“My softness,” I say, keeping my voice sweet as icing, “kept your grandson breathing last night. My softness tells himmonsters are not under the bed, they are men who walk in daylight and call youDear. My softness does more work before breakfast than your iron has done in a decade.”
She lifts her chin a fraction, which in Moira terms is a scream. She takes a step toward me that is not a threat and not not a threat, and I refuse to move, not because I think I will win an embrace of thorns but because I will not teach the room that I step back when a woman with money walks forward.
“Mother,” Declan says from the doorway, and his voice does the thing men’s voices do when they decide. He crosses the room in a straight line, hands in his pockets, sleeves still rolled, tie looser now, a man who has laid a city flat with a map and a pencil thirty times before breakfast and does not want to do it again. “Stop.”
The word lands. The staff in the hall freeze in that very Boston way, polite shock turned to air. Moira’s eyes flick to him and mine do too, because what comes next is the kind of moment that rewrites houses.
“You are no longer in charge,” he says, not cruel, not loud, each word set down like a stone on a river crossing. “Not of me. Not of Aoife. Certainly not of Liam. You are his grandmother. Be that. You are not his governor. You are not my conscience. You are not the lock on any door in this house.”
The silence that follows is not empty. It is packed with thirty years of furniture. Moira’s face does not change, which means this hurt. She looks from him to me and back again, reading the new thing between us as if she could put it down with Latin. Her gloves creak when she curls her fingers, the only sound she allows herself.
“You will regret confusing mercy for love,” she says.
“Perhaps,” he answers. “But I will not regret this.”
She considers, then nods once in a gesture that acknowledges defeat without accepting it. She leaves as neatly as she arrived,perfume and cold in her wake, and the staff unfreeze by degrees, like a room heating. I find my breath where I left it on the table, tucked under the corner of the garden plan, and slide it back into my chest. My knees tremble once, a small private rebellion.
Declan looks at me last. “Are you all right?”
“I’m excellent,” I say, because the high after standing my ground tastes like stealing cherries. “Also, I’m starving.”
He laughs under it, the soft one that belongs to kitchens and late nights. “Come on,” he says.
I cook. He leans against the counter and watches like he’s still learning me. I make chicken and rice with the kind of slow, comforting movement my hands know even when my mind doesn’t. Onions turning sweet in butter, garlic pressed with the side of a knife, rice toasted until it smells like a nut, stock added in a steady pour, the lid clicked on like a spell. Liam dances in, drawn by the scent like a small, adorable bloodhound, and I set the table with three bowls and a pile of warm pitas wrapped in a towel, and we eat too much and laugh at nothing, and it is the sort of dinner that repairs small tears in a day.
After bedtime—one story, then another, then the one about the fox again because he wants the ending to keep being happy—I sit in the hallway and listen to the quiet settle. The house breathes. Somewhere in the distance a door closes with a careful hand. I brush my fingers over the wallpaper where a child once drew a secret line in pencil and no one ever scrubbed it out, and I think about legacies and names and how the only dynasty I care about is the one you make when you hand a kid a whisk and saygo on then, make a mess, I trust you to clean it.
Night deepens. I carry the day around like a bowl I don’t want to spill. The schoolroom is still. The model garden waits like a promise I can’t help but want. I pass the study and the door is almost closed and I can hear the low murmur of a man speakingto other men, the cadence of logistics, and I keep moving because I will not drink fear for dessert.
At my door I don’t go in. I stand. I think about the look on Declan’s face when he told her no, the way it wasn’t violent, the way it was a person choosing. I think about Liam’s paint drying, the fox with too many rays of sun over his head. I think about the plan laid out on the table and the part of me that softened because somebody listened.
I cross the hall.
He answers on the first knock, barefoot, shirt open at the throat, the kind of tired that doesn’t show unless you know where to look. His room smells like cedar and something darker I refuse to name because it makes my knees unreliable.
“Why now?” I ask, not angry, not sweet, just the honest question you ask a man who just moved a mountain you have been pushing alone. “Why put your mother in her place today. Why the plan. Why all of it.”
He doesn’t make me wait. He doesn’t ask me in or out or try to buy time with charm. He steps close enough that the heat of him meets mine and he says, very simply, “Because I finally have something worth protecting.”
26
AOIFE
“I’m tired, Declan,” I say, the words spilling before I can stop them. My voice is thin but steady. “I’m tired of running. Tired of fighting you when all you have done is try to love me in the only way you know how.”
My chest heaves, my hands fisting in my dress. I lift my chin, meeting his gaze head-on. “I choose you. Not because I have to. Because I want to.”
Something cracks in him. His jaw works once, twice. He does not speak. He just crosses the space in two steps and kisses me like a man who has been holding his breath for years.
The kiss is not gentle. It is starving, fierce, desperate. His tongue slides against mine, his teeth catch my lip, and I moan into him as my body caves. He cups my face, then my neck, then drags his hands down to my waist, gathering the silk until it pools around my hips.
He undresses me slowly, reverently, peeling the straps off my shoulders, tugging the fabric down inch by inch until I am bare before him. My breath comes fast. His eyes linger on every curve, every mark he left earlier, his hunger dark and bottomless.
When he presses me back onto the bed, his hands do not stop moving. They roam over my breasts, squeezing, thumbing my nipples until they harden. They slide down my belly, spreading me open, stroking the wet heat between my thighs until I gasp and writhe.
“Fragile,” he mutters against my mouth, even as his touch is rough, greedy. “Eternal.”
I drag him down with me, clawing at his shirt until the buttons scatter, baring the muscle I ache to touch. My nails dig into his back, raking lines down his skin, and he groans into my throat, sucking hard, leaving another hickey blooming there.
