22. Maeve
Maeve
He's still standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, that careful neutral mask on his face, and I can see now that the mask isn't for him. It's for me. So I won't feel pressured. So the choice stays mine.
Even now, he's giving me the choice.
Falling. No handholds. No control at all.
I look at this man—this fiercely loyal, sometimes ridiculous, lethally dangerous man who bought dinosaur cereal and sang lullabies and let me go the moment I asked—and I make the bravest decision of my life. I swan-dive into a freefall.
"Lorcan."
"Yeah?"
"I need to say something, and I need you to not make a joke until I'm done."
His eyebrows lift. "That's asking a lot."
"Lorcan."
“Right. But first I want to say that Brianna confessed to what she told you. It was a lie, and her employment at O'Rourke's ended about an hour ago."
I stand up. My knees are shaking, and I let them shake, because apparently that's what falling feels like, and I'm done pretending I'm not mid-air.
"I don't care about Brianna. I know it was a lie. I always knew.” My arms want to cross, a defensive pose. I make them stay at my sides, open, undefended. "I still ran, and I couldn't understand why, and then your mother came in here and took me apart like a jigsaw puzzle.”
"She does that."
"I was afraid of letting go. Of asking for help. Lorcan, I was scared of you. Of trusting you. But “I don’t want to leave.” My voice cracks and I keep going anyway. "Is it too late? To change my mind. To stay."
"Too late." He says it flatly, like he's testing the words for structural defects.
Then his hands come up and frame my face, his mask drops, and what's underneath is so raw it steals my breath.
"Absolutely not. It will never, ever be too late.
I love you. I fell in love with you the moment you threatened to slit my throat in my sleep. "
And then he kisses me, and I kiss him back with everything I've got, pulling him down, no exits counted, no plan B, just falling and letting him catch me, because that's his job now.
Someone clears their throat. Loudly. Theatrically.
We break apart. Jamie is standing in the doorway with Oisin on his hip, wearing the expression of a boy who has witnessed a crime.
"Gross, you guys." He shifts Oisin higher. "Get a room."
"This is our room," Lorcan says.
"MaeMae kissing!" Oisin announces to the room at large.
"Yeah, buddy, we all saw." Jamie's mouth is doing something suspicious at the corners, something that wants to be a smile, but then it flattens, and his eyes come to me. "Hey. Something's wrong with Cara."
My stomach plummets.
"What do you mean, wrong?" I'm already moving, past him, down the hall. "Wrong how?"
I hear his voice from behind me as he follows. “I dunno, she's just sitting there. She stopped packing and she won’t move. She's just sitting there."
Oisin just got over a fever. Maybe she caught it. Or maybe it’s emotional. I told her to pack, upheaving her whole world again, the fourth home in four years for a girl who needs consistency.
I push open her door.
Cara is sitting on the edge of her bed. The bed with the lavender comforter Kathleen bought her because Cara touched it twice in the catalog. Her small suitcase is open on the floor, half filled, and her face… Her face wears a sad expression.
"Hey, sweetheart." I cross the room and crouch in front of her, pressing the back of my hand to her forehead, then her cheek. No fever. "Are you sick? Does your stomach hurt? Did you catch what Oisin had?"
She shakes her head.
"Did something happen?"
She shakes her head again, slower.
"Cara, baby, I need you to help me out here. Can you point? Can you show me what's—"
“I…want…to…stay."
My jaw falls open.
Three years. Three years of silence, of notes and nods and reading her expressions, of a harried counselor with four hundred other kids barely acknowledging her trauma. Cara’s voice comes out small and rusty, but it is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard in my life.
"I want to stay," she says again, steadier now, watching my face. "Here. With Lorcan and Grandma Kathleen and Deirdre. I like it here."
I'm on my knees on the floor and I don't remember getting there. Behind me I hear Jamie whisper holy shit and for once in my life I don't correct his language, because—yeah. Holy shit.
"You talked." My voice is wrecked. "Cara. Baby. You talked.”
She shrugs one small shoulder, like it's nothing.
A sound comes out of me, half laugh, half sob, and I pull her into my arms and she comes, burrowing against me, her thin arms wrapping around my neck, and I see them all crowded together—Jamie with his eyes wide, Oisin in his arms, and Lorcan, looking at this little girl like he’s incredibly proud of her.
"We're staying," I say into Cara's hair. I say it to her, and to Jamie, and to Oisin, and to the man I’m married to—my husband. “We can all unpack. We're staying. We're home."
Cara pulls back and looks at me with her big, serious, cataloguing eyes—and then she smiles. A wide, gap-toothed, nine-year-old smile.
And that's when the pile-on happens—Oisin launching off Jamie's hip onto the bed shrieking "STAYING!
" at stairwell-echo volume, Jamie sitting down heavy beside Cara and knocking his shoulder into hers, muttering, “Say something else, weirdo,” while she giggles—out loud.
She giggles, and the sound breaks me open all over again.
Lorcan plops down beside me and gathers us all in a group hug.
"So," he murmurs, just for me, "From now on, where they go, you go. Where you go, I go. Deal?”
I lean my head on his shoulder. “Deal.”