Chapter 21
KATE
My grandmother is sitting in the garden, a half-finished jewel-tone shawl bunched in her lap as her knitting needles flash like swooping birds. A canvas bag gapes at her feet, holding her yarn. A floppy cotton hat provides shade for her face and the back of her neck.
“Granny!” I say, leaning down to kiss her cheek. There isn’t a second chair, so I collapse on the ground beside her. Sitting cross-legged, I pluck a long stem of grass and wrap it around my finger.
“A chroí,” she says, settling her needles in her lap. Her hands tremble a lot more than I would like. There’s a reason she’s been working on that shawl for months. “You’re looking grand today.”
I glance down at my hoodie and sweatpants. There’s nothing special about my clothes.
Granny laughs. “You’ve got some color in your cheeks. Here,” she says, fumbling for the mobile she keeps with her at all times. “Let me take a photo.”
I blush. After last night, I’ll never think of a camera the same way again. Instead of smiling for my grandmother, I hold up a hand, blocking her view of my face.
“Now, now,” Granny tsks. “Just pretend we’re on holiday. You let me take plenty of snaps that first trip to Ireland.”
“I was eight years old,” I say dryly.
But her mention of Ireland drags a chill down my spine. The sky hasn’t changed—it’s still the bright clear blue of early June—but gooseflesh rises on my arms. I hug my knees.
Granny sits back in her chair, her eyes glinting like a sparrow’s. “Go on, then,” she says. “What’s the craic?”
The familiar phrase should make me smile. It was one of the first things I learned when we arrived in County Donegal, an easy way of asking for the day’s gossip. But when I think about that first trip to our homeland, I can’t help but remember the reason, and something inside me withers.
Granny waits, because she’s wise that way.
I finally ask: “Was it wrong for us to go to Donegal?” I’m shocked to hear my voice break on the last word. But I’ve been asking myself the question for days, ever since Breagha broke down in her bedroom. “Was it wrong to leave Breagha behind?”
Granny folds her hands in her lap. “Breagha wasn’t hurt,” she says quietly. “Not the way you were.”
“Not by the Bad Men,” I say, because I’ve never said Pyotr Tarasov’s name out loud to my grandmother, not even when I woke screaming in my bed in the little stone hut where we stayed by the lake.
“But after. During the Dogfight. She heard about everything that happened, all the ways men die. She knew it was because of us. Because of me.”
Granny purses her lips. “First,” she says.
“Those men didn’t die because of you. They died because there isn’t a clan on earth content with the size of its territory.
Not we Lynches. Not the bratva. Not the Italians or the Japanese or the Colombians, none of them.
The Russians wanted your Da to give up land.
You were just a tool for the Tarasov mob to get what they wanted. ”
She’s said it before, from the very first night after I got away from the Bad Men and was safe in my Canton bed: This was not your fault.
I shred the grass between my fingernails. I didn’t believe her when I was a child. I don’t believe her now. I never will.
Granny sighs. “And second, your sister wasn’t all alone. She had that woman they brought in after Larissa, the one with a face like a dried apple doll…”
“Noreen O’Connor,” I say. Mam found her somewhere in Canton. She was a thousand years old and walked with a nasty limp, but she treated Breagha like her own personal baby doll, dressing my sister in frilly lace and braiding her hair and spoiling her with sweets any time of day or night.
I ran off Nanny Noreen the instant I came home from Ireland. All it took was a box of crickets, the type meant to feed pet lizards. That, and a black rubber snake.
Granny says, “Your sister had Noreen.” After a pause, she adds, “And she had your mother too.”
Mam didn’t let my sister out of her sight for months.
My mother sat in the back of Breagha’s classrooms at St. Brigid’s, played endless rounds of Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, even slept on a cot in our bedroom.
For years after, Mam prided herself on knowing every bite of every meal my sister ate.
Everyone said Mam was the best mother on earth.
Especially after her back gave out from sleeping on that cot.
And she had to give up chairing St. Brigid’s Altar Guild, because she didn’t have time for meetings.
And she was dropped from Junior League for the very same reason. Mam was a feckin’ saint.
“We could have brought Breagha with us,” I say.
“We could have,” Granny agrees. “But did she really need to hear you screaming in your dreams?”
It’s a fair question, but it hits me like a bowl of ice-cold water.
“You had hard work to do,” Granny says. “And you deserved a chance to get it done without fending for your little sister.”
Hard work.
I’ve never thought of Ireland as work. Ireland was learning the language, a daily puzzle that kept my mind from other things.
Ireland was traipsing across green hills and over castle ruins, adventures that exhausted my body.
Ireland was learning to knit (which never took) and to bake bread (another domestic failure) and finally, finally, finally to sleep through the night without waking—but only if a light was on.
“We both did hard things,” Granny says.
I remember all the people we met while we stayed in Donegal—endless rounds of aunts and uncles and cousins.
