6. Cillian #4
She reaches for the wine and fills my glass before she fills her own, mid-sentence, not breaking eye contact with the woman on her right.
I catch Walsh watching it.
At some point during the first course her leg presses against mine under the table.
It’s definitely not accidental—the table is long enough that there’s room.
It’s just a steady pressure, warm through the fabric.
She is still talking to Walsh about something I can’t focus on because she is pressing her leg against mine.
I don’t show that it affects me.
I put my hand over hers on the table midway through the first course to really play up the affection, just as Connor demanded. What I wasn’t expecting was for her to turn her palm up and thread her fingers through mine.
Walsh leans back in his chair. Hannigan says something to the man beside him.
The question of whether this marriage is real stops being a question.
She works on Connor through the main course.
She asks him things he actually knows, listening like the answers interest her, redirecting conversation his direction at the precise right moment.
Connor, who presides over his own table like a man above it, starts leaning forward when she talks.
He asks her a follow-up question, which Connor Brennan does not do, and she answers him with her chin slightly up and something in her eyes that is attentive and not even a little impressed.
He leans in further.
I think about make sure she understands how this works and I scoff. She understood it before I said a word.
She turns to me at some point during the main course to ask me something— something about whether I want more bread—and her hand finds my jaw for a second, turning my face toward hers.
Her hand is gentle on my face and the way she touches me is the way you touch someone whose face you know.
She asks her question and turns away, and I sit there for a moment with the ghost of her hand on my jaw. She is very, very good at this.
I’m not entirely sure all of it is performance anymore.
Maureen Fitz is across the table and two seats down. She married into the family twelve years ago through one of Connor’s more distant cousins.
She has been working to make herself central to it ever since. I can’t stand her.
She seems to think that because she married into the Brennan family, that means she should be considered a trusted member.
I don’t trust her at all.
She’s a viper dressed in designer clothes and she’s been watching Valentina since we sat down with the attention of someone who has identified a target and is waiting for the right moment.
She waits until the second course.
That’s always her move—when the wine has settled in and the guard is down and a comment lands in the middle of the table where it can’t be easily walked back from.
“Such a shame about Emma not being here,” she says, with a warmth so practiced it almost sounds genuine.
She lets everyone at the table understand exactly what she’s doing, then she turns to Valentina with a smile that has nothing behind it.
“I imagine the whole situation has been rather uncomfortable for your family. Given how your brother started it.”
The table goes quiet.
I look at Connor.
His face closes with that specific Brennan blankness, the one that means something is happening underneath that no one is going to see.
He sets his glass down carefully.
I look at Teresa.
The color has gone out of her face and she’s looking at her plate.
Valentina sets her fork down.
She looks at Maureen with an expression of such warm, pleasant interest that from across the table you’d think she was about to agree with her.
“Uncomfortable,” she repeats, mulling over the word.
“How thoughtful of you to worry about us.” A small pause, her head tilting.
“I think about it differently, actually. I think the people who knew her best—who’ve known her for years, who’ve watched her grow up in this family—must feel her absence most acutely. ”
The warmth in her voice is genuine sounding, but her dark eyes resting on Maureen are anything but warm.
“That kind of loss is so specific, isn’t it?
All that history. All those years of being close to someone, and then”—she gestures with her hands—“they’re simply somewhere else.
” She leans forward just slightly. “How are you holding up, Maureen?”
Maureen’s mouth opens. Closes.
“Oh, it’s all right if it’s hard,” Valentina says, gently. “These things take time.”
From three seats down, Brigid’s voice comes in. Brigid hates Maureen and has always done her best to make it known that she considers Maureen an outsider.
“Maureen wasn’t close to Emma,” she says, glaring at the white-faced woman.
“She was barely an acquaintance. Weren’t you, Maureen?
” She takes a sip of her wine before she turns her attention to Valentina, a faux-sympathetic look on weathered face.
“I always find it interesting how loud the grief gets from people who had the least to do with the person.”
The silence this time is a different quality of silence.
Maureen’s face has gone the color of the tablecloth.
Valentina looks at Brigid across the table and something satisfying passes between them.
