Chapter 12
Nora
I count the steps from the car to the country club entrance. Fourteen. The doorman opens a door for me, and the moment I walk in, I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where I’m walking down the school hallway in my underwear.
My eyes search the room. I spot Kathleen near the hostess stand in a cream skirt and blazer. She looks at me the way a general surveys a newly recruited private.
“You’re on time,” she says by way of greeting.
“Hello,” I respond, flashing a nervous smile.
Without another word, she turns and begins striding into a dining room full of women who all seem to know each other. I follow behind, feeling like a lost puppy.
The room is pale gold and white. Real flowers on every table. The kind of quiet that money buys—no clattering, no raised voices, just the low murmur of people who have never had to speak loudly to be heard.
Every head turns when we walk in.
I feel it—the sweeping assessment, the cataloguing, the judgment. My dress is the blue one Cillian chose, which is designer and expensive, but I still feel as though I’m “less than.” These women wear their clothes like a second skin. I’m wearing mine like a costume.
Kathleen moves through the room with the ease of someone who has never once questioned her right to be somewhere. She introduces me at each table with the same words, “My daughter-in-law, Nora.” She says it with a plastered-on smile, but there’s a cutting undercurrent to her tone, just the same.
The women smile at me with their mouths. Their eyes do something else.
“Lovely to meet you.”
“Cillian’s wife. How wonderful.”
“We’d heard there was a wedding.”
There was a wedding. As if it happened to someone else, somewhere far away, and word of it drifted here eventually like smoke.
I smile back at all of them. I’ve been smiling at people who want to make me feel small my entire life. I’m very good at it.
We reach a table near the window overlooking the golf course, and Kathleen says, “And this is Aoife Sullivan. You may have heard of the Sullivan family.”
The woman who rises to greet me is not what I imagined, and ever since I overheard Declan mention her yesterday in Cillian’s office, I’d imagined plenty.
Yes, I overheard a snippet of the conversation between Cillian and his brothers. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Not intentionally.
I was bringing Cillian the cup of coffee he forgot on the kitchen counter when I heard Declan say, “This is because you married the Murphy girl instead of Aoife Sullivan.”
I knew I should turn around and walk away, but my feet were frozen.
Cillian snapped at him, telling Declan that our marriage wasn’t up for discussion. Then I heard Ronan say something about them having to acknowledge the cost to their business.
I didn’t stick around for any more of the conversation, but I’d already heard enough. Aoife Sullivan.
I had pictured someone cold, or brittle, or obvious in her hostility.
Aoife Sullivan is none of those things. She’s tall—several inches taller than me—with auburn hair that falls in a smooth, expensive curtain past her shoulders.
Her eyes are green, pale and piercing. Her suit is dove gray and fits her the way clothes fit people in fashion magazines, but rarely in real life.
She extends a hand. Her manicure is perfect. My nails are bitten to the quick.
“So you’re Cillian’s surprise bride.” Her smile appears to be warm, but her eyes are not. “How…unexpected.”
“I’m Nora,” I say, and shake her hand.
Her grip is measured. Confident without being aggressive. She holds on a beat longer than necessary, and I have the distinct impression she’s taking stock of me the way a buyer appraises something before deciding it’s not worth the asking price.
Kathleen seats the three of us together. Of course she does.
The luncheon begins. A server appears with a menu I don’t entirely understand. I order what Aoife orders, because it seems safe, and I spend the first ten minutes listening to the table talk around me and counting the white stitches on the hem of the tablecloth.
Aoife turns to me with the air of someone deciding to be charitable. “Kathleen tells me you and Cillian had a whirlwind courtship.”
“We did.”
“Cillian always did move fast when he made up his mind.” She glances at Kathleen across the table.
“He and I had a bit of a courtship of our own before… Well, before he married you.” A small laugh escapes her perfectly painted lips.
“As I said, your marriage was unexpected, and we were all quite surprised.”
The long pause after her statement is very precise.
“Aoife and Cillian have known each other for years,” Kathleen says, picking up her water glass. “Our families go back quite a way.”
“Cillian and I practically grew up together.” Aoife touches her hair, a gesture so practiced it looks natural. “I was at Declan’s twenty-first birthday party. I’ve known Ronan since secondary school.”
“We’d always hoped—” Kathleen starts, then stops. Sets her glass down. “Well. Things change.”
The unfinished sentence sits there. I’m supposed to hear what she didn’t say. I do hear it. I hear it very clearly.
Conversation moves to charitable endowments, to someone’s fundraising gala, to a new hospital wing being named after a family whose name I don’t recognize.
I have nothing to contribute to any of it.
