Afterward, she lies against my chest, and I run my hand through her hair.
“At the luncheon today, I want you to remember that you are enough,” I tell her. Then, I repeat it just to make sure it sinks in. “You are enough.”
She lets me hold her for another minute, and then she sits up and smooths her hair.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she says. “I’ll remember I’m enough if you promise not to worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Deal. But if you need me, call me.”
“I won’t need you.”
She says it to reassure me. It doesn’t. I watch her get up and start getting ready, and I sit with the particular helplessness of a man who can control everything in his world except the one thing that matters most.
Chapter 12
Nora
I count the steps from the car to the country club entrance. Fourteen. The doorman opens a door for me, and the moment I walk in, I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where I’m walking down the school hallway in my underwear.
My eyes search the room. I spot Kathleen near the hostess stand in a cream skirt and blazer. She looks at me the way a general surveys a newly recruited private.
“You’re on time,” she says by way of greeting.
“Hello,” I respond, flashing a nervous smile.
Without another word, she turns and begins striding into a dining room full of women who all seem to know each other. I follow behind, feeling like a lost puppy.
The room is pale gold and white. Real flowers on every table. The kind of quiet that money buys—no clattering, no raised voices, just the low murmur of people who have never had to speak loudly to be heard.
Every head turns when we walk in.
I feel it—the sweeping assessment, the cataloguing, the judgment. My dress is the blue one Cillian chose, which isdesigner and expensive, but I still feel as though I’m “less than.” These women wear their clothes like a second skin. I’m wearing mine like a costume.
Kathleen moves through the room with the ease of someone who has never once questioned her right to be somewhere. She introduces me at each table with the same words, “My daughter-in-law, Nora.” She says it with a plastered-on smile, but there’s a cutting undercurrent to her tone, just the same.
The women smile at me with their mouths. Their eyes do something else.
“Lovely to meet you.”
“Cillian’s wife. How wonderful.”
“We’d heard there was a wedding.”
There was a wedding. As if it happened to someone else, somewhere far away, and word of it drifted here eventually like smoke.
I smile back at all of them. I’ve been smiling at people who want to make me feel small my entire life. I’m very good at it.
We reach a table near the window overlooking the golf course, and Kathleen says, “And this is Aoife Sullivan. You may have heard of the Sullivan family.”
The woman who rises to greet me is not what I imagined, and ever since I overheard Declan mention her yesterday in Cillian’s office, I’d imagined plenty.
Yes, I overheard a snippet of the conversation between Cillian and his brothers. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Not intentionally.
I was bringing Cillian the cup of coffee he forgot on the kitchen counter when I heard Declan say, “This is because you married the Murphy girl instead of Aoife Sullivan.”
I knew I should turn around and walk away, but my feet were frozen.
Cillian snapped at him, telling Declan that our marriage wasn’t up for discussion. Then I heard Ronan say something about them having to acknowledge the cost to their business.
