Roisín has them before my hand is out—Pop’s box into my palm, the dark-silver band from my pocket set into the priest’s book for the photograph Aoife insisted she’d need for posterity and for press.
I take the gold—the thin band that has known heat and soap and years—and slide it onto her finger. My voice doesn’t shake. “With this ring,” I say, and the words don’t matter as much as the vow I am making with my face.
Keep. Guard. Choose every day. Make small when she needs small, make large when she wants large, never let the wrongenemy near the door. She looks at me like she hears the unspoken, and then like she understands.
She takes the other gold ring and slides it onto my hand, and the weight is nothing and the meaning is not. She touches the dark-silver band with her thumb, finding the Ogham without being told where it is. She doesn’t say the word. She doesn’t need to. I will.
When the time comes to speak the promises, I don’t add poetry. I don’t have to. The room is too crowded for the things I’ll only say where only she can hear them. I keep to the script where it serves and let my eyes do the rest.
The priest says what priests say when they can’t stop the world from being itself. He declares. He raises his hand. If God has an opinion, He keeps it.
“You may kiss the bride,” he says.
I have been thinking of this kiss since a screen with holes taught me the shape of her breath.
I touch my palm to her jaw, where names live, where fear hides. I kiss her like I’m done pretending the cameras matter and not done at all with what comes after. She opens just enough…my patience ends there.
Applause fills the air, and the organ tries to take the roof. I pull back a breath and say it against her mouth so only she hears it. “After this, Mrs. Shannon?—”
Her eyes tilt, wicked. “Bossy.”
“Married,” I answer, and kiss her again, enough for the aunties to sigh and the uncles to shut up.
We turn to the aisle. People stand like they were taught to. Nan rises and gives me a nod I’ll carry until I’m old. Don Marco’s face breaks into something that makes him look like a man his daughter would still love. My brothers don’t embarrass me. Roisín smirks as if she planned every breath.
We step off the riser and start the walk.
For a half second, before the handles turn, I wish Blackvine Ridge hadn’t stolen the sun years ago—that I could stand here without measuring exit routes and lists and which roots to salt first. I wish I’d met her without the ice underfoot.
It doesn’t matter. If there isn’t a sky, I’ll build one.
We hit the light and the outside air tastes like the first stretch after a fight. Photographers shout. People cheer. I don’t hear it. I lean to her ear while we pretend to enjoy applause.
“You have ten minutes to be adored,” I say. “Then I am going to put my mouth on my wife, and after that I am going to introduce you to the part of the evening that isn’t for cameras.”
“Bossy,” she breathes again, and smiles for Nan instead of me.
“Married,” I correct, and kiss her again, longer, so no one mistakes whose night begins when the pictures end.
14
CATERINA
The plan is supposedto be photos.
Aoife has a list as long as a gospel: bridal party, family, family-that’s-security, security-that-insists-it’s-family. We make it as far as the rectory hallway when Cayce’s palm finds the small of my back and veers us through a half-closed door.
“Two minutes,” he says, voice low. “I’ve been waiting a week.”
“So have I,” I tell him—because those late-night messages? They’ve been winding me like a clock.
It’s a cramped parish sitting room—old leather, a crucifix, a hissing radiator. He shuts the door with his heel and the look on his face knocks the air out of me. He doesn’t kiss like ceremony; he kisses like he’s finally cashing a check he wrote with every text.
“Did you do what I asked last night?” he murmurs against my mouth.
“You’ll have to find out,” I say, leaning back on the little table, palms down, pulse up.
He sinks to his knees.
