“Bring your better coat,” she answers. “My son is judging you now. He wasn’t before, but he is now.”
“Your son,” I say, and let the words lay down in the space between us like a rug we both know how to stand on.
Back at home, come evening and it's date night. The nanny arrives ten minutes early, a woman who could run a small country and probably does on the weekends. Liam is already in socks, hair wild, holding a book and a wooden sword. He stops when he sees me and narrows his eyes like a detective in a cartoon.
“You promised a story with monsters,” he says.
“And a plot hole you can fix,” I add.
“Good.” He grabs my hand and tries to drag me to the corner. “Mum, he said ‘plot.’ That means maps.” He glances at me under thick lashes. “Do we have to be boring while you eat?”
“We have to be boring for exactly ten seconds while I kiss your face,” Aoife says, and he endures three kisses with heroic sighs and then leans into the fourth like a small oak giving in to the wind.
I crouch and lower my voice. “Guard the fort.”
He salutes. “Aye.”
Aoife watches us with the kind of soft at the mouth that makes men do unwise things. She smooths her dress—black with a ribbon of emerald at the throat because she’s sentimental against her will—and shrugs into her coat. The nanny takes the book, already notes two dietary restrictions for snacks I have never heard of, and we are out in air that has picked up a clean blade of cold.
We go someplace that pretends it isn’t famous. The host recognizes her first and then recognizes me and decides torecognize neither. We sit by a window, the city poured out under us like a story that ends in light.
“What are you going to feed me so I forget that men say ‘far-oh’?” she asks.
“Anything with butter,” I say.
“They hide butter here,” she says, scanning the menu. “They put it in opera clothes and give it a stage name.”
“They do it for you.” I fold the napkin over my knee and take in the room. Florists who know what eucalyptus is for. Lawyers whispering. A table of women with perfect hair laughing like they own the night and might. “Order for us.”
She does without looking at the prices. The amuse arrives in spoons like pearls—a single Kumamoto oyster under champagne gelée with a dot of lemon that hits like a bell. Her eyes close. She hums low. The sound travels under the table and hooks behind my ribs.
“You approve,” I say.
“I forgive,” she corrects, and steals the second spoon.
We talk like we always do when we remember we’re good at it. She tells me a small disaster about flour delivered labeled as sugar. I tell her the freshest lie I heard at the docks this morning and whose wrist I let sweat just long enough to have a better week. She dissects the room with wicked charity. I let myself be a man at dinner with the woman he’s spent years wanting to make laugh.
Between courses she checks her phone and then sets it face down. “He’s built a fort out of cookbooks and illegal pillows,” she reports. “He has a password.”
“Good man.”
“The password is ‘soup.’”
“Better man.”
A server brings smoked scallop with charred leek and black garlic, then a risotto that smells like rain and forest floor. Shetastes both and closes her eyes for a heartbeat after, like she’s filing joy for later. She passes me her spoon and says, “Stay with me,” so lightly that only I would catch the weight.
I have almost forgotten to dread the phone when it thrills against my thigh in that quiet, coded way my men use. I glance at the screen. Seamus. I look at Aoife’s face. She nods once. I answer without leaving the table.
“Well.”
“No boyfriend,” he says. “None. Not seeing anyone.”
Aoife’s shoulders let go half an inch and then catch again, waiting.
“She goes to Old Calvary,” Seamus adds. “Weekly, if she can. Tuesdays. Thursdays if she can’t. Fresh flowers. Same stone.”
I feel the room tilt the smallest degree. “Name on the stone?”
