Chapter 2
two
THREE MONTHS AFTER – THE NEWS
MAGS
“Christ Almighty and all His Saints, Margaret Colleen Morrow. Get your bloody shit together.” Mags cursed herself as she jogged down one of Dublin’s busiest streets, dodging pedestrians while praying the large tote banging against her spine didn’t bust a strap and knock some innocent passerby senseless.
“I’m so going to get fired,” she repeated for the hundredth time, her whining getting on her own last nerve.
It had been three months since her parents had exploded some shit news all over her person. Not only had the news rocked Mags with fear, but it had also changed the trajectory she thought her life was headed in.
Mags remembered the night before Bébhinn and Gray’s big day. She’d been so excited to celebrate two of her best friends. That was before her mom told her she had something she needed to say. Mags recalled every hair on her body had stood to quivering attention.
Mags recalled how her mom’s face had flushed red before going startlingly white. Her mom was generally self-possessed, but she wasn’t that night. Instead of getting out whatever she needed to say, she cleared her throat no less than four times and fiddled with a string at her cuff obsessively.
The most alarming—she wouldn’t meet Mags’ eyes.
At her mother’s continued silence, her dad placed a hand over his wife’s and said in his smooth, professor’s voice, the one Mags and her mother teased him about, “Aileen.”
Scrunching her eyes closed once, she finally sighed and met her daughter’s worried gaze. “The cancer is back.”
As Mags dodged another slowpoke walking three damn dogs in the middle of the footpath, she internally winced at how her mother’s pain-filled image had seized Mags’ chest as the awful words had kept coming.
Recurrence. Lymph nodes. Lumps. Swelling. Collarbone.
Those words sounding one on top of the other—terrifying.
Her mother had beaten cancer once before Mags was born, but Mirren had told her how scared she’d been, though she’d done her best to stay positive for their mother’s sake.
It had been a blow to hear her mother was sick.
More than a blow, it had felt like she’d been set on fire and was still burning.
Mags made a conscious effort to be strong every day—every moment of every day, if she were honest. A world without her mother wasn’t one she allowed mental space to contemplate. She couldn’t.
Her mom and dad had always gotten by financially. They weren’t wealthy by any stretch, but Mags had never wanted for anything, and though there were times she might have gotten a tad bit envious of her friends, she knew how loved and lucky she was.
She was still loved and lucky to have both her parents.
However, the secrecy of her mother’s health took its toll on Mags.
According to her folks, Mags’ Uncle Coll, Josephine, and Thomas MacGregor had paid for her original cancer treatments.
They financially supported her when she had to take months off from teaching.
She didn’t want to burden them this time, even though Mags had furiously argued that they would never consider her a burden and would be hurt.
Her father might not have agreed with his wife, but her mom was the love of his life, and he would acquiesce to her wishes.
Her mom took another leave of absence, while her father took a sabbatical from the university to research and write a sequel to his one and only historical fiction, written during his first years of teaching in America.
He’d explained the situation with his wife to the university board members, and they were more than happy to grant his request for leave.
Her parents believed that the facility that offered her mom the best and healthiest outcome was John Hopkins. So, they left the morning after the wedding to live in the United States for an unknown number of months. Baltimore, Maryland, to be exact.
They’d told family and friends that her dad got a huge grant to write a novel, and they were going to treat it like an extended holiday.
The subterfuge was exhausting. Mags had complained to her dad, telling him that all the lying was bullshit, and she was sick of covering for them.
Her dad very kindly but firmly replied, “Your mother is scared, Margaret. She’s scared to leave her daughters and grandchildren. She’s scared about what she’s missing now and what she might miss in the future.
“The treatments are brutal, and though I know her brother and friends would bring her comfort, she doesn’t want her ravaged body to be the last thing they remember her by in case she doesn’t make it.
“It’s why she chose America for treatments over France, like last time. She didn’t want to be close enough that you and Mirren would stop your whole lives to live at her bedside.
“So, I don’t like lying either, but I’ll do it for her, and so will you.”
And that was, as they say, that. Mags begged forgiveness, which her dad had assured wasn’t needed because they were all struggling with the entire situation.
“Your mom getting cancer again sucks, sweet girl. Hiding it sucks, watching you and your sister and your mum cry sucks. Don’t ever believe that you’re the only pissed off Morrow.”
That was two months ago, but Mags heard her father’s honesty and encouragement in her head every day.
By then, she’d been wallowing for four weeks and feeling ridiculously lonely.
After her dad’s kick-in-the-pants speech, she’d attacked her life with the same fearlessness her mom used to attack cancer.
Mags wasn’t one to wallow for long. Wallowing was for lazy people who lacked direction and motivation. She had both in spades and only had to make a few adjustments…or forty. Some had been harder than others.
Her parents were frugal people and had plenty of money in savings for an occasional splurge and emergencies.
However, with neither of them working, their budget had to be tighter.
Thankfully, they found a modest one-bedroom to rent close to the hospital that was affordable, and her dad made all of their meals and was a king of budget shopping.
Her mom said there were several stunning parks near them, including one with the most beautiful flowers. Mags adored the pictures her parents had sent and immediately set to work on a white dressing gown covered in the American flora as a get-well gift for her mom.
Once they’d settled in America, her dad called to discuss automatically depositing a bimonthly allowance directly into her bank account.
Mags shut that down immediately, assuring him that she lived rent-free and ate most of her meals at school for cheap or at the O’Faolains.
Mostly lies, but hey, Mags was embracing their new gray.
She’d work six jobs before she made her parents stress over their youngest child’s finances when Mags was quite capable of making her own way.
