“Okay,” I say, “That’s no Problem. You just need a job and a place to stay. I can pull strings. My brother Lorcan manages O’Rourke’s—our family pub. It’s newly reopened after a renovation. He can probably use extra help.”
She turns toward me. The same guarded blankness. Not hostile, not confused exactly—more like a person hearing a language she doesn’t speak and trying to isolate a familiar sound.
“What is a pub?” she asks.
I open my mouth. Close it.
“You don’t know what a pub is?”
“No.”
Of course she doesn’t.
“It’s a…” I search for the simplest possible explanation. “A place where people go to eat food and drink alcohol and spend time together. A gathering hall, but with food and drink you pay for.”
Her brow furrows. “Why would they pay to eat? Don’t they grow their own food?”
“Not in the city. People buy food at stores, or they go to restaurants—eating places—and someone else cooks for them.”
She furrows her brow, and I can tell the concept hasn’t landed. Of course it hasn’t. The frame of reference doesn’t exist.
“Have you ever been outside The Enclave?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“No. We are not permitted. The outside world is…” She hesitates, searching for the phrase. “A cesspool of sin that will lead the soul to eternal damnation.”
She recites it the way a kid recites a school pledge. The words don’t belong to her. They were installed.
I grip the wheel tighter as I’m slapped in the face with a dose of reality—meet the consequences of your actions, dipshit.
She doesn’t know what a pub is. I’d bet my financial portfolio she’s never had a cellphone, seen a television, used the internet, or held paper money. She can’t navigate a city, drive a car, fill out a job application, or order food at a counter. She has no identification, no social security card, no birth certificate that I’m aware of. And she has no shoes.
I pulled a nineteen-year-old woman out of the only world she’s ever known and put her in a car headed toward a city of three million people, and she has fewer tools for surviving in it than a small child.
If I drop her off somewhere—a shelter, a women’s center, a bus station—she’ll be eaten alive. Not in weeks. In hours.
I glance at her. She’s fixed on the skyline growing taller through the windshield, and her hands are folded so tightly in her lap that her tendons stand out. She hasn’t said a thing about being afraid. Not a word about not knowing what comes next. She sits and watches and folds her hands and waits—clearlytrained since birth to be still, silent, and accepting of whatever someone else decides.
My phone vibrates in the center console. The screen glows. Ma.
I send her to voicemail.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this woman. I don’t know how to undo nineteen years of brainwashing, or how to explain to my family that I impulsively married a cult member I met less than an hour ago.
But I know one thing. One thing sits in me with the weight and certainty of an anchor dropped to the ocean floor.
I’m not sending her back.
Chapter 5
Prudence
The floor beneath my bare feet is cold and slick as polished stone. Mr. O’Rourke leads me through glass doors into a building that reaches into the sky.
A man in a pressed uniform nods. “Mr. O’Rourke.”
“Thomas.” Mr. O’Rourke’s hand hovers near the small of my back without touching. “This is my wife, Prudence.”
As Thomas’s gaze travels from my dirty bare feet to my torn dress held together with a belt, not a single muscle in his face moves. “Ma’am. A pleasure.”
