Chapter 16
Dee
Idon’t know how it happened.
We were on our Monday walk, the day after that gobshite letter came and destroyed my peace of mind, and Jax asked about the big project Paddy wouldn’t stop talking about.
“He exaggerates,” I quipped dryly.
One minute we were looking at the gatepost on the farm lane that Paddy was proud to have fixed up—badly, but with enthusiasm—and the next we were standing at the back door of the farmhouse. Jax was looking at me with that expression of his—patient, like he knew I might bolt—and I thought, fine.
Fine. I’ll open the door.
I hadn’t been inside in a long time. It had been too hard. But it had been over a year since we lost Maggie.
Ronan was at the pub, and in any case, no one locked their doors in Ballybeg. I put my hand on the knob and turned it, stepping into the kitchen.
It smelled the same.
That was the first thing.
Old wood and something sweet underneath—Ronan had been baking in here, I knew, but beneath that it was the smell of the house itself, older than anything we'd put in it. It smelled like my mother, which was impossible because my mother had been gone twelve years, but there it was.
Jax said nothing, which was the right thing. He was good at that, despite appearances. For all his talk, he knew when to be quiet.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at the Formica counter that Da had patched with the wrong shade twice, and the window over the sink with the latch that never quite caught, and the hook on the wall where Maggie's old apron still hung.
Green with a white border.
She bought it at the market in Ennis when she was fifteen, declaring she was going to be a serious cook and needed proper equipment.
She wore it until she couldn’t cook any longer.
I tied it on when I cooked for her while she was sick.
I doubt Ronan ever put it on; he’d probably say that shade of green clashed with his complexion. Ha!
"She cooked here?" Jax asked, looking at the apron.
"Aye." I swallowed, looking around like you do when you haven’t been in a familiar place in a while, as if checking to see what has changed and what remains the same.
"For Maggie, the kitchen at the farm was her real kitchen.
The pub was work. This was where she practiced new recipes.
" I moved to the counter and put my hand on it.
"I remember Ma standing here on a Saturday morning, making brown bread, the radio on low.”
I chuckled. “Ma had a singer’s voice. Maggie, not so much. But she sang anyway. We replaced the old radio with a Bluetooth speaker. My sister had a fondness for Taylor Swift.”
I hummed a few lines of her favorite, Shake It Off.
Jax let out a soft laugh.
“She had a terrible voice.” My thumb moved along the edge of the counter. "She said the bread didn't mind."
Jax tipped his chin in acknowledgement.
I turned and walked through to the hallway, and he followed, because that was what Jax Caldwell did: he followed where I went, and he didn't make a fuss about it, and it was one of the things about him that I didn't have a name for yet, the way he moved through the world in relation to me. Always caring for me, being there.
I was getting used to it.
Scary thought.
I put my hand on the banister and felt the smooth place halfway up where Maggie and I had worn it down over decades of use.
“Your bedrooms are up there,” he said. It wasn’t a question, just him telling me that he knew that was where Maggie passed away.
“Aye.”
“You want to see her room?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you were there?” He took my hand in his and laced our fingers together.
I looked at our joined hands. “Haven’t opened it since the week after the funeral. Ronan offered, more than once, to help me sort her things…but….”
I kept saying: not yet and that became a permanent condition.
Not yet had become my way of keeping her here a little longer, on the other side of a door I refused to open.
“Show it to me,” he urged.
He smiled at me. His dimples flashing.
“Okay.” We walked up together on the creaky staircase.
We stood in front of the door—it was old wood, the varnish peeling off.
“It’s time, Dee,” he murmured.
It was. And that terrified me.
How did he know me so well? How was I supposed to protect myself from a man who saw everything I tried so hard to hide?
I opened the door.
Her room was small, like they used to be in the old days.
The room carried the faint, stubborn chill of an old farmhouse that never quite dried out. The air smelled faintly of dust and cold cotton.
The space was untouched, appearing suspended.
I let go of Jax and opened the window to let in some fresh air. It faced the fields at the back, and in the afternoon light, the green outside was so saturated it looked almost unreal, the way Ireland sometimes did when the cloud broke.
Her bed was made—I had made it that last week, and then couldn't unmake it because unmaking it meant something I wasn't prepared for.
Her books were stacked on the nightstand in the same order she’d left them.
Ulysses sat on top—she swore she was going to finish—bookmark still wedged about three-quarters of the way through.
She didn’t finish it.
She hated that.
Because our Maggie wasn’t the kind of person who left stories unfinished if she had any say in the matter.
On the dresser: a small mirror, a jar of hand cream, a photo. The photo was us—me, Maggie, and our mam, taken the summer I was fifteen, on the cliffs. Maggie had her arm around me like she was holding me to the earth, which was what she always did.
I stood in the middle of her room and looked at all of it.
Jax wrapped his arms around me, his chest to my back, as if supporting me.
"She was the cook," I said. "I kept the accounts when we first took over the pub together, because she was feckin' hopeless with numbers. Dee, lass, she’d say, you count because God is my witness I don’t know how to.
" My voice went low, and I rested my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. “Dee, lass, you talk to the doctor because I can’t understand half the gobshite he says.”
“You took care of her,” Jax said quietly. “I can’t imagine that being easy.”
“I loved her.”
He kissed my head. “Tell me about her.”
I turned to look at him. He wasn't asking about my sister to fill the silence; he was asking because he wanted Maggie in the room with us.
"She could make anyone feel like the most important person in the world." I relaxed against him as I reminisced. "Customers, strangers, people who came in furious and left laughing. She had a way of—she'd find the thing that mattered to a person and lead with that."
I stepped away from him, and he let me go.
I reached out and touched the spine of James Joyce’s tome. "She was braver than I. I'm the loud one. She was the brave one. Isn't that a thing? She died, and I'm still afraid of a door."
Jax put his hand over mine, on top of the book, held my hand on the spine of the book Maggie never finished.
Then he pulled me into his arms, and we stood in her room in the afternoon light, as I let myself cry.
After a while, I looked up at him. He wiped my tears that didn’t soak into his designer T-shirt with his hands.
"Thank you, Jax.”
He kissed my forehead and then my nose, and then brushed his lips against mine.
“No, darlin’ Dee, thank you for sharing Maggie with me.”
How does he always know the right thing to say?
“I cried all over you.” I rub my hand on his damp shit, wanting to change the topic.
“You’re allowed to cry. You’re allowed to be sad. I know you think you have to be strong—and you can be, darlin’ Dee, for everyone, but with me, I want you to feel safe enough to be sad.”
I sniffled as fresh tears assailed me. His generosity, his ability to see within me despite my walls—all of it was a marvel, wasn’t it? A man walked into my pub and saw into my heart—a thing like must be a miracle.
“Sometimes it’s okay to be sad. Not working toward anything.” He wiped the fresh tears as they rolled down my cheeks. “Just sad.”
I looked at the photo on the dresser—the three of us on the cliffs, Maggie's arm around me. "She'd have liked you." I let out a watery laugh. "She had terrible taste in television and excellent taste in people. She would have taken one look at you and decided immediately."
"Decided what?"
"That you were the real thing."
He was quiet for a moment and then he mused, “And you?"
I looked at him. His blue eyes were very steady and very serious, and I thought about all the ways I'd tried to outrun this particular moment.
"I'm working on it.”
He smiled—not the dimpled, wicked smile, but the other one, the one that I'd only recently learned existed, the one that told me he saw me. "That's more than enough, darlin' Dee." And then because Jax was who he was, he winked and added, “For now.”
We stayed in Maggie's room a little while longer, and when we left, I didn't close the door all the way behind me.
It felt like the right thing.