Page 42 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
“Who walks you?” she asks, the knife still moving. “The queen mother?”
“Funny,” I say. “I will be fine.”
Her eyes click to mine and hold. “That is not an answer.”
“I have one,” I say, which is the closest I can get to telling the truth without opening a door I will not be able to close. “We are careful. We always were.”
Something in her face softens, or shifts, and I cannot tell which. “Always,” she agrees, and returns to the carrots with renewed, almost cheerful vigor.
We move through the morning with that choreography kitchens learn and keep—a reach, a pass, a small nod when the pan is too hot or the timing is off. The scones come out glossy and proud, crackling as they cool, and the smell loosens something in the room even the espresso could not. I break one in half and give Siobhan a piece, steam curling up like a blessing.
She bites, closes her eyes, hums. “Perfect.”
“Almost,” I say. “Next batch gets a pinch more salt.”
“Of course it does,” she says, smiling for real this time, and for a few minutes I get to pretend we are still twenty and invincible and the only knives we held were for work.
Lunch service runs like a clean river, no logjams, no surprised trout. The vendor tasting is fine, the investors nod in that careful, bored way money nods when it wishes to be seen acting interested, and a family from the neighborhood sends back a plate only because they want to compliment it and do not know how else to get my attention. I make a circuit of the tables, I cut another scone for an elderly woman who reminds me of my grandmother, I answer a question about the butter with the words cultured and patience, and I think, this is what I bargained for, this is the part I can live in.
The sky darkens early and sulks by five. Staff peel away in pairs per the new protocol, coats zipped, jokes thrown over shoulders to make the distance to the parking lot feel shorter. Siobhan is last with me, wiping down the pass, stacking metal, the radio playing something sentimental we pretend not to like. We run through the checklist twice, more for my nerves than necessity, and I send her out with a small box of scones and a warning I deliver like a mother and a general.
“Text when you are home,” I say.
“I always do,” she replies, and tilts her head toward the dark glass. “Watch your back, Chef.”
“I have eyes,” I say. “Go.”
When her footsteps fade I am alone with the humming fridges and the soft tick of hot metal cooling. I walk the dining room one last time, hands smoothing over chair backs, fingers finding a crumb and flicking it to my palm. I lock the till in the safe, count to sixty because that is what a nervous habit looks like when it puts on a lab coat, and kill the lights except for the small string of fairy bulbs over the front window that make the frost look like lace.
At the back door I pull on my coat and shoulder my bag. The lock turns with a satisfying bite. I step outside into the sharp night and the smell of snow that has not committed yet. The alley is a tunnel of cold. My breath smokes. I reach to pull the door tight and my finger finds something that should not be there.
Tucked into the doorframe is a small object, darkened by weather, wedged just enough to be deliberate. I ease it free. It is a silver button, heavier than it looks, the tiny harp worn smooth with age, a thin braid around the rim. I feel the cold of it in my palm like a message pressed into skin.
I turn it in the light from my phone and my stomach drops, not fast, more like an elevator that shudders and keeps going. The buttons on Moira’s coat were twins to this one. I saw them this morning. I counted them without meaning to, two undone, three fastened. I tell myself there are a hundred coats like that in this city, a thousand buttons with harps, a million ways for a piece of silver to go missing.
The problem is that this is tucked, not dropped. It is placed, not lost.
My fingers close around it and I look up at the dark lane and the quiet road beyond, listening to the kind of silence that feelscurated. The air smells faintly of orange peel, or maybe that is only my memory trying to make order out of a cold night.
I lock the door again and slide the button into my pocket. It settles there like a coin on a scale. Then I walk to the car without hurrying, keys between my fingers because habit is a kind of prayer, and I do not look back until I am in the driver’s seat with the doors locked, engine humming, heat turning the cold into fog. Only then do I reach into my pocket and touch the button again.
I am almost sure it fell from Moira’s coat.Almost.
17
AOIFE
One week later
The button sits where I left it, in the shallow bowl by the door where loose change and corkscrews go to be forgotten. Part of me wants to pretend it was nothing at all and another part remembers how neatly it had been tucked into the doorframe, how the metal burned cold in my palm, how the lane was too quiet for a city that never shuts up. Declan told me about the ribbon and now I have the button, old Dublin traveling on the hem of a Boston coat. Between the two of them a week has stretched and frayed and somehow softened, too, because the world refuses to be only one thing at a time.
In the mornings I find my son and his father in the breakfast room the staff calls the winter nook, the windows hazed with condensation and the radiator clacking like it’s trying to remember a song. Declan sits with his sleeves rolled and Liam climbs him like a small, cheerful pirate, a wooden spoon in one hand and a bowl of steaming porridge in the other, and when I linger in the doorway instead of announcing myself, I hear the Don of Boston making a motorboat noise as he steers the spoon, complete with turns and little brakes, into our son’s open mouth.He lifts his eyebrows and the spoon zooms left. He tilts his wrist and the spoon banks right. He makes a quick backing-up beep when Liam tries to steal the reins and the spoon gets all over the boy’s chin.
“Docking procedure,” Declan intones solemnly, and the voice he uses is lush and dark but laced with a kind of glee that drops me to my knees faster than any love declaration could. “Captain, secure cargo. Repeat, secure cargo.”
“Cargo secured,” Liam says around oats, proud, and swallows, then points the spoon at the radiator. “Monsters live in there.”
“They do,” Declan agrees. “But they fear porridge.”