“Watch yourself, brat,” a grizzled old man barked at Mags as they nearly collided outside an ancient-looking tobacco shop.
“I’ll show you, brat, ye smoked trout,” Mags growled back under her breath, using one of Granny MacGregor’s favorite slurs. She missed that woman, even though she hadn’t been biologically Mags’ grandma, she had been in every way that counted until the day she’d passed.
Mags’ life had become nothing short of a dog performing a series of competitive, timed jumps and twirls, chaotic but choreographed to within an inch of its life.
Her days began at four in the morning at an elderly care facility, where she helped prepare the patients’ breakfast, serve, clean what seemed like hundreds of pots and tableware, and finish with lunch prep.
From the care facility, she had to rush across town to one of Dublin’s most popular chippers, where she immediately started cleaning and slicing hundreds of potatoes and filleting a quadruple number of cod.
She’d convinced the owner that she was a brilliant filleter—seriously, how different was a knife than scissors and needles?
From ten thirty to two in the afternoon, she and two other grunts fried their little hearts out for a queue of customers. Too bad the stingy manager didn’t allow employees a free meal once in a while. Her body wasn’t meant to survive on ramen alone.
However, after the chippers, afternoons were all hers.
That time became all about artistic pursuits—clothing design and embroidery—simple, classic pieces where she created art with stranded cotton.
Some of the embroidery designs were bold and in your face, while others were hidden, just waiting to be discovered, peeking from a lapel, cuff, or collar.
Mags’ final part-time gig was bartending Friday and Saturday evenings.
She would have loved to ask Ciar Murphy or his father for a job at one of their pubs, but it would have raised too many questions, and since she was not only hiding her mother’s cancer but her own dive into poverty, she couldn’t risk it.
However, just a month ago, her dire situation improved, and her due diligence had paid off. The wife of Ireland’s Prime Minister actually wore the embroidered vest she’d spent innumerable hours designing and hand stitching. She wore it to a charity event where she’d been asked who the designer was.
Wait for it—her name, Margaret Colleen Morrow, had been broadcast as the designer who dressed the Prime Minister’s wife. It had been broadcast on television and written in the papers.
Mirren, her older sister had literally tackled Mags not four hours later, having flown from Edinburgh to Dublin immediately, and demanded that she take the opportunity and run.
Like, literally, run.
Mirren secured an attic above a gallery within hours and hired a cleaning crew to make the space presentable before contacting some of her acquaintances at the Daily Mail to run an article about the “highly sought after new designer” along with Mags’ new website that their Uncle Coll had designed in less than ten minutes.
The art gallery whose attic her new sewing business had taken over was owned by her sister Mirren’s employers.
Kain and Lillias Smith owned a ton of shit, and thank the Lord, they loved her sister, which meant the rent was affordable—affordable with three jobs and an agreement to do light dusting in the gallery and clean the restroom at the back.
Bonus, there was a stairwell to the attic inside the back entrance, and she could use the toilet without bothering anyone.
There was no central heat and air, but thankfully she hadn’t had to deal with frigid winter temperatures yet…wait a few more months. She definitely needed to save for a space heater.
Her mom and dad had screamed at the news. Her father said later that her mother hadn’t looked so happy in weeks.
What her parents and big sister didn’t know was that Mags was actually living in the attic, which had no running water, heat, or air.
Because if she had mentioned that, she would have had to discuss all sorts of regrettable things, like dropping out of university. She’d blown off her financial aid deadline because she’d been too busy crying over her mother’s cancer. The result—she couldn’t afford Trinity.
The snowball effect hadn’t stopped there. The late, great Hugh O’Faolain had purchased the townhouse she’d resided in for his daughter and her best friends, of which she was one, to use while they were in school.
Except Mags wasn’t able to be in school anymore, at present anyway, and needed to move out. Bébhinn and her family would have never asked her to move out—they would have been pissed had she even suggested it—but Mags wasn’t and had never been a charity case. She would never abuse their kindness.
Blair had gotten back from her extended internship in Wales the week before, and Mags made sure to tell her before she walked into the townhouse they’d previously shared and saw her room empty.
Blair had been bummed that they wouldn’t see each other as often, but she understood and was excited about Mags’ new flat—if only she knew—and her new business, which all of her friends were supporting, sharing her information.
She put off Blair wanting to come see her place, claiming that she hadn’t even found a second to tell Bébhinn or Gray, but she would next time she saw them, and then maybe they could all do a tour together.
Mags prayed that she could put that off until she had maybe started bringing in enough income to perhaps afford a flat that her friends wouldn’t freak out over.
The PM's wife had, unbeknownst to her, thrown a lifeline to Mags, and she’d grabbed it with both hands. She still had a long road with a lot of obstacles ahead, but almost all of her struggles could and would be fixed with money.
So, her afternoons were spent meeting clients in their own homes—her new abode wasn’t an option, thank you very much—and sewing and embroidering until the wee hours thereafter. A few more weeks, and Mags would start to make a return on the long days.
Weekend days were spent on designing and sewing, while weekend nights were spent bartending at a cool jazz club.
The tips were great and kept her head above the teeming water of financial ruin.
Ninety percent of her earnings went toward rent, fabric, and stranded cotton.
When her stomach complained, she chewed gum and wielded her embroidery needle with added fervor.
“Thank Christ,” Mags whispered under her breath as she pushed through the chipper shop and realized her luck was turning.
The obnoxious manager was late. Sending a pleading look toward Eze, a giant Nigerian math genius and her newest best friend, to keep his comments about her chaotic life to himself, she slipped her apron on over her care center scrubs and grabbed a potato.