clean,” she says. “None of us keep clean. We choose where the dirt goes.”
“Then I will choose,” I say. “You do not get to.”
She looks at me as if weighing whether to break something or polish it. “You think he will change for you,” she says. “He changed for no one.”
“I do not want him to change,” I answer, surprising myself with the truth of it. “I want him to tell me the truth before the gun goes off.”
