Dublin first, then a few days in the countryside—Cork, Killarney, the Ring of Kerry. Two weeks. It had been my idea, the Ireland honeymoon, and Daniel had agreed the way he agreed with most things I suggested, pleasantly and without objection. I had loved him for it, at the time.
The Donovans had been Irish for as long as anyone had bothered to track it. My father's family had come to Charleston three generations back and had put down roots with the stubbornness of people who had survived enough to know that staying put was its own kind of victory.
There were Donovans in Saint Sebastian's going back further than the current building. My grandfather's name was on a memorial plaque in the vestibule. My parents had been married here. Colleen and I had been baptized here, confirmed here, had sat in these pews for nearly every Sunday of our childhoods, the liturgy so familiar I could recite it in my sleep—the call and response, the comfort of words that never changed.
I had loved this building my whole life. I was finding it slightly harder to love, at the moment.
The expense of the wedding and the honeymoon had registered on my father's face the way expenses always did—not in words. Martin Donovan did not put financial strain into words, but in a quiet that lasted three days and then disappeared without acknowledgment.
We were comfortable. My parents had given us a genuinely good life, careful and honest and full in the ways that mattered. But comfortable was not lavish, and this wedding—the venue, the dress, the flowers, the photographer with the six-month waitlist, the rehearsal dinner that had required my mother to take three separate deep breaths before signing the check—was years of careful saving arranged into one long, beautiful, slightly terrifying Saturday.
I knew what it had cost. I had always known what things cost, not in numbers but in the silences around them.
"Mama mentioned Christmas," Colleen said. "At the new house."
"I know." I didn't look away from the mirror. "She mentioned the yard."
Colleen didn't say anything.
"Twice," I added. "Once in terms of square footage and once in terms of—" I made a vague gesture at the general concept.
"Room to grow," Colleen said.
"Room to grow." I smoothed a hand over the bodice of the dress, a useless gesture—everything was already as smooth as it would ever be.
I could feel her looking at me. I could always feel Colleen looking at me in a certain way, had been able to since we were children, because she was the one person in my life who had never entirely accepted the surface of me as the whole of me. It was the thing I loved most about her and occasionally found most inconvenient.
"I want you to be happy," she said.
"I am happy."
"Cat."
"Colleen."
The room held us for a moment, warm and close, the sweetness of the tulips thickening the air. They were already beginning to curl at the edges from the heat, petals going soft. I had noticed that earlier and set the observation aside, because today was not the day to become a person who found omens in flower arrangements.
My bouquet sat on the side table beside them—roses and gardenias and trailing ivy. It was beautiful.
I had spent four months selecting beautiful things. I had a talent for it, the curation of appearances, the assembly of precisely the right elements into something that read as effortless. Everyone said so.
The campaigns I ran at Providence Academy, the donor events, the scholarship galas—everyone said that Mary Catherine Donovan had an eye, a gift, that rare combination of taste and discipline that made difficult things look inevitable.It was a real skill, and I was genuinely proud of it. I was also aware, in a way I had only recently begun to articulate, even to myself, that I had spent my career making other people's visions beautiful without ever asking what I might build if the vision were my own.
I thought about a phone call I'd received last month. Then, I stopped thinking about it because it was not useful right now.
"I want you to be happy," Colleen said again, quieter this time. Not a reassurance. Something closer to a question.
I looked at my sister—really looked, in the way sisters did when they'd known each other long enough that the looking said more than the talking.
She was single and the subject of parental attention that had grown more textured and persistent over the past few years. The gentle, redirected hoping, the careful mentions of this colleague or that family friend, our mother's voice going soft whenever the subject of Colleen's future arranged itself into the conversation.
Patricia Donovan was not a cruel woman. She was not even an unfair woman, by her own lights. She simply loved her daughters and wanted them safe, and in the architecture of her love, safety meant settled, and settled meant a life she could recognize and speak about with pride at coffee after Mass.
She had two daughters and no grandchildren and a body that had made its sacrifice on a table when I was born—something I had understood since childhood in the way you understood things that were never said aloud, absorbing them from tone and texture and the shape of certain silences.
She had never once made me feel responsible for what she'd lost. But daughters knew things, and I had known. I had spent my life trying in every quiet way available to me to be worth it.
The grandchildren she would someday have.
