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Maeve asks Aileen softly, “Will you go with him?”

Aileen looks first at Ewan. Then at Ellen with blood still on her mouth. Then at Maeve’s hand resting steady on her arm.

When she answers, her voice is scarcely above a breath.

“Not today.”

A woman like Aileen has not been made for defiance. Life has not allowed it. She has been bent and pressed and frightened into quiet so long that even this little stand feels like a thing wrought in fire.

Ewan glares at her as though he has never imagined she might say no where other ears can hear it.

He has the audacity to look hurt at that, which quickly turns into malice.

“Fine,” he says.

But there’s no triumph left in the word.

Only the look of a man who will carry humiliation like a coal in his gut and warm himself on it for years.

“I’ll not forget this.”

Taskill answers for all of us. “See to that.”

They leave at last, rolling back down the road in silence. No one moves until they are gone from sight.

I don’t miss the way James gathers Ellen to him properly, with a care so fierce it undoes me by degrees. She sags against him at once, and that more than anything shows how near she has come to breaking.

Nor do I miss Alex going straight to Róisín. The moment her hand comes to his shoulder, and she asks if he’s okay, all the hard fury seems to drain out of him. He softens beneath her touch, and she slips her arm through his and draws him off, away from the rest of us.

I look at Aileen then.

At the tears on her cheeks. At the fright still living in her body. At the smallness of her, and the stubborn scrap of courage that it took to say two words before the man who’s ruled her by fear since the day they wed.

And though I don’t know it fully, and I can’t see the shape of what’ll come of her life or his, I know this much plain:

There are some children born of love, and some born in the long shadow of a man’s cruelty.

If ever a son comes into the world by Ewan MacGregor, he will come into a hard inheritance. Whether it claims him whole is another matter. I know well that not all legacies of blood are strong enough to smother what love first plants.

Aileen is shaking still, and I’m finding it hard not to notice that her hand keeps straying low over her belly.

But she’s not alone now.

Not anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

RÓISÍN

Idon’t take him far.

Only around the side of the house, past the kitchen wall and out of sight of the yard. I don’t let go of him until I know no one can see us.

Even then, I don’t step away.

Alex stops the moment we are alone.

For a breath or two, he says nothing at all. He only stands there with his chest rising hard, shoulders still set as if the violence has not yet gone out of him. There’s blood on his hand, gathered dark over his knuckles. And to my lasting shame, the sight of him like this is doing strange things to my body.