Brigid briefly inclines her head toward my wife.
Valentina looks like the cat that caught the canary.
“More wine?” Valentina asks Maureen sweetly.
Connor’s face is still impassive, but he immediately goes back to his conversation.
But I can tell from the way he’s sawing at his meat that Maureen’s husband is going to be verbally eviscerated later for his wife’s display.
I grimace.
I don’t envy the bastard.
But it’s my aunt’s face that I’m most interested in.
Teresa catches Valentina’s eye from across the table and holds it for one moment, something moving between them that I don’t have a word for.
Then Teresa looks down at her plate and she’s almost smiling.
Under the table, Valentina’s hand briefly finds mine on her knee.
Then it’s gone and she’s back in conversation like nothing happened.
I’m left sitting there with the shape of her hand burning a hole in my flesh.
The drive home is quiet.
She’s turned toward the window watching the city go by, and there’s something in her expression that’s quieter and more private than I usually see from her.
“Emma’s absence was really felt tonight,” I say, after a while.
She turns from the window, the moonlight shining on her hair. “It’s the first thing I noticed when she opened the door.” A pause. “There was an interesting gap in the photographs on the side table.”
“Yeah.”
“And the chair by the window.”
I incline my head.
She looks at me for a moment. “Does Connor know how much it shows?”
I shrug. “Connor knows everything. He just makes it look like he doesn’t.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “He does though,” she says quietly. “Not much. But enough.”
I don’t say anything.
We get back to the apartment.
I’m shrugging off my jacket when she turns around and looks at me with a steely expression.
“He introduced Walsh’s son tonight,” she says lightly as she undoes her wrap and puts it in the closet.
“He stood up in front of that whole table and introduced a twenty-five-year-old as the one he’s brought in to learn how the operations work.
” She looks at me, dark brow arched. “You’ve been running those operations for fifteen years.
He didn’t mention it. He barely looked at you across that table.
And when he did, it was the way he looks at his driver.
” She crosses her arms. “I want to know if you think that’s normal or if you’ve just decided it’s how things are. ”
“It’s how things are,” I say because it’s the truth. No amount of complaining or bitching will change it.
She sighs in frustration. “That’s not what I asked.”
I look at her. She looks back at me and she looks…furious on my behalf, which is not something I know how to handle. I’m used to her being furious at me. That I know how to manage. This is brand new territory.
“My father treated Leo like a partner,” she tells me. “Years before Leo took over. He asked him things. Disagreed with him in public. He brought him in on the decisions that mattered.”
Her voice drops. “What you do for Connor—what you’ve been doing for twenty plus years—a man who respected what you were to him would have put you at that table as the next thing, not as the help he brought along.”
She shakes her head. “And I watched you sit there tonight and say nothing. I need you to tell me whether you’re okay with that.”
A ripple of irritation courses through me. Why can’t my wife leave things alone? Sure, Connor doesn’t treat me like his heir, but I’ve accepted that this is the way Connor is.
“Valentina,” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Because I’m not.”
I blink at her.
“I’m not okay with it,” she continues, folding her arms across her chest. “And if you’re not either, you should stop acting like you are.”
The apartment is quiet. She’s standing in front of me with her arms crossed and her chin up, genuinely angry.
“It’s…complicated,” I tell her, wanting this conversation to end.
“It’s not that complicated,” she says heatedly, her brown eyes flashing in irritation as she can see I’m trying to avoid talking.
“You were a child when he took you in, and somehow you think you owe him a debt. You’ve been paying it ever since and at some point—and I’m not telling you when, that’s not for me to say—at some point the debt gets paid and what’s left is just him taking what he didn’t earn.
You’re the only one who gets to decide when that is. ”
She uncrosses her arms. “I’m not saying walk away. I’m saying look at it clearly.”
I look at her.
She looks back.
There’s so much I could say to this.
There’s the angry and scared eleven year old, the man I became because of what Connor gave me and what he cost me, the question of what I owe him that I have genuinely never let myself answer because the answer might be…inconvenient.
All of it sitting there and available.
And I don’t want it.