Page 32 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
I should sleep. I pour water instead and stand at the sink and listen to the pipes settle. The day has worn me out in a way that work never does. I think about the way her hands shaped the air above the bread corner. I think about the way she did not smile when she said we. I think about the nights ahead in a room where the ovens breathe like animals and the knives stay sharp because she prefers them that way. I think about the men I will have to keep at a distance because they will want a piece of the clean thing I just gave a home to.
There is a soft sound down the hall, a door closing more carefully than a door needs to close. The bathrooms in the family wing share a wall. I hear the water run for a time and then stop. I carry the keys back to my desk and leave them there because I do not trust my hands to bring them to her door without knocking and I do not trust myself to knock.
A minute passes. Then another. Then a sound you can miss if you are a man who refuses the truth. Not a sob. Not at first. The quiet hitch of a person who has held everything too long and finally lets the body do its work. It comes again, not loud, not dramatic, just real. It goes through me with a surgical precision my enemies would envy.
I walk to the family corridor before my brain decides whether this is wise. I stop outside the bathroom because I have made enough mistakes this year and I am not adding one. My palm meets the wood and stays there. I do not knock. I do not call her name. I let the ache of it settle in my bones because some painsbelong to one person alone and mine is learning which ones those are.
On the other side of the door she tries to be quieter and fails because grief can find the smallest gap and widen it. Her breath hits the tile and bounces back and I can hear the rhythm of her palms against porcelain because she is grounding herself the way kitchen people do when the world spins too fast. Liam sleeps on. The house keeps its counsel. The rain starts again outside and ticks at the windows like a stranger who has mistaken the hour.
Something fractures in me. Not a break a doctor can see. A line down the center of a man who already knows how to carry lines no one else believes exist. I lower my forehead to the cool wood and close my eyes and tell myself I will wait here as long as it takes for her to steady, that I will be the quiet, that I will not reach for the handle even once. I keep that promise. I keep it until the water runs again and her breath evens out and the light under the door shifts to a thin line.
I step back. I walk away. I let her have the room, the night, the space to choose what parts of herself she is willing to bring into the morning. In the study the candle has burned down to a tongue of flame that clings to its own wick and will not surrender. I cup it with my hand and blow it out and watch the smoke rise in a clean white ribbon toward the ceiling. The darkness that remains is not empty. It is a room waiting for the next light.
13
AOIFE
Itell myself I am only going to the restaurant to confirm he can’t buy my spine with stone countertops and gleaming hobs, that I will walk the space, roll my eyes at the extravagance, and go home to make soda bread in a battered tin on principle, but the moment I unlock the door and the bell gives a clean, chapel-bright note that rides the stillness like a bird set free, something in me loosens as if a tight thread has finally been cut.
The air inside smells faintly of rosemary and new wood. Not chemical-new—wood that has been sanded and oiled by someone who plans to touch it every day. The old convent bones are here in the curve of the rafters and the hush of the windows, but the kitchen is a different animal, built for heat and hurry. I step onto the black-and-white tile that will make the floor easy to police after a rush and touch the long run of butcher block he left bare, my palm picking up a whisper of beeswax. The ovens along the far wall breathe slow, clean warmth, pilot lights steady as heartbeats. The walk-in opens with a sound like a polite gasp and exhales cold that smells like metal and lime.I peer at the corners—no condensation pooling, no lazy sealing job. Somebody paid attention.
There’s a spice rack tucked behind the wine cooler that makes me laugh out loud. It’s not new. It’s old, the wood worn smooth where fingers hunt without looking, the kind of thing you don’t buy because it’s pretty but because it remembers how to be useful. In the corner there’s a deep stone sink you could baptize a salmon in, and next to it on the counter, left as if he knew exactly how to pry under my armor, a sketchbook. I open it and see my handwriting, except it isn’t mine. It’s the shape of mine, the tilt and spacing, the habit of circlingventing?three times when I’m annoyed. Someone transcribed notes from an old notebook I lost years ago—double heat on the pass, bread bench in a corner with a draft that doesn’t bully, three steps from hot line to cold. I turn the page and there’s a floor plan shaded in pencil, and in the margin, a sentence I do not remember writing and yet would die on—light should fall on the plates like forgiveness.
