Page 17 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
I cross the bay to the wall with the crack and touch the rough plaster. Her perfume is faint. Citrus that clung to a dress. A trace of mushroom and butter from the morning rush at the Clover. It cuts me sharper than the shot.
“Watch her,” I say.
Kieran waits. “From how far?”
“Far enough to keep her safe. Close enough to stop a fool. No contact. No shadows on her window. If she turns, you turn. If she runs, you clear the road.”
He nods. Sirens in the distance. Not for us. Not tonight. The harbor groans as a barge nudges the far pier. Rain starts again, light, steady. I tuck my chin into my scarf and walk out.
The drive back is quiet. I take the long way with the lights off in certain streets. I pass St. Brigid’s and consider stopping. The side door is always open for those who know the knock. I do not go in. I do not want to leave the smell of powder in the vestibule. Instead, I slow at the curb. My hand lifts to my breastbone. I murmur the old words. For Wallace’s mother. For the boy he was before the first wrong turn. For the line he chose to cross. Then I pull away.
The estate rises out of the fog, lights warm behind old glass. It looks like a place that cannot be touched by the cold, though it is. The guard at the gate nods once. He knows I want no questions. The gravel under the tires sounds like rain on tin. I park by the east entrance and walk in through the servants’ corridor because I prefer the stone and the quiet and the smell of beeswax to the show at the front.
The house is awake in the way of houses that never sleep. Corridors hold their breath as I pass. The candle in the alcove burns at a thumb’s height. The portraits watch from their frames. My father’s eyes look the same tonight as they did the day he died. Stubborn. Cold. Staring at a man who would not honor a truce.
The study waits. I strike a match and touch it to the kindling. Flame moves through pine like a rumor and settles into heat. I sit in the same chair where I sat across from my father at eighteen, at twenty-five, and after. The leather knows the shape of my shoulder blades. I pour whiskey into a glass.
Her face sits in the corner of my mind. Wet hair from the rain at her balcony months ago. The way she said my name. The tilt of her chin when she tells me no. The parting of her mouth when she wants me to keep going. Tonight, none of those are the one I cannot shake. Tonight it is the look in the warehouse before she ran. The look that saidI am a fool. The look that saidI knew and chose you anyway and now I must pay for it.
I drink. It does not help. I wipe my hands with a cloth from the desk drawer. I wash them in the basin in the corner. I scrub the line under my nails. It does not help. Clean skin is not clean blood.
A soft knock. Not the staff. They do not knock like that. I do not lift my head.
“Come in,” I say.
My mother enters in a black silk robe. Her feet are bare. She looks at the glass. She looks at my hands. She looks at the fire. She closes the door behind her with weight and care, like a nurse with a patient who might wake rough.
“I heard a car,” she says. “Late for a Monday.”
“Work,” I say.
“Wallace?”
“Yes.”
She does not sit. She circles the room the way she circles a problem. She taps two fingers against the mantel. She stops by the window and watches the rain ladder down the glass. At last she turns and faces me.
“She saw,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“She ran.”
“Yes.”
My mother’s mouth tightens. “This is exactly what I told you. A woman like her needs clean floors and quiet promises. You give her blood on both.”
I roll the whiskey in the glass. “He moved money for the Italians through her kitchen. Through my name. I warned him. He kept going. He thought my mercy was a habit.”
“And so you fixed it,” she says. “And broke something else you cannot fix.”
“She would have been the next message,” I say. “I did not shoot a chef. I cut out a rot.”
Mother’s eyes soften at the edges. “You are not wrong,” she says. “You are never wrong about the arithmetic. But she did not need to see you do the sum.”
I think of Aoife in the open door of her tiny bedroom. Bare feet. Fairy lights. That laugh that snaps and glows. I force myself to breathe. “She was never meant to see that part of me,” I say.“I always wanted to tell her everything. I wanted her to know the truth at my pace. Not like this.”
“Your pace is a blade,” my mother says. “It cuts what cannot keep up.”
