Trigger warning: Part of Molly’s story features wrestling with a nonconsensual sexual event in her past. As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I’ve done my best to treat this topic sensitively and with our modern conceptions of consent in mind, but please be advised that some of these sections may be difficult to read.
Not many men sail to France with a black eye. But then again, not many men fight with Molly O’Flaherty and live to tell the tale.
I leaned against the deck, smoking a cigarette and watching the waves roll past the ferry, churning and frothing against the sides. I could go down to the saloon and enjoy a glass of port before we reached our destination, but even though the journey from Dover to Calais was short, I didn’t much fancy the idea of spending it with inebriated strangers gawking at my black eye.
No, better to be alone in the dark, where I could lick my wounds in peace.
The problem was that I knew exactly where things had gone wrong. I knew where I’d crossed the line from occasionally fucking Molly O’Flaherty to falling in love with her. And that line had appeared when I’d found her sobbing in her parlor on Monday morning, tears glinting off her cheeks, her red hair lit like fire by the winter sunlight.
She was so achingly beautiful and so achingly alone, my stubborn Molly. And the moment I thought the word my, as in My Molly, it had hit me with hurricane force.
I loved her.
And in the matter of three short days, I’d managed to fuck it up so irreparably that there was no other choice but for me to leave the country. I would probably never see her again.
And after what I’d done, that was the best thing for her.
I flicked the cigarette into the cold, choppy water and went down to the saloon to get drunk.
Eight Months Later
“Are you really sure you want to go?” my brother Thomas asked.
We were outside the Provençal villa Thomas and his wife Charlotte had rented for the year—a year that was likely to turn into two, given Thomas’s general state of contentment and Charlotte’s swelling belly. They were working on the sixth Cecil-Coke baby, little usurpers I liked to call them. Each one held a spot between me and inheriting Coke Manor, and I reminded them periodically of this—like right now, when I had little Henry pinned to the ground and was tickling his sides mercilessly.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I told Thomas over Henry’s squealing laughter, and then I bent down and pretended to eat his chubby little cheeks. “I won’t stop until you promise I can live with you when I’m old,” I warned my nephew.
“I promise! I promise!” Henry squawked.
And then—ambush. Arms around my neck, arms around my waist. Soon I had four Cecil-Coke tots wrestling me to the ground, and I was subsequently vanquished, my hair pulled and my pockets robbed of the penny sweets I kept there for just such instances of raiding.
“I’m defeated,” I declared, flopping over dramatically onto the dry, sweet-smelling grass. “I’ve been destroyed. By tiny monsters.”
Giggling, the children scampered off. I sat up, smiling, and dusted off my clothes.
Thomas regarded me from his chair, where the fifth Cecil-Coke was snoring soundly against his chest. “Then again, I think I see now why you’re so eager to set off.” His voice was dry, but he was mostly joking—we both knew how much I adored my little usurpers.
“It will be better this way,” I said. “I’ll go and handle the family business in London, so you can stay here in your lavender-scented bower.”
Thomas thought I was leaving to act as his proxy in some legal affairs across the Channel—which technically wasn’t untrue. I was planning on doing those things. But he didn’t know about the letter from Julian Markham in my breast pocket, a letter I’d unfolded and refolded and unfolded again countless times over the past two days.
A letter about Molly.
“I hope I can come back before Charlotte has the child,” I said, standing up. “The tiny, squinty, sleepy part is my favorite.”
