Chapter 3 Billie
Billie
My dad makes a pot roast that should honestly be on the cover of magazines.
He's been vague about the process for years, the way people get when they know they have one good thing and intend to take it to the grave.
Sunday dinners have always been worth showing up for, and the pot roast is a significant part of why.
Even though I have my own place now, I always show up for Sunday dinner. It’s tradition.
I take a serving and pass the dish to my brother Cian without comment.
"You're doing the thing," Cian says.
"I'm eating."
"You're eating and doing the thing. They're not mutually exclusive." He takes a generous portion because he is twenty-four and has never once in his life left food on the table. "The thing where you're somewhere else."
"I'm right here."
"Mm." He lets it go, which is somehow worse than if he'd pushed it.
My dad looks up from where he's standing at the counter, fussing with the gravy. "Leave her alone, Cian." He says this to the gravy, not to either of us.
Declan is sitting across the table from me. He reaches for the bread basket and his forearm crosses my sightline and I develop a sudden, passionate interest in the tablecloth weave. Riveting stuff. Cotton blend, probably. Very sturdy.
"Billie," Cian says, and his voice has that pitch that means he's about to say something I'm going to need a face ready for. "Have you slept this week?"
"I sleep."
"You've said 'I sleep' with that exact defensive energy twice now in the last three Sundays.
" He points his fork at me with the easy precision of a brother who has been keeping track of my tells since birth.
"You only get defensive about sleep when you're not doing it.
" He means well, but he’s been on my case since I moved out. Big brother energy and all that.
"I've been busy."
"You work from home."
"That doesn't mean—"
“Cian," my dad says from the counter, still not looking, warm and absent in that way parents get when they've had a version of this conversation a hundred times. "Let her be."
Cian considers this and pivots without friction. "Ronan," he says, "did you know that a guy from your old neighborhood back home was on the news last week?"
My dad looks up from the gravy. "Who?"
"Some guy who went into local politics. Don't worry about it. I only brought it up because I figured you'd know his family." He pauses. "Do you know his family?"
My dad says a surname. Cian says yes. My dad makes a sound that is half recognition and half something more complicated.
He starts talking about the family, then about the street, then about a pizza place that apparently closed down years ago, and Cian follows the whole thread with the patient attention of someone who wanted to know all of this.
I watch my brother and think: that's it.
That's what he does. He wanted to know if Dad knew the family, so he found the facts and the angle that would get Dad talking, and he's going to sit there and learn things while everyone thinks the conversation happened by accident.
I have lived with Cian for most of my life and I am still not entirely comfortable with how quietly he operates. If he ever turned that skill on me properly I'd be cooked inside thirty seconds, which is a thought I choose not to dwell on while sitting at this table with my current secret portfolio.
He catches me watching him. He smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes because his eyes are too busy deciding whether to ask me something else.
"Stop it," I say.
"I'm eating."
"You're calculating."
"Both." He shrugs and goes back to the pot roast.
The dinner goes on. My dad tells a story about a client, something about planning permission and a neighbor with opinions, and it's funny in the slow-build way of Ronan Callaghan stories.
Nobody tells a story like my dad. He'll take fourteen minutes to get to a punchline that deserves three, and somehow the extra eleven minutes make it funnier.
Declan listens. I watch him listen without appearing to watch him listen.
When Cian starts up a third theory about our neighbors, I use it as cover. I push back my chair and slip into the kitchen to refill the gravy.
I need twelve seconds alone or I'm going to do something with my face that Cian will absolutely notice.
The kitchen is small and runs warm because of the old radiator on the exterior wall.
My mom used to call it a different climate.
I did a lot of homework in here. It smells like the gravy and whatever candle my dad has decided to burn this month and the general accumulated smell of a house that has been a house for a long time.
Declan is already there.
Same idea at the same moment. The dish is halfway between us, he's reached for it from one side and I've come in from the other, and we both stop. Not dramatically. Just the small arrested movement of two people who have misjudged a shared space.
His hand is six inches from mine on the ceramic rim.
I would like to report that I handle this with the cool composure of a woman who has been professionally on camera for eighteen months.
I do not. My brain goes completely offline for approximately two seconds and my entire body becomes aware that this kitchen is very small and very warm and Declan Maguire is very close and it’s giving me thoughts that would get me disowned from this family if anyone could read minds.
Declan picks up the dish and holds it out to me.
"Thanks," I say.
My voice comes out ordinary. Academy Award-worthy, honestly. Somebody give me a trophy.
He doesn't leave the kitchen immediately.
Turns to the counter, refills his glass from the open bottle, and in the ordinary choreography there are about four seconds where we're both in this small warm room and neither of us is looking at the other.
Dad and Cian talking in the other room, muffled through the wall.
He picks up his glass. He looks at me.
The thing about Declan Maguire's full attention is you feel it before it arrives.
Some shift in the room, some quality of contraction, and then he's looking at you and there's no gap in it.
No part of him somewhere else. Just all of him, pointed at you, like a weather system that has decided where it's going.
One second. Two.
"We're waiting on the gravy," he says.
"Right," I say. "Yeah."
He leaves.
I stand in the kitchen with the serving dish and red cheeks.
This is fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine.
***
Dessert is a pie from the bakery on Main, which my dad picks up every third Sunday. We're mostly through it when my dad asks Declan how the week was and Declan says fine, quiet, but that he's been having trouble sleeping lately.
"Bad patches," Declan says. Nothing more.
My dad makes a sound of sympathy. "Have you tried decaf—"
"Yes."
"And?"
"It takes the edge off." A pause. He picks up his coffee. "I'll be fine."
I reach for my wine glass and take a long sip.
We stay another hour. My dad makes coffee and Cian argues about something on TV and Declan sits with his mug and says about six words total, which is standard, and I am a completely normal person at a completely normal family dinner and nobody knows anything.
I hug my dad goodbye at the door. Cian says he'll text me. Declan says goodnight from the hallway, briefly, and I say goodnight back and I do not make eye contact for longer than is reasonable and I get out.
I replay the kitchen on the drive home. I remember how that kitchen felt like a different climate than it ever has before, and my mom was right, it is a different climate, she just didn't know the half of it.
I start the stream as soon as I get home.
BrattyBaby drops into the chair and the filter comes up and the voice shifts and approximately forty people say hello in the chat. The chat fills up fast.
DarkWatcher45 tips immediately. No message. Just the number and the silence after it.
I acknowledge it without breaking stride. Cool. Unhurried.
"DarkWatcher. Right on time."