"With the school," my father said quietly. "For the conference. Three years ago."
He said it gently. He always said everything gently. But the implication was there, plain as a plaque in a vestibule: a development director chaperoning a school trip to the city was not the same as navigating a federal legal situation alone in a city she barely knew.
I looked at the table.
They were not wrong, exactly. They were applying an old map to a new country, measuring me by the woman I'd been rather than the woman I was becoming, and I wanted to say so. I wanted to lay it all out—the pier, the studio, the gallery meeting coming up, the person I had watched myself turning into over the course of the weekend that had contained more real living than the past several years combined.
But my father's face had aged ten years since yesterday. My mother hadn't made it to Mass. Colleen's contact was in New York and the window was four o'clock and there was a lawyer who could help and I was the one who needed to be there, and my family—my frightened, fractured, genuinely loving family—would feel better if Daniel went.
I was allowed to let them feel better.
That was different from performing goodness. That was choosing to give something because I could afford to, because the woman I was becoming had enough in her to make the choice freely rather than from fear.
I looked at Daniel.
He was watching me with the attention of a man who had been trying, since yesterday morning, to want only good things for me, and who was largely succeeding.
"All right," I said.
Something moved through him. Not triumph. Relief, maybe. Or the simpler thing—the thing a decent person felt when they were allowed to be useful.
"I'll need to go home and pack," he said. "Two nights, probably?"
"Two nights," Colleen confirmed.
"I can be back here in an hour." He looked at my father.
My father nodded and put out his hand again, and Daniel shook it, and I watched the two of them—the father and the man who'd almost been his son-in-law, the man who still might have been his son-in-law in another version of this weekend. I held the ache of it quietly and let it be what it was.
We bought the tickets on Colleen's laptop at the kitchen table while Daniel was gone. Two seats, afternoon flight, Charleston to LaGuardia. I paid with the savings account nobody knew about, the one I'd been building for six years in the studio of a life I was only just beginning to inhabit. I felt the satisfaction of paying for something with money I had earned by myself, for myself.
We were supposed to be flying to Dublin today.
I let myself think it fully, without flinching. Daniel and I, today, should have been somewhere over the Atlantic in a window seat with a travel guide open between us, circling things with a pen. The Ring of Kerry. The Killarney countryside. The thread of Donovan ancestry that ran back to a country I had never seen.
Instead, we were flying to New York. Together. To fix the damage my choices had caused to people I loved.
I had made my choices knowing they had costs. This was one of them.
I needed to get to the studio to pack.
I said my goodbyes at the door—my mother held me a beat longer than usual, and I let her. I drove back to Wentworth Street with the windows down and the March air coming through and my mind moving ahead of the car, sorting through what needed doing and in what order.
The studio was quiet when I came up the stairs. The grocery bag still on the counter, fully unpacked now, the olive oil in its cabinet. The canvases against the walls. The sofa.
I stood in the middle of it for a moment and breathed it in, and I did what I'd done on the pier. I let the space tell me something.
It told me it was still mine. Craine had been here and Brock had been here and the whole weight of the weekend had moved through this room, and it was still mine.
That mattered.
I packed efficiently. Two days' worth of clothes. The good blazer for the meeting. Shoes that communicated competence.
I thought about Brock while I moved through it—he hadn't called, and the not-knowing sat in me like a stone in a pocket, weight shifting whenever I moved. I would deal with it when I came back. When my father's name was clear and my family was steady and I had the space to think about what I actually wanted to say to a man who had saidnobody elseand then watched his family's shadow fall across everything I loved.
I zipped the bag and set it by the door.
24