I know how to stretch a grocery budget. I know which diner shifts pay the most in tips.
I know how to keep the gas bill down by not using the heat until the winter temps drop to well below freezing.
None of that is useful here.
Aoife turns to me again. “Do you have a background in philanthropy?”
“No.”
“Business?”
“No.”
“What did you study?”
“I didn’t go to college.” I hold her gaze. I’m not going to look away. “I needed to work.”
“Oh, of course.” Her voice is gentle in the way that isn’t. “Not everyone has the same opportunities. I did my MBA at Northwestern, but I realize that’s not accessible for everyone.”
She says accessible the way someone says it when they mean something else entirely.
“I’m sure Cillian finds your—” she pauses, as if searching for the right word, and I know she’s already found it and is making me wait— “simplicity refreshing. He carries so much on his shoulders. It must be nice for him to come home to something uncomplicated.”
Simplicity. Uncomplicated.
I set my fork down on the side of my plate. My hands are steady. I’m proud of that.
Kathleen is talking to the woman on her left now, but she’s not missing any of this. I can tell from the angle of her head.
“The Sullivan-O’Rourke alliance would have been so beneficial,” Aoife continues, her voice taking on a slightly wistful quality. “For both families. The development deal alone—well. I suppose love conquers all.”
She smiles when she says it. The smile of someone who knows exactly how far into my flesh her barbs are sinking.
“Cillian has always had a soft heart for underdogs and strays,” Kathleen says, rejoining the conversation. “Even as a boy. He once brought home an injured crow and kept it in his room for a week.” A small, fond smile.
Underdogs and strays. An injured crow.
I think about what Cillian said this morning. You are enough. I try to hold onto it. I try to hold the warmth of it against what’s happening now.
It’s harder than I expected.
The food arrives. I pretend to eat. I smile at the right moments. I ask a question about the children’s hospital that turns out to be the right question, and for a few minutes, the conversation expands away from me and I can breathe.
Then Aoife reaches for her phone.
“I was just thinking,” she says, “I have a picture from last year’s gala that Cillian and I attended together.” She turns the screen toward me. “You might enjoy seeing it.”
I look.
Cillian is in a tuxedo, the dark kind that makes him look like he could be on a billboard in Times Square selling men’s cologne.
He’s standing with one hand in his pocket, the easy posture of a man who belongs everywhere he stands.
And beside him is Aoife—her auburn hair swept up, a gown in deep emerald that makes her eyes look lit from inside.
They’re both turned slightly toward each other.
They’re not touching, but they look like they’re about to.
They’re both gorgeous, and they complement one another just right. They look like the perfect couple. Wealthy, attractive, sophisticated, and born to attend galas and fundraisers.
“Everyone assumed it was only a matter of time before he proposed,” Aoife says. Her voice is very soft. “Imagine our surprise when…you happened.”
You happened. Like I’m an accident. Or a weather event.
I hand the phone back.
“It’s a lovely photo,” I say.
I don’t look at myself in the mirror on the far wall, but I know what I’d see. A girl in a borrowed life. A girl who counts steps and ceiling tiles and stitches in tablecloths because it’s the only way she knows to stay calm. A girl who slept in a closet the first night Cillian brought her home.
Kathleen is watching me now. I can feel it.
I pick up my water glass. I take a slow sip. I set it down in exactly the same spot.
You’re enough. Cillian’s words made me feel good at the time.
But what does that mean? Not you’re the best. Not you’re amazing. Just…enough.
This whole atmosphere is foreign. A women’s luncheon at a country club?
I can honestly say I never expected to participate in anything like this.
This is for women who have earned graduate degrees from colleges like Northwestern.
Not a woman who waited tables at the local diner through high school to keep the utilities on and ate moldy food to stop her stomach from growling.
But it’s more than not fitting in. I’m in enemy territory.
Kathleen and Aoife are what I’d consider hostiles. They’ve been doing this their entire lives—this particular kind of dismantling. The kind that leaves no marks. The kind that sounds like pleasant conversation but is fraught with verbal landmines. And I have no armor for it.
I smile at something the woman to my right says about a Spring fundraiser.
I count the number of diamonds on her wedding band. The number of water glasses on the table.
I think about the look on Cillian’s face this morning when he kissed my forehead before I got in the car.
By the time coffee is served, I’ve catalogued every exit. Two doors to the dining room, one to a hallway, one to the terrace. I’ve counted everything in sight, and I’ve smiled eleven times without meaning a single one of them.
Aoife is telling a story about a trip to Dublin. Kathleen is laughing.
I look at my reflection in the window.
I look down at my left hand where my wedding ring sits.
I think: he chose me.
And then, underneath it, I wonder why.