Chapter 41
41
FIONA
“ I n the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was one week ago."
Oona’s familiar voice chisels into the stone box around my heart. I want to fling open the door on my side of the confessional and drag her out of the wooden booth. I’m dying to throw my arms around her and bury my face in her soft neck and never need to face the world again.
But I paid Father Bertram a small fortune for these few minutes. I can’t afford to waste a single second. “Oona,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Fiona?” Her watery blue eyes are framed by the carved screen between us. “What in the name of the Blessed Virgin?—”
“I needed to see you. I’m going crazy, and there’s no one else who knows me, no one who understands…”
“What’s wrong, coinín beag? ”
Little rabbit. For just a moment, I’m sitting on her lap in the nursery on the third floor of the dún . I’m holding Bunbun, my fingers wrapped around his ears as she works a comb through my snarled hair.
Bunbun .
I hear Patrick’s voice, rough with need the first night we fucked in the apartment. That’s your safeword. That’s what you’ll say when you need me to stop.
And then I hear my voice, gasping the word I never thought I’d use, rushing it out, even though I thought he’d ignore me, even though I thought I was lost.
But he listened. He heard. He stopped.
“Fiona, love?” Oona’s voice rises half an octave in concern.
“It’s Patrick,” I say.
“What’s Paddy done now? You tell that boy I won’t make the bannock he likes, if he doesn’t treat you like the queen you are. Send him round. I’ll give him a talking to.”
“He’s gone!” I hiccup when I say it.
“Gone?” Oona asks, like she doesn’t know the word.
“We fought,” I tell her. “Two, no, three weeks ago. I lost my temper and?—”
“What have I told you about minding your tongue?”
I can’t count the number of times Oona has told me I need to calm down, slow down, take the time to let my brain catch up with my mouth. I try to justify myself now, the same as I always have. “But he said things too!”
“I’m certain you remember that two wrongs never made a right.”
“Tell him that!”
“I would, if he were the one who sent away Father Bertram and caught me all unawares like this.”
She sounds so prim, my cheeks heat with embarrassment. We don’t have much longer, and I have to make her understand why I’ve cornered her here. “I thought he was different, Oona. I thought he was special.”
But then I remember the look of disgust on her face when I called him Daddy in her kitchen .
Wiping my palms on my thighs, I try again. “He took care of me when he didn’t have to. He helped me when no one else would. He told me when he thought I was full of shit, but he stood by me anyway.”
“Sweet Blessed Mary,” she says, and I see her making the sign of the cross. I think she’s going to lecture me about swearing in church, but instead she says, “You love him!”
“I don’t?—”
“I wasn’t sure you’d ever trust a man like that, a man in the life. Not after what you’ve seen in the dún . Not after being raised by a wolf like your da.”
“I don’t love him, Oona. I can’t.”
“And why not?”
“ He left me! ” I barely remember not to shout the words. They come out as an agonized hiss, like a candle dropped in a bucket of tears.
“He’ll come back.” Oona says it with the simple confidence another woman would use to say two plus two equals four. Three teaspoons equals a tablespoon. Eight ounces make a cup. Patrick Moran will return to the dún.
No. More than that. Patrick Moran will return to me .
“How can you possibly know that?” I ask.
“I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
“Oh, please.”
Oona says, “I’ve known Paddy since he was half your age. He has his own wolves. He met his own demons at the dún .”
“So you’re saying he’s as fucked up as I am.”
Oona tsks. “Keep using language like that, coinín beag , and I’ll head straight for home.”
“Oona…” I draw out her name, the way I used to do when I was a little girl, when I wanted her to read me one more story before she turned out the light.
“Talk to him,” she finally says, like that’s the simplest thing in the world.
“Yeah,” I say. “Right. ”
“Don’t take that tone with me . ” She holds up her hand, close enough to the wooden screen that I can see her long lifeline slicing across her palm. “No, no, I don’t want to hear it. You have a thousand reasons why you can’t do what’s right. But there’s one reason you should.”
“Because…” I know what she means. But I can’t make myself think the words, much less say them.
“Because you love him,” she says. Straightforward. Matter of fact. Like when she told me I’d get my period. When she cleaned me up after what happened in the chapel. When she told me Aunt S had died. “Talk to Paddy now. Because your uncle…”
I hear something in her voice, just before she trails off, something I never thought I’d hear in a million years. Oona Maguire is scared. “What?” I ask her. “What’s going on?”
She says, “The men in that house—they think I don’t pay attention. They think I’m blind and I’m deaf and I won’t repeat a syllable they say…”
“Oona. What is Uncle Aran planning to do?”
“At the vote next month, for the Grand Irish Union. Your uncle says he’ll run the meeting.”
“He can’t do that. I’m the one who booked the rooms.”
Oona makes a dismissive sound with her lips. “Anyone can book some rooms.” She lowers her voice so much I have to lean forward to hear her. I catch my breath to make out her whispered words. “He says he’ll sit for Boston. He’ll cast the Old Colony vote for general. And the morning after oaths are sworn, he’s bringing in a priest, to marry you in front of all the others. He’ll drug you if he has to. Beat you if he must. And once his ring’s jammed onto your finger, he’ll have all those other captains name him King of Boston.”
None of this is news. I’ve known Uncle Aran’s plan since he shoved his tongue down my throat in his office at the dún .
But bringing a priest to the Union meeting? Drugging me in front of all the other captains ?
He’s crazier than I ever imagined. He won’t give up the Crew without a fight.
I’m suddenly aware that Uncle Aran might have followed Oona today. He has the resources to pay for access to my phone and track me that way. He’s purchased contacts on the police force; he can put out a missing-person claim and offer a reward to would-be Good Samaritans—tell them I’m sick, that I need help, that I’m off my non-existent medication.
Horror shivers through my belly like hairs rising on a tarantula’s leg.
“Holy fuck,” I breathe, which is probably the first time those two words have been said inside the confessional—at least on the priest’s side of the box.
Oona tsks again. But then she says, “Talk to Paddy. Tell him the truth. Together, you’ll stop him.”
“ How? ” This time, I can’t keep my voice low.
“Talk to Paddy,” she says one more time. “You’ll figure it out together.”
“If I could fucking talk to?—”
“That’ll be three Our Fathers,” Oona says serenely. “And three Hail Marys. Go in peace, coinín beag .”
She leaves before I do. I sit back on the hard wooden bench and try to figure out how to track down Patrick.
What I can possibly say to make him forgive me.
How I can get him to help me before it’s too late.