The Beast (Dominion Hall #18)

Chapter 1

MARY CATHERINE

The dress weighed seventeen pounds.

I knew this because my mother had announced it with the reverence most people reserved for miracle births and canonizations, hands pressed to her cheeks, eyes shining: seventeen pounds, Mary Catherine.

As though suffering beneath something beautiful was, itself, a sacrament. As though the Catholic Church had finally found a way to make the dress the penance.

Standing in the back room of Saint Sebastian's, I was starting to think she might have been right.

Colleen was sitting on the velvet settee when I came back from the bathroom, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her in a way that would have made our mother short-circuit, if she'd walked in.

My sister was thirty-two and three years older than me, and she had the gift of looking comfortable in rooms where comfort wasn't the point.

She was watching me the way she'd been watching me all morning. Carefully.

“You've been in there a long time," she said.

"It takes a long time to exist in this dress."

She smiled, but it didn't quite reach. "Cat."

"I'm fine, Colleen."

"I didn't ask."

I sat down at the vanity and looked at myself in the mirror instead of at her, because her face was doing something I didn't have the bandwidth to receive right now. My lipstick had survived the bathroom, which felt like the one thing going right.

Outside, the organ was playing—that low, resonant sound that didn't so much travel through the air as move up through Saint Sebastian's marble floors and into the soles of my feet, and from there, directly to whatever part of me was currently conducting a quiet referendum on my entire life.

"Do you remember," I asked, "when I was seven and I told Mama I wanted to be an artist?"

Colleen didn't even have to think about it. "She said that was a beautiful dream and suggested you might also consider something with more stability."

"Right." I pressed my lips together, checking the color in the mirror. "I wasn't even that committed to it. I just wanted to see what would happen if I said something unexpected."

"What did you learn?"

"That unexpected things make Mama nervous and pot roast is her apology language." I set down the lipstick. "I think I've been optimizing for the pot roast ever since."

She laughed—a short, real one—and then the laugh faded and she was looking at me again with that careful expression. I wished she would stop, because it was making it harder to be fine.

I turned back to the mirror.

Ivory silk with a cathedral train that had required two people to arrange properly that morning, my mother and the seamstress both flushed with the effort.

I had stood very still and let them work because standing still and cooperating was something I had always been good at.

Hand-sewn lace along the bodice. A neckline that showed more of my collarbone than I usually allowed.

My hair was swept up, dark and severe against the paleness of my neck, pinned so tightly I'd felt it behind my eyes since ten o'clock.

My face was the face I'd always had, the one that stopped people mid-sentence at parties, the wide eyes and the jaw and the cheekbones that I had spent twenty-nine years learning to soften with expression, with warmth, with the smile that my sister had once told me could stop traffic.

What Colleen didn't know—what I had never told her—was that I used that smile the way other people used a held breath. To get through things. To stay on the surface when something underneath was pulling.

I was using it now. Alone in front of the mirror, I was smiling at my own reflection, and I noticed it only because it struck me as both completely automatic and faintly absurd.

"The Whitakers are lovely people," Colleen said from the settee. Not just Daniel is wonderful. The family. The whole structure of it.

"They are," I agreed.

"Dublin is going to be incredible."

"It is."

I meant it, or I had meant it for the eight months since Daniel and I had planned it together over takeout at the kitchen table, spreading a travel guide open between us and circling things with a pen like people in a movie about being happy.

Dublin first, then a few days in the countryside—Cork, Killarney, the Ring of Kerry. Two weeks. It had been my idea, the Ireland honeymoon, and Daniel had agreed the way he agreed with most things I suggested, pleasantly and without objection. I had loved him for it, at the time.

The Donovans had been Irish for as long as anyone had bothered to track it. My father's family had come to Charleston three generations back and had put down roots with the stubbornness of people who had survived enough to know that staying put was its own kind of victory.

There were Donovans in Saint Sebastian's going back further than the current building.

My grandfather's name was on a memorial plaque in the vestibule.

My parents had been married here. Colleen and I had been baptized here, confirmed here, had sat in these pews for nearly every Sunday of our childhoods, the liturgy so familiar I could recite it in my sleep—the call and response, the comfort of words that never changed.

I had loved this building my whole life. I was finding it slightly harder to love, at the moment.

The expense of the wedding and the honeymoon had registered on my father's face the way expenses always did—not in words. Martin Donovan did not put financial strain into words, but in a quiet that lasted three days and then disappeared without acknowledgment.

We were comfortable. My parents had given us a genuinely good life, careful and honest and full in the ways that mattered.

But comfortable was not lavish, and this wedding—the venue, the dress, the flowers, the photographer with the six-month waitlist, the rehearsal dinner that had required my mother to take three separate deep breaths before signing the check—was years of careful saving arranged into one long, beautiful, slightly terrifying Saturday.

I knew what it had cost. I had always known what things cost, not in numbers but in the silences around them.

"Mama mentioned Christmas," Colleen said. "At the new house."

"I know." I didn't look away from the mirror. "She mentioned the yard."

Colleen didn't say anything.

"Twice," I added. "Once in terms of square footage and once in terms of—" I made a vague gesture at the general concept.

"Room to grow," Colleen said.

"Room to grow." I smoