“I want your blessing,” I say. “And maybe your bands, if you give your blessing.”
At that she goes quiet. Not the quiet she uses when she’s offended. The quiet she uses when she’s listening past the invisible walls that we try to build to keep her out.
“You went to confession with her?” she asks, eyes narrowing as she starts to speak in riddles, using the catechism as a weapon. “You put your hands through the screen and took a vow you haven’t earned?”
“I put my hand out,” I say. “She decided what to do with it.”
“And did you put her on the altar like a sacrifice? Did you pull a girl bound for the church off her path so you could wash away your dirt with her?”
I take the hit. I don’t dodge. “I’ve used pretty women before like a man uses a strong drink, to forget the past. That wasn’t what this was. What it turned into.”
“Are you certain?” she says, pouncing. “Or do you like to polish words when the priest is listening?”
“I’m certain,” I say. “Because what I felt there wasn’t rinsing away my sin. It was a moment of pure innocence and…revelation.” I let the truth land between us. “I went in thinking I knew the shape of the earth. I didn’t, and I’ll start a war if someone tries to keep me from her. From the peace that I found in those stolen moments.”
She breathes out softly and lets her shoulders rest. “All right. I believe you can tell the difference. That is not the same as doing it. That girl will be inside your house and your story, not the church’s. She is owed more than your discipline.”
“She’ll have more than discipline.” I mean it the way a man means a bank account. “She’ll have what I don’t give anyone else.”
“And what’s that, boy?”
“Everything,” I say. It feels like a crime to say it out loud. “A yes on my lips for everything and anything she wants. A future with a family of her own, instead of a life filled with penance.”
Nan holds my eyes. The corner of her mouth ticks, not with amusement; with assessment. “You speak like you learned to think,” she says. “Well then. I reckon this is the truth and not performance meant to knock me on my ass. I can hear the difference.”
She sips her tea. Then she sets it down, shifts a little in the chair, and takes a breath.
“You know how I came here,” she says. “But you don’t know it from me. Think maybe it’s time you did.”
“Pop stole you,” I say. “He took you from a man who had your name on a paper and a bargaining chip to claim.”
“Not a paper,” she says. “A promise. A promise I made when I thought the world was as small as the lane outside the house and the cows I had named. Your grandfather came home on a leave with shoulders too straight and a laugh that made the windows shake. He danced with me at a wedding that wasn’t ours and told me I was going to America.”
“You didn’t argue?” I ask.
“I argued like a woman who hadn’t met him yet.” She smiles, real. “He said, ‘Sorcha, I’m after you, and if you don’t come now I’ll have to come back and get you, but either way you’re coming.’ I said, ‘You’re some thief, then.’ He said, ‘I am. But I only take what’s mine.’”
I feel her words land in my chest a way I don’t enjoy. I keep my face neutral.
“And the other man?” I ask.
“He was kind,” she says. “Steady. A decent sort with decent land and a cow that gave more milk than the others. I could have had a life that would not have broken me. It would nothave made me sing, either. Your grandfather wasn’t kind or simple. He was loyal and fearless in pursuit of our life. There’s a difference. He was not patient with the world but he was patient with me. He left the military when his father died, and the job he inherited was not one with a pension and a gold watch. He took me, yes. He made me cross the sea, yes. He married me at St. Mary’s with his mother’s ring on my finger and his father’s enemies at the back of the church, counting the weapons and their chances at eliminating a future queen.”
She stops and looks out at the water, as if the inlet could give back a decade if you asked right.
“He was not an easy man,” she says. “But the life we created was ours. The best kind that exists in our world. He made a bad thing into a roof, and he kept the rain off me and our children until the time came for them to take their place. He loved me like a sin and a sacrament wound irrevocably together. If you’re not planning to upstage that, don’t you touch that girl. Leave her to the church and to God.”
“I plan to upstage it,” I say. My voice stays low. “I plan to make what we build worth the enemies that try to steal her away.”
She lifts her chin. “And the enemies?”
“They’ll all taste pain at my hands,” I say. “But there’s one that I haven’t been able to destroy yet. One that could hurt her, and me, and everything.”
Nan’s expression shifts. “Blackvine.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t spit. She’s not a spitter. She gives the syllables the cold they deserve. “Blackvine Ridge left your father sleepless and killed him in the end. It took three boys you grew with. It took a girl, too. And countless others we don’t even know about. That place…” Her gaze grows distant. “That place was touted asa space to make the children of our kind ready for anything life threw at them. Instead it broke them. Took their?—”