Granny invited the women in for a cuppa.
She kept a fine bottle at the back of the cupboard for the men.
And every child who crossed our threshold got a heavy slice of soda bread, spread thick with butter and glistening jam.
Over and over, Granny told relatives about our life in Baltimore—how Da was leading the clan there, how the Canton Crew was growing. I didn’t understand at the time, but she was building support for her son.
She wanted a pledge of soldiers so Da could beat the bratva. Everyone in County Donegal knew Lynch men held their own in a fight. Mad Robbie Malloy even killed a man at a bare-knuckles match down in Cork.
But the clan wasn’t interested in bleeding for a war across the ocean. Granny did better at raising funds.
She came home with jewelry from the women and banknotes from the men. She kept the Lynch clan alive in America, long before I handed over money from my Red Cap raids.
Granny picks up her knitting now. She works a full row, the needles clacking their soft song. I shred another stem of grass and another and another.
“It wasn’t fair,” I finally say.
I mean that it wasn’t fair to have left Breagha behind—regardless of Noreen, regardless of Mam. But Granny says, “It wasn’t. And when the Bad Men stand before St. Peter, they’ll finally account for their sins. But you need to remember, a chroí. None of it was ever your fault.”
I wish I had my grandmother’s simple faith.
I wish I could spend the rest of the day lying on this soft green lawn, shredding blades of grass until my fingers are stained green.
I wish I could eat lunch with Granny and watch over her while she takes her afternoon nap.
I wish I could take the rosary from her nightstand and get down on my knees and mutter the prayers I learned as a child.
But I have other obligations. I need to follow up with Carlotta Mirabelli. The professor wrote back over the weekend, saying she was intrigued by my concept for Ariadne’s Daughters. I’ve delayed sending her details, because I’m terrified my project will fail before it has truly begun.
When I stand, my thighs ache, a whispered reminder of everything I let Cole do to me last night. Master. I called my husband Master. And I didn’t die of shame.
“There you go,” Granny says, settling her knitting in her lap.
“What?”
“Your cheeks. You’re blushing again.”
Of course, that makes me flush even harder. “That’s the sun,” I say. “Next time I’ll bring a fashionable hat like you have.”
She laughs and I kiss her cheek and tell her I’ll be back tomorrow. As I pass through the house, Mrs. Watson is putting together a tray for lunch—a white-bread sandwich with the crusts neatly trimmed and half an apple sliced into crescents.
My own stomach rumbles as I reach the gate. The hired guards give me polite nods, but they wait for me to work the biometric locks on my own. I admire their dedication to security.
As I step onto the pavement, I glance toward the corner. A too-small boy is walking a too-big dog, an excited black lab that’s straining at its leash. The child raises his hand to wave at me, and I start to wave back. The dog takes advantage of its owner’s distraction to break free.
“Stop, Smoky!” the kid cries. “Come back!”
The lab gallops down the sidewalk, leash streaming out behind him. The guards snap to attention, raising their weapons.
“Smoky!” the boy screams. “No!”
The dog skids to a stop by my feet, snuffling at my shoes, at my knees, at my crotch. His tail is wagging like he’s trying to take flight. His leash pools on the pavement.
“Smoky,” I say. “Sit.”
The dog sits for approximately one human heartbeat. That gives me a chance, though, to collect his leather strap.
“Sit,” I say again, tugging on the leash to enforce the command. This time, Smoky stays on his haunches. As the boy trots up to my side, I smile at the guards. “At ease,” I tell them. “Everything’s fine.”
“Smoky!” the kid says, burying his face in the dog’s neck. The soldiers lower their weapons, but they remain on high alert.
“Here you go.” I offer him the leash. “Try to be more careful.”
“I will,” the kid says, standing straight and solemn, like he’s taking some oath of office. “I promise.”
His hand brushes against mine as he takes the leash. A square of paper is curled against his palm. He pushes it into my hand so quickly, so confidently, that I can only react in reflex, curling my fingers around the offering.
“Come on, Smoky!” the boy says, slapping the leash against the pavement with a sharp crack.
One quick glance confirms that the guards follow the distraction; they aren’t paying any attention to me or to the note I’ve just accepted.
“I’ll race you to the corner!” the kid says.
All three of us adults watch the boy and the dog. Smoky wins.
I try to keep my shoulders level as I cross the street.
I nod to the pair of guards in front of our fence, belatedly realizing that they also targeted the runaway dog and his owner with their high-powered weapons.
Neither guard, though, comments on the paper.
They must not have seen it change hands.
Biometric lock. Through the gate. Up the stairs. Into the house and the privacy of the jacks, where I close the door and raise the lid of the toilet, in case anyone is listening. Only then do I unfold the tiny square of paper.
Four Seasons, it says. Noon. Tomorrow.
It’s signed Megan.