Page 31 of Her Irish Savage

Inside the apartment, everything is just the way I left it. The air smells like dust, but with a hint of cinnamon, a touch of lavender and leather. The kitchen and living room are to the right. The bedroom is to the left, with its en suite bathroom.

I lead us toward the living room. One wall is exposed brick, backing a flat, black TV screen. Another is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with everything from novels to essays on economics. The huge windows have a southern exposure.

I pull the shades before I flip on the lights and set Moran’s duffel bag by my feet.

“What the hell is this place?” Moran asks.

“My home away from home.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I stay here when I want to get away from thedún.”

He looks toward the bedroom with an edgy frown. I can tell he wants to make sure no one’s lurking with a machete.

“Relax,” I say. “No one in the Crew knows about this place.”

“And you know that how?”

I point toward a framed photo on the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room. It’s Aunt Siobhan and me. She’s wearing Tory Burch couture, a ruffled white top so sheer it’s immediately obvious she isn’t wearing a bra. I’m in my first-ever leather bustier, the one with the straps that barely cover my nipples. I was sixteen when she bought it for me. I could still smell gunpowder on my hands when I smoothed the leather over my breasts.

Moran squints at the photo. “Who’s that?”

“Aunt S.”

“That means something to me?”

“Siobhan Dowd. My father’s sister. Uncle Aran’s wife.”

Now he looks at the photo more closely. I can practically see him scrubbing off Aunt S’s smoky eye and contouring makeup. He pulls her hair back into a respectable messy bun. He puts her in jeans and a long-sleeve T. Maybe a frumpy dress.

And then he looks around the apartment more closely. “So this is, what? A hideout?”

“Aunt S got tired of my uncle’scailíns, of cleaning other women’s lipstick off his underwear. So she bought this place. Sort of an escape pod. Her lawyers hired lawyers who hired lawyers. She sold some jewelry and paid in cash.”

His chin juts toward that Tory Burch declaration of independence. “And now she comes here to turn tricks?”

“Fuck you,” I say. I’m surprised by the sudden heat of my anger.

His eyebrows barely twitch. “I’m just saying… It looks like she knows her way around a bedroom.”

He doesn’t say anything about me. He doesn’t have to. But I drip acid over a single word: “Knew.”

“What?”

“Aunt Siobhanknewwhat she wanted. And that was a place where her husband didn’t micro-manage her every move.”

He gives the apartment one more look, suspicion narrowing his eyes once again. “Until Dowd found out.”

“Uncle Aran never knew! Aunt S just got sick.” It’s harder for me to say the words than I expect it to be. “But when she was here, she dressed the way she wanted.”

I don’t tell him about the trench coat she kept in the closet, the one that still hangs in front of the wall safe. She covered up, even for a walk around the block. She never, ever got to live the life she deserved. Not before the cancer. And definitely not after.

But she taught me how to be the woman I am. Never afraid. Or ashamed. If not for Aunt S, I might have listened to the nightmares. I might have carried a sharp razor into a hot bath…

Moran’s looking toward the bedroom again. “And we spent last night in the smallest hotel room in Boston because?”

Despite his judgmental, patriarchal comments about Aunt S, he deserves an answer. “Until ten minutes ago, I was the only person on earth who knows about this place.”

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