“Mm.”
“The old man actually crossed for this?” I turn, surprised out of my head for a second. “He hates airplanes.”
“He hates missing a chance to judge,” Roisín says. “He’s in the vestibule pretending to bless the holy water with his opinions.”
Our great uncle, the head of our family in Ireland, doesn’t travel. He never crosses. That he’s here…well, it gives so much more than any normal person would know.
“That’ll go well with Don Marco.”
“It will go the way I say,” she says, perfectly pleasant, and I believe her, because my sister is truly terrifying.
There’s a knock. Rafferty opens without asking who it is, because this floor has already been burned clean of strangers. Nan steps in on Conall’s arm. She looks me over once, top to bottom, and then opens her arms. I bend to kiss her cheek.
“Are you good?” she asks.
“I am.”
“Liar,” she says, pleased. “But you look handsome enough to get away with it. Don’t try it with a priest.” She taps my lapel once and slides her hand into my inside pocket, checks that the small black box is where it belongs, and returns it. “Pop would be growling about the tie.”
“He can haunt me later,” I say.
“He already does,” she answers, eyes soft, then flicks to Tiernan. “You mind him.”
“I always do,” Tiernan says, which is mostly true.
Roisín floats a tie across and Tiernan knots it clean, fingers quick. “Save the collar button till Nan finishes terrorizing the photographer,” he says. Practical. Controlled.
There’s a knock. Rafferty opens—no one knocks on this floor without permission. Don Marco steps in and brings cold air with him. He looks smaller than he used to and harder than most men ever get. He shakes my hand too tight because he’s earned the right to do so. We trade nods. He says nothing yet.
“Five,” Tiernan tells me quietly. “We’ll take the side door. Irish side’s seated. Your mother’s cousins are pretending they own the nave.”
“Of course they are,” I say.
Nan pats my jaw like I’m seven and told the truth by accident, then sails back out to terrify an usher into standing up straight. The door hushes behind her, and Tiernan shuts it,posted at the jamb with the flat look that moves men without words.
Don Marco pats my shoulder and looks at the cassocks lined on pegs, at the altar servers’ cinctures coiled in a basket, at the cross laid flat on the table because the priest has not yet lifted it. He inhales once and then lets out a breath that he’s held for two decades.
“I owe you a story,” he says.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe it to her,” he corrects. “And you’re about to be her home.”
Roisín nods like a surgeon confirming consent and takes a half step back. Tiernan eases out to the vestibule to give us space and seal any listening ears that aren’t ours.
“I don’t tell this often,” Don Marco says, eyes on a point that isn’t me. “Not because I don’t remember. Because I do. Every day that my daughter has been alive is seared into my memory.”
“She and her mother were at St. Gianna on a Sunday,” he begins. “I tell this fast when I have to, but not today.” He puts his hand on the table and flattens it there like he’s stopping it from shaking. “My wife taught Sunday school. It wasn’t piety. It was her way of being useful in a world full of useless people. She was that kind of good—charity committee on a Tuesday, casseroles for a widow on Thursday, dragging me to sign a check on Friday and making me believe it was my idea. Not perfect—just better. She thought I could be better than what I was and kept saying it until I started to act like it might be true. Caterina takes after her.”
He swallows, eyes finding something far. “A man came in with a gun. Wrong man, wrong day. I don’t keep his name. I don’t say it. He did a lot of talking—you know the kind—and men who thought they were brave discovered whether they were. My wife was brave. She didn’t run. She put eight children under atable and stood between them and death. One of those kids was Caterina.”
My jaw sets. “She was there.”
“She was there,” he says, and the words strip years off his voice. “Hiding under a table, staring at the hem of her mother’s skirt, listening to the world split. And her mother—my wife—standing like the only wall that mattered.”
He doesn’t describe the rest. He doesn’t need to. Churches echo. So do widowers.
“She died where you’ll stand in twenty minutes,” he says quietly. “I tried to kill God for it. I’m still trying not to. After, I made sure that man paid his penance, and then I wrapped my hands around what I had left—the daughter who held the last part of her soul—and I held too tight. I made rules to keep ghosts quiet. Caterina grew up in the shadow of a woman who would have told me to stop it, and she still learned to help people, sign her own checks, and volunteer for things that didn’t care what our name was. She is her mother’s daughter. Not a replacement—a continuation of the goodness in her soul. That’s why I’m protective. Not because she’s breakable, but because she is what I have left of the only good thing in my life.”
