Page 69 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
She winces like I stepped on her foot. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that,” she says. “I had a… plan. That plan was delicate. You made it heavier.”
I test the rope at my wrists by breathing. It gives a fraction and then tightens because the knot is good. My ankles are tied to the chair legs. My dress is still intact. My neck is sticky where something sweet landed and dried. My heartbeat begins to count the room.
“You could have called,” I say. “We used to do that when we had feelings.”
Her mouth pulls into something that could be a smile from the wrong distance. “You chose wrong,” she says, and the words carry the weight of a grudge years in the making. “You had a chance to be more than a pretty story in his house. You had a chance to stand next to me and build something that wasn’t under a man’s name.”
“You think Declan is a name I stood under,” I say. “You never watched me cook.”
“I watched you count on him,” she says. “And the women who count on men disappear.”
I look at the knife on the linen. It is close enough to touch if I had both hands free. It looks like it wants to tell the truth.
“Tell me where we are,” I say, to measure how much room her pride will take.
“In a place that remembers its sins,” she answers, pleased with herself. “Old churches keep useful rooms. People give their secrets to stone.”
“And you steal them,” I say.
“I borrow,” she corrects. “From people who won’t miss them.”
I let my gaze travel over the candles, the old brick, the table with wax. The floor slopes toward a drain. Above my head, a sound like traffic makes itself small. The city is nearby. I breathe slower to keep my breath from giving me away.
“Why?” I ask, and I mean it. Not the plot. The bone under it.
Her face changes as if someone opened a window in a room I didn’t know had air. “Because you never looked at me,” she says, low and fierce and ugly with yearning. “You looked through me to your next plate. To your next man. To your next blessing from people who never learned your name until he taught them to say it.”
“You were my first call when I signed the lease,” I say. “You were the person I wanted next to me when the stove flamed. You were never invisible in my kitchen.”
“In your kitchen,” she repeats, biting the word. “Exactly.”
“You wanted your own,” I say. “So did I. I wanted you to have it too.”
“You wanted me to have a corner,” she says. “I wanted the room.”
The knife on the linen looks older now. The silver gleams. The handle has an engraving, a tiny bird with a crown. I think of the silver wren left at a scene, of women with late shifts and no witnesses, and bile crawls up the back of my throat.
“You didn’t?” I say, but it comes out as a question.
She hears it anyway. “Not alone,” she says, as if delegation were absolution. “And not for sport. For instruction. They didn’t listen when we spoke softly.”
“Who is we?” I ask.
“Women tired of kitchens that belong to men,” she says. “Women tired of smiling at suppliers and saying please. Women who wanted to cut a new path and learned the cost.”
“And what do I cost?” I ask, keeping my voice very still.
She moves closer, the hem of her dress whispering over stone. “You cost everything,” she says. “Because you are the story that gets told whether you like it or not. Because you make him look better. Because when you stand in a doorway with a boy at your hip, the world forgives him for breathing.”
“You hate me for loving my son,” I say. “That’s new.”
“I hate you for making the wrong man softer,” she says. “Soft men in hard rooms get other women hurt.”
A draft snakes along the floor and licks my ankles. I shift, only enough to ease the bite of rope. She watches the movement like it’s a note in music and smiles because she knows she has me exactly where she wants me.
“Moira taught me that,” she adds, almost shy. “She said legacy is a house with many doors. Some doors you slam. Some you leave ajar to tempt fools. Some you brick up so no one remembers what’s behind them.”
My chest goes tight in a way that is not fear, or not only fear. “Moira,” I say, “said what, exactly?”
