Page 54 of Hazard a Guest
How?
With a hand far steadier than she felt, she touched it. She lifted it. She flipped it over.
On the back was a tarnished pin, meant to go through the collar. This cross was not for hanging in doorways; it was for wearing. It had always been a brooch. It had beenherbrooch.
The one Freddy had taken.
When the door opened again and Joe returned, slipping back through the threshold of their private sanctuary with a tray of food and drink, Ember realized that she had, at some point,come to sit, and that the cross, at some point, had come to be cradled in her hands.
She didn’t know how either thing had happened. She didn’t know how she felt, other than stunned. She couldn’t stop touching it, couldn’t stop running her thumbnails through the space between the rushes, like if she didn’t memorize the sensation, she’d regret it until she died.
Joe paused. He nodded. He crossed the room anyway, placing the tray carefully on the foot of the bed and taking the chair across from her. “You found it,” he said.
“I found it,” she answered, in a tone that wasn’t quite sure that was true. “Is it … is this mine?”
He nodded, careful as he ever was. “Yes.”
“You took it?” she asked, searching his face. “From Freddy?”
“He gave it to me,” he corrected, inclining his head, “to give to you.”
She tried to speak but only managed to release the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “When?” she finally managed, after a few more tries.
“Yesterday,” said Joe. “Last night.”
“Last night,” she repeated, awed. “Did he tell you …?”
Joe nodded again.
She felt the surprise of that register on her face, felt all the muscles tense and release. “Did he really?” she said, more to herself than to Joe.
She set it back on the table, looking at it in the soft morning light.
She had imagined getting it back one day, of course. She had fantasized about it the way someone fantasizes about being a child again and making different decisions, never actually hoping that such a thing could come to pass.
Freddy had kept it all this time? That seemed impossible. It seemed absurd.
It seemed … like hope.
“That idiot man,” she marveled, softly and without bite. “That absolute fool.”
“I should have given it to you the minute you came into my room,” Joe said, guilt flashing across his beautiful face. “I had been obsessing over it when you knocked, but as soon as I saw you, it might as well have been half a world away. I forgot. I am sorry.”
“You’re …” She shook her head, the word clanging around in her mind, trying to find purchase. “You’re sorry?! Joe!”
She stood, rounded the table, and gripped his face, pushing her lips hard into his. She pulled back and studied him and then did it again. “You arenotto be sorry,” she said, her voice at a fever pitch. “Not ever.”
He stared at her, trying to understand what she was saying, and the more confused he appeared, the more she crumbled in his light. She released him, backing away with a kind of hysterical awe.
She twisted in the morning light, catching it deep in her lungs, and she laughed, brushing her hands over her face.
“It’s really here!” she said, marveling at it. “You found it.”
She crawled back into the bed, ready for breakfast, leaving the cross where it sat for now, on the table, where it had blessed the passage of the previous night. She took up her tea and gazed at her man and felt the wonder of all of it muddling together in a froth, even if it took him a moment to gain his bearings again and return to her.
He looked so careful, settling into the bed beside her, reaching for his coffee. He looked so trepid.
“It’s a novelty,” she told him, nodding toward the cross. “Not a relic. It’s a thing we do once a year for tradition and fun and to sell to pilgrims who want a piece of Kildare to come home with them. My mam gave me that one, right before I got married. It’s … it’s one of the only things I took with me at the end, when I wasn’t married anymore.”