“Bastard,” I whisper, because fury and gratitude are cousins, and they both have my mother’s jaw.
I set the sketchbook down and take the room in again, slower this time, letting the geometry of it settle into the map in my head. The ceiling ribs hold sound without bouncing it, the pass faces the window where service can see weather change and not feel buried alive, the coats will hang by the rear door so the cooks can leave without crossing the floor. It is not flashy. It is not ostentatious. It feels like somebody finally listened when I described the kitchen I’ve been building in my head since I was twelve and used a pot lid as a steering wheel.
I still hate him. Love is irrelevant to the structural integrity of a lifetime’s stubbornness. But when the leasing agent slides the papers across the old refectory table and says, “Initial here, here, and sign there,” I do it. Not because of him. Because of me.Because I deserve to wake up for something that does not belong to the O’Connell name, however deeply that name has entangled itself in my bed and my bones.
I name the place The Green Hearth.
Outside, the pond is gunmetal and the wind lifts a scrim of brittle leaves. I walk the cloister garden and note where the sunlight pools midmorning, then go back inside and start a list. Wipeable paint for that one stretch that will collect every thumbprint. A low shelf under the pass for extra spoons. Hooks exactly where I want them, not where some contractor who never cooked a day in his life thinks they should go. The drain grade in the prep corner is off, and it’s going to irritate me until I fix it, so I text the contact Declan sent—Seamus, who spells his name the Irish way and answers like a man already halfway up a ladder.
By noon I have a stack of resumes printed and a pot of tea steeping on the back burner because a person can be ambitious and still civilized. I pin an index card to the front door—hiring line cooks, pastry, dish, servers who can carry three plates and hold their tongue. No food stylists. No prima donnas. Come hungry.
They come in a trickle at first and then a stream. A dishwasher with forearms like braided rope and a careful way of standing that tells me he’s used to being shouted at. I hand him a bus tub and a tray of mixing bowls and watch how he stacks without banging. “You’ll last,” I say, and he smiles like a church surrendering to sunlight. A pastry chef who can temper chocolate by eye and makes the kind of lemon tart that tilts toward bitter in a way that keeps you honest. We talk about salt, about how people fear it until they learn to use it with grace. A line cook who stabs his knife at the board like the board insulted him—no, thank you. He’s out the door before his printed resume finishes introducing itself. A server whose smile looks good in amirror but dead on a tray—no. A server with an easy laugh who watches the room while listening to me—yes, and I make her prove she can carry a round of six without wincing.
I call Siobhan last, not because she is least important, but because I need to brace for the way her devotion can feel like a door closed behind me. “Chef,” she says when she answers, bright as foil, the kind of eager that tings off the ear. “You picked the worst day for my heart. I was about to call you.”
“Were you,” I say, and slide the bolt of the back door home without thinking.
“Just to say,” she rushes on, “I knew you’d come to your senses. You need someone who knows how you think, and I’m the only one who—well. You know.”
I do know. I know how she matches my rhythm before I’ve even set it, how she anticipates and fills the spaces I leave empty. I also know how that closeness can curdle when the kitchen grows too hot. I hire her anyway, because I need precision right now more than I need comfort, and because a new place is a storm that requires sailors who can smell the wind turning.
“Come tomorrow,” I tell her. “Bring your knives. And your calm.”
“I’m always calm,” she says. “For you.”
I circle the words and file them away.
By the time the light slides off the windows, the outline of a crew is penciled in. Not perfect, thank God—I don’t trust perfection—but promising. I shrug on my coat and lock up and drive back to the estate with a mood that tastes like cardamom—warm, a little sharp, a little sweet.
Moira is in the front hall like an omen wearing pearls. The lamps gild her cheekbones and the neat silver woven into her dark hair. She doesn’t move as I step inside and unwind my scarf, only turns her head very slightly toward me in the way of queens considering new ambassadors.
“I heard,” she says, and I can feel the house’s attention tilt like a picture on a nail.
“I figured you would,” I say lightly. “Did the portrait over the stairs tell you, or has Mrs. Fallon been reading my emails again?”
