Chapter 19
MARY CATHERINE
Ihad just put the olive oil away.
That was the ordinary moment when it happened—the groceries almost unpacked, the studio beginning to feel like something that could actually be lived in, the morning light coming through the east window in the way that made the canvases glow.
I had been thinking about the show. About which pieces spoke to each other and which ones needed to be finished and whether the large canvas in the corner was ready or whether it needed one more session.
I had been—for the first time in recent memory—thinking about nothing except what I actually wanted to think about.
The knock at the door was three measured beats. Unhurried. The knock of a man who was certain he would be answered.
I went still.
Brock would have knocked differently. I knew this already, after one day, the way you knew things about people who'd been let close.
Brock would have come up the stairs with weight—I would have heard him.
This knock had arrived from silence. Whoever was on the other side of that door had come up the stairs without making a sound.
I crossed to the door and opened it.
The man on the landing was not tall. That was the first thing—I had expected tall, for some reason, and he was not.
Medium height, well-made suit, dark tie, the kind of face that had been handsome once and had organized itself into something more useful: authority.
Gray at the temples, precisely trimmed. Eyes that did their accounting the moment I opened the door and showed nothing of the results.
"Miss Donovan," he said. Not a question. He knew who I was.
"Yes," I said, because there was nothing else to say.
"My name is Dominic Craine." He smiled. It didn't reach the eyes, which had already moved past me into the studio. "I wonder if I might come in for a moment."
Everything in me said no. Everything in me said close the door and call someone, though I didn't have anyone specific to call for this particular situation, which was itself the problem.
But there was something in the way he stood—the absolute, unhurried certainty of a man who was accustomed to doors opening for him—that made the direct refusal feel like a thing with consequences I couldn't see yet.
"What is this about?" I said.
"It won't take long." Still the smile. Still the assessing eyes. "I'm with the federal government. Just a conversation."
I stepped back. He came in.
He looked at the canvases the way a person looked at something they'd been briefed on—not discovery, confirmation.
His eyes moved around the studio efficiently, touching the sofa, the hot plate, the window with the city behind it, and I watched him and felt something cold settle into the base of my spine.
"You've had this space for some time," he said.
"Five years."
"And you've kept it—private." He said the word with a quality that made it sound like a vulnerability rather than a choice. "Your family doesn't know about it. Your colleagues at Providence Academy don't know. Your former fiancé—" He paused. Just a breath. "Didn't know either, I imagine."
My stomach had gone hard and cold. "What do you want?"
He turned from the canvases and looked at me directly for the first time, and I understood then that the smile and the suit and the measured knock were a shell. What lived inside the shell was precise and cold and entirely without sentiment.
"I want to be helpful," he said. "That's genuinely all. I'd like to give you some information that I think will be useful to you, given the—" he tilted his head slightly "—changes in your circumstances this weekend."
"I'm listening," I said, because the only thing worse than hearing it was not knowing it.
"You've made an acquaintance," he said. "A man who arrived in this city yesterday under a false name, in a rental car contracted to an alias, whose real name and real history I suspect you don't actually know.
" He let that land for a moment. "The Dane family, Miss Donovan.
The brotherhood based out of this city, the one associated with the pier incident you may recall.
They are under active federal investigation.
What that means, practically speaking, is that the people around them—" another pause, lighter this time, almost delicate "—become relevant to that investigation. "
The room was very quiet.
"The people around them," I said.
"The people around them," he confirmed. "Their associates. Their—" he glanced around the studio "—contacts. The people who might, say, provide a location. A safe house. A place to stay that doesn't appear on any official record."
I felt the blood leave my face.
He watched it happen with the expression of a man who had delivered this particular kind of information before and had learned to give it space.
"I want to be clear," he said, in the tone of a man who was about to be anything but.
"I have no interest in you. A development director at a private school, a woman who attended her own wedding yesterday and then apparently went swimming—" the smile again, briefly "—you are not who I'm looking at. I want that understood."
"But," I said.
"But associations have consequences that don't always respect innocence.
" He put his hands in his pockets, relaxed, a man discussing something neutral.
"Your father has a business. A good one, by all accounts—twenty-three years, solid reputation, the kind of thing a family builds over a lifetime.
Your mother is active in the parish community.
Saint Sebastian's, I believe—she's on the women's guild board, the capital campaign committee.
" He named the committees with the ease of someone reading from a file, which meant he was.
"Your sister—" he stopped. Left it open.
He didn't say Colleen's name. He didn't have to.
The cold in my spine had spread outward through my whole body. I was aware of my hands and how still I was holding them.
"What do you want from me," I said. Not a question this time. A sentence stripped to its bones.
