He laughs into his bowl and the sound goes through me like heat through cold fingers. I watch his face as he eats, that solemn concentration he gets when he decides food is a job, and thememory of last night’s empty bed recedes a little, not gone, never gone, but quieter, like a door that doesn’t slam anymore.
When he asks to paint, I say yes before the word is finished. We lay an oilcloth on the nursery floor and tape the corners like a ritual. I line up jam jars of tempera—emerald, cobalt, a red so bright it looks dangerous, a yellow that smells faintly of art class and childhood—and he chooses the small brush first, the one that makes thin lines like secret paths. I sit with a mug of tea and let the steam fog my cheeks, and I try to breathe at the same rhythm as the stroke of his hand.
“What are you making?” I ask, even though I can see it already, a fox in a boat with a flag, the water tall and spiky, the sky crowded with a sun that has too many rays because he doesn’t believe in moderation.
“Us,” he says. “Going somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere safe,” he says, so matter-of-fact it makes my chest ache.
We break for lunch because his stomach announces the hour before any clock does. I make grilled cheese the way my grandmother taught me, with a smear of mustard that nobody ever guesses and a lid on the pan for the last minute so the heat creeps into the bread and melts the center without burning the outside. The onions I cooked down yesterday go into mine, glossy and sweet. He refuses them with the solemn integrity of a small person who knows his mind, so I tuck one inside anyway and he eats it without noticing, which feels like both victory and betrayal and I will tell him in ten years and we will laugh.
He naps, finally, knees tucked under, one fist open on the pillow as if holding court with invisible friends, and I stand at the door and look at him until I can feel the breath in my own body slow down in sympathy. Downstairs I hear the low music of men’s voices and the hush of doors and the distant hum of agenerator that never sleeps, and for once I let it all exist without arguing with it. I am not surrendering, I am allocating energy, which any good chef will tell you is the real art.
Later that week, Declan asks me to come see “something not terrible,” which is as close to enthusiasm as he allows himself in daylight. He’s waiting in the old study turned schoolroom, sleeves rolled, tie loose, a draft of winter air pooling near the windows even with the heat on, and the table is covered in documents and prints and a little model of our garden that looks like a diorama for very serious fairies.
He keeps his voice even, like he’s explaining a safety drill on a plane we are already sitting on. “Liam will be homeschooled here,” he says, and the word lands without apology. “Not forever if it doesn’t suit. For now. A team—literacy, math, science with experiments in the garden, music, art. Irish three times a week. Movement every day. We’ll rotate teachers so he meets different minds. You’ll choose half. I’ll choose half.”
He points to a schedule that looks like a complicated dance, then to a blueprint of the grounds where the garden has transformed into an outdoor classroom—raised beds, a glass cold frame, a table with sinks that will run warm water even in winter, a weather station with a tiny anemometer, and a chalkboard that will face south because he remembered the light in the afternoons tilts just so.
“Security doubles,” he says, almost soft. “No uniforms to scare him. They blend and they watch. The back road gets a new gate. The vans we use for the market are switched out weekly. Play dates here to start, then out to neutral spaces we control. Teachers vetted twice over, then again. He learns. He runs. He climbs things and falls and learns again.”
“You’re giving up on normal,” I say, not sharp, just honest, the tea cooling in my hand untouched.
“No,” he answers. “I’m giving up on pretending normal is safe.”
I let that sit. The model garden catches a shaft of winter sun and the tiny painted lettuce leaves shine. “He needs other kids,” I say. “He needs noise. He needs to make a mess that isn’t cleaned up by people he doesn’t know.”
“He will,” Declan says. “We’ll bring noise. And mess. And people he will know.”
“And me,” I say, because there’s a line I have to draw with my mouth. “I’m the constant. He reads my face to measure weather.”
Declan meets my eyes. “And I will not change that.”
We go sheet by sheet through the plan. I argue for free afternoons, for unstructured hours where he can build a fort under the table and call it school. I insist on a kitchen unit with child-safe burners and a drawer full of blunt knives because nobody learns patience like a kid cutting mushrooms for the first time. Declan takes notes in a neat hand, and when I say no to a bodyguard in the corner of the classroom, he doesn’t push. He redraws the grid so the guard becomes a gardener who also knows how to stop a man from opening a gate.
I ask about holidays and he says, “We leave when it’s quiet,” and I ask about friends and he says, “We will find the right ones,” and I ask about what happens if Liam says no and he says, “Then we listen.” He lays out protocols and redundancies and emergency codes, and I hate that I recognize them for what they are—a language meant to hide fear inside useful work—and I love him for giving me something to hold.
In the afternoon, it happens. The air changes first, the temperature drops a degree, the light shifts like a hand paused over a switch. Then Moira O’Connell walks into the schoolroom without being announced, dressed in black that eats whatever light the room can spare, gloves she does not remove, mouth aline that could cut glass. She doesn’t greet me. She doesn’t have to. She sees a chair and moves it two inches. She adjusts the globe. She folds the corner of the schedule like it offended her.
“Discipline begins with sightlines,” she says, as if to the furniture. “A child must understand authority without needing to be told where it sits.”
I set my teacup down, very gently, because smashing Wedgewood seems like a waste. “I prefer children who understand why, not where.”
She turns that glacier gaze on me. “You prefer many things that do not last.”
“What a relief,” I say, bright and false. “I was worried I’d accidentally build an empire.”
“The boy is an O’Connell,” she says, the definite article a blade. “Heir is not a costume you can hang on a peg by the door when it becomes inconvenient. He will sit straight. He will sign his name with a hand that does not shake. He will learn what our name buys and what it costs.”
“He will learn kindness,” I say. “He will learn to bake without eating the raw dough. He will learn not to pull the dog’s tail and how to say no when a stranger offers him sweets. He will not learn that love is a ledger.”
Her smile is small and pitying, and it makes me want to pour hot caramel over it. “You think you are the first woman to arrive here with a clever mouth and a recipe for happiness,” she says. “The house is full of ghosts who thought ovens make homes. This house eats ovens.”
“Then it can learn to eat crow,” I say. “Watch me feed it.”
She moves a chair again because motion is power. “Children raised soft become men who are easy to steal. And your softness will be the end of us all.”
