Page 26 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
“I intend to,” I say.
“Declan, you cannot treat her like a trophy,” she replies, and I hate how easily she can find the line I’m not sure I won’t cross. “Not like a hostage. If you force her, she’ll burn the house down with all of us in it.”
I lift my eyes to hers. “She will not keep me from my son.”
That effectively ends any further discussion between us. Mother presses her lips into a thin line and leaves me to wallow in my misery and the certainty of what I will do next, because the truth is that this was never just about the child. The child makes the next step easier, but all roads would have inevitably led to this. To her.
To her, her presence everywhere the light falls, not like a haunt but like a kindness I cannot keep. Her laugh lifts out of the ghost of memories, bright as cut glass and warmer than any fire in this house. My soul remembers her wrists dusted in flour, the way she tapped the heel of a knife against a board to make a point, the way she tasted a sauce with her eyes first and then with her mouth as if both were required to tell the truth. The balcony remembers rain caught in her hair and the city thrown open under our feet, her breath fogging the night while she told me ordinary things that felt like small absolutions. I carry the smell of orange peel and whiskey syrup the way a soldier carries a photograph, not for proof but for courage.
I am wrecked by the thought of her hands on the world, making it better in places that do not deserve it, a loaf shaped for strangers, a child steadied by a song, a room warmed by her stubborn light. I think of the last time her eyes found mine before she ran, the shatter that started in the center and moved outward, the way a plate breaks clean when you hold it too tight. I have tried to replace that sound with other rooms, other voices,other mouths. Nothing fits. The house has learned the size of her absence, and so have I. If there is penance to pay, it will not be paid with money or fear, only with the life I build around the fact of her. I do not know if she will forgive me, I only know that everything I am still capable of loving began when she stepped into my night and lit a candle that refused to go out.
She is coming home to me because the universe cannot possibly let this end any other way. “Aoife,” I groan and cover my eyes, and the room tilts, and the next chapter of my life starts like a gunshot that no one hears, like a prayer that finally gets an answer, like the first pull of a tide that will take everything not tied down.
11
AOIFE
Three days later
I am finishing the vinaigrette when the door opens and the air inside my chest folds in on itself like a soufflé that never stood a chance, because I see the coat first, that heavy dark wool that could swallow the winter whole, then the eyes that make the room shrink to the square of space between us, and then the man himself, the one I have taught myself to live without in the way people teach themselves to wake before the alarm, by repetition and stubbornness and small lies told at the right time.
Lunch for the investors has to move like a string quartet, no one louder than the other and no one late, so I do what a professional does when a past life walks through her door, I keep plating, I keep tasting, I keep my face neutral and my hands quick, because the seared scallops need a wink of lemon and the barley salad wants a pinch more dill, and the cured salmon looks almost indecent rippling over the warm brown bread. The seaweed butter I whipped this morning holds its knife marks the way good butter should, soft enough to yield and firm enough to remember the blade.
“Chef, shall I fire table two?” Niall asks, hovering at my elbow, his wiry nervous energy bouncing against my quieter focus.
“Fire both,” I say, tipping the pan so the scallops baste themselves in their own fat, the smell sweet and briny and bright. “And tell Sinead to warm the plates. They are like ice.”
He nods and vanishes, and I look up because I cannot help myself. Declan is there at the far end of the room, not seated, not moving toward the host stand either, simply standing with that contained stillness that always made me think of the second before a wave breaks, hands at his sides, a coat that looks expensive but not loud, the line of his shoulders telling me more than his face does, the control, the pull, the refusal to crowd a space he means to own.
He does not speak. He does not make a scene. He watches me work. The investors notice him and do that subtle thing men with money do when someone with more walks in, they square their napkins, they look without looking, they lower their voices as if money can hear better than other people. The dining room hushes one notch and the lights seem a shade warmer against the rain that has been soft all morning, a fine silver that blurs the harbor and makes the fishing boats look painted in watercolor.
I drop the scallops onto the plates, let them land with a quiet hiss, spoon the barley around them, dot the dill oil, and send them out. The salmon is next, the slices thin enough to be translucent, the rye crisp and dark, a flourish of pickled red onion for bite. The investors are the kind who talk about synergy and heritage brands with the reverence my grandmother reserved for saints, they have opinions about olive oil varietals and the ethics of sea salt, they are not cruel, just bored and used to getting their way, which is a cruelty of its own if you are not careful.
“Do you need a hand at pass, chef?” Sinead asks, her cheeks flushed from running plates, curls pinned back with the ferocity of a woman who has sworn never to let a strand of hair fall into the hollandaise again after last week’s near tragedy.
“I need you to breathe,” I say, and my voice is calm enough that I almost fool myself. “We are fine.”
I taste the vinaigrette, consider for a heartbeat, add a single drop of honey to round the edge, and look up again because I can feel him, the way one knows when a storm has shifted direction. He is closer now, not near the counter, never rude, always careful with the boundaries of my kingdom, but close enough that I could see the faint gold flecks in the blue if I let myself. He has not shaved as close as he used to, there is a roughness to his jaw that looks like decisions made without sleep. He still does not speak.
“Coffee for the gentleman,” I tell Niall, and I do not ask, I state, because some rituals do not change even when everything else does. “Black.”
Niall nods, curious but loyal, the way all good floor managers are, and I go back to the food, to the things that do not lie, to the bowl of celeriac soup that wants a swirl of crème fraîche and a scatter of toasted hazelnuts, to the roast hake that flakes at the slightest nudge and smells like clean salt and butter, to the little baby carrots I braised in stock and orange and finished with a whisper of cumin, because no one expects carrots to be seductive, and that is exactly why they can be.
Through all of it I am aware of him the way a person is aware of a door that leads to the sea, the way the hinges will sound when it opens, the way the air will change, and when the last plate leaves the pass and the last glass is refilled and the investors have settled into the slow pitch of a postprandial glow, I take my towel from my shoulder, untie my apron, and step intothe back hallway to breathe air that does not smell like steam and heat and citrus.
The alley is narrow and honest. The bins are lined up straight because I bribe the waste guys with soda bread on Thursdays, the brick is dark with the kind of rain that feels like a thousand tiny tapping questions, and there is always a cat I have never seen but know lives near the bundt pans because sometimes I find flour-paw prints on the back step. The door closes behind me and I let my shoulders drop, just once, a small surrender, then I feel the temperature change and I know before I turn.
“Hello, Aoife,” he says, and my name in his voice is both a benediction and a verdict.
I turn because I am stubborn and because I want to see his face when the words I have rehearsed for three years fail to arrive. He is at the end of the alley where the street noise is a suggestion and the light makes a silver sheet out of the rain. He looks like a decision that already happened. He looks tired, not the kind that sleep fixes, the kind that sits in the muscles of the jaw and the set of the shoulders, the kind that means a man has been holding up a house with his back and is angry at the architecture as much as the weight.
“You should not be here,” I say, and it comes out even, not a tremor to be found, which feels like a small miracle and also a lie.
“I should,” he says, and he steps forward just enough to unnerve me without cornering me, which would be a rookie mistake and he is not a rookie at anything. “I gave you three years.”
“You gave me nothing,” I say, and that wakes the heat in my chest I have kept down since the warehouse, since the sound of a gun I will hear in my sleep until the end of my days, since the look on his face when he turned and saw me, which was notregret, not shock, but a terrible kind of relief. “You lost the right to speak to me about time.”
His mouth flinches, not a smile, not a wince, a tic of a man who would defend himself if this were a courtroom and not an alley, and then he lets his hands stay where they are, open, empty. “He is my son,” he says, and the words come out quiet, as if loudness would make them false.