"Information," he said. "If you should happen to be in contact with anyone from the Dane organization—or anyone associated with their operations—I would find it valuable to know the content of those conversations.
The location of meetings. Anything operationally relevant.
" He paused. "You would be protected, of course.
Formally, if necessary. Your family's circumstances would remain—" he looked around the studio one more time "—private. "
The word again. Private. He'd weaponized it twice now in the space of five minutes, and I understood exactly what he was pointing at with it. The studio. Colleen. The things that belonged to the Donovan women that no one had been supposed to know.
"And if I say no?” I asked.
He looked at me with an expression of such practiced reasonableness that I felt something in me go very, very cold.
"I'd be disappointed," he said simply. "I'd encourage you to think it over.
I'd give you some time." He reached into his breast pocket and produced a card—plain, just a number, no name—and set it on the edge of the nearest canvas stack.
"These decisions are better made without pressure.
I understand that. Take the time you need.
" He straightened. "But I'd encourage you to make it soon.
The investigation is moving quickly, and the window for—cooperation—has a natural close. "
He picked up his hat from where he'd rested it against the wall—he'd brought a hat, which struck me as the most deliberate thing about him, the most calculated, a man who understood the value of old-fashioned gestures—and moved toward the door.
At the threshold, he paused and looked back. I saw it then, very briefly, the thing the suit and the smile were covering. Something that was not reasonable at all.
"Lovely work," he said, and nodded at the canvases. "You have real talent, Miss Donovan. It would be a shame to have any of this disrupted."
Then, he was gone.
I stood in the studio for a full minute without moving.
Then, I sat down on the floor—not the sofa, the floor, my back against the cabinet under the sink—and pressed both hands flat against the cold wood and breathed.
The grocery bag was still on the counter, half unpacked.
The olive oil was in the cabinet. The light through the east window was still doing what it had been doing, gold and indifferent, and the canvases were still stacked against the walls with all five years of private work inside them, and Colleen's name was in a federal file somewhere being used as leverage against me, and none of it—not one piece of this morning—was what it had been thirty minutes ago.
I thought about my father's business.
I thought about my mother on the women's guild board.
I thought about Colleen.
I thought about Nora, who had turned from the crackers with warm eyes and said good about the gallery.
I pressed my hands harder against the floor and let the cold of it ground me. I told myself to think clearly, which was difficult because every clear thought I tried to have arrived with Craine's face attached to it.
He knew about the studio. He knew about Colleen. He knew things that were not knowable by ordinary means, which meant he had reached into the private life of a private woman and pulled her threads loose before he'd even knocked on the door.
And he wanted me to inform on Brock.
On the Danes.
I sat with that for a moment. Brock had never told me his last name.
I had connected him to the Danes myself—the pier, the explosion, the way he moved through the world like a man who belonged to something larger and more dangerous than he'd said out loud.
But Craine had come here knowing. Knowing Brock's name, knowing the address, knowing that a man from that world had spent last night in this room.
Which meant someone had been watching the studio.
Which meant that whatever I had thought was private—the last private thing I had—was not private at all, and hadn't been for longer than today.
I thought about the alias. The rental under a name that wasn't his. The behavior of a man who understood he was being tracked and had built his life accordingly.
He was a Dane. I was almost certain of it now.
And I had no idea yet what that meant, or what he'd walked into when he came to this city, or whether the ambush his brother had pulled him away to deal with had anything to do with the man who had just stood in my studio and said your sister in a voice like a door closing.
I picked up my phone.
My hands were not completely steady and I let them be unsteady because there was nobody watching anymore.
I found the number. The one he'd put in my phone in the dark before he left.
I pressed call.
It rang twice.
And then his voice, low and immediate: "Mary Catherine."
Not a greeting. A recognition. Like he'd been waiting for the call and had known something was wrong before I'd said a word.
"Someone was just here," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "A man named Craine. He—" I stopped. Started again. "I need you to come back."
A beat of silence. One beat, no longer.
"I'm coming," he said. "Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Okay," I said.
"Hey." His voice dropped lower, something in it settling like a hand on a shoulder. "You're all right. I've got you."
I've got you. He'd said it in the water off the pier and he'd said it in the dark of this room and he said it now down a phone line from somewhere across the city. It landed the same way every time—not like a promise a man made to manage a woman, but like a fact he was reporting.
I locked the door.
I sat back down on the floor with the phone in my hand, and I waited.
The studio that had felt like the first space that was entirely mine felt different now. Smaller. Watched.
The walls I'd chosen had not been enough, apparently.
The things I'd kept private had not been private enough.