Bridget’s eyes go wide. “Not Bronwyn. She was kind. She was good.”
She was mafia.
“What do you think they’ll do, Mam?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I do know your father was talking to Seamus McCarthy just last week.”
Seamus McCarthy, the acting head of the family now. I heard he got married to a Russian and they have a few kids now. I don’t really know him, just a few of his younger siblings.
They call him The Undertaker though. No one calls him Seamus anymore and hasn’t for quite some time.
“Right,” I say. “About what?”
“Don’t know that either,” she says quietly. Then she pastes on a fake smile I’m all too familiar with.
“I’m meeting Caitlin later this afternoon,” she says. “We’re going to have tea.”
Ah. So she’s already made the plans.
I stare at her like she’s grown a second head. Why now? Why CaitlinMcCarthy?
“I want to see if there’s anything we can do to help find Bronwyn,” she says, but I already know what she’s really doing.
She wants to offer up what we’ve got—our name, our money, our contacts—to find Bronwyn McCarthy. To curry the good favor of Caitlin McCarthy.
But why?
Is she bargaining? Trading favors? I want to ask, but I don’t.
I breathe again, as deeply as I can, but it still feels shallow.
Fluorescent lights.Goddamnthese lights.
When I look at Bridget, a thin trickle of red blood seeps from the bottom of her nose.
Oh god, oh no, not again.
I leap to my feet and grab a fistful of tissues from the bedside table. A simple nosebleed isn’t what it seems when bleeding doesn’t stop. We have boxes of tissues in here because, with Bridget, it starts small, before it escalates quickly.
The tissues are instantly saturated. I grab more. “Help us!” I yell into the hallway. My voice is high-pitched with a note of hysteria. “Somebody help us!”
“It’s fine,” Mam says, wringing her hands as she backs away from me and Bridget. “It’s fine, love. It’s just a nosebleed. She’s fine.” But Bridget’s gone pale, and her lips look blue.
But Mam's backing away, her face carefully blank—the same expression she wore when the doctors first told us Bridget's diagnosis. When they said the word “terminal” and Mam stood up, smoothed her skirt, and said, “We'll get a second opinion. The Kavanaghs don't do… this.”
As if illness cared about our family name.
As if Bridget could just decide to be perfect again.
“Erin,” Bridget whispers. She grabs at more tissues, but they’re soaked. Her words are slurred, her eyes are rolling back as a team rushes in to help, and I step back, still clutching bloodied tissues.
I watch, tears flowing freely as the nurses rush in to take over. This is happening with more and more frequency now.
My hands shake. No amount of tapping can calm me.
Bridget isn’t getting better.
We’re out of options.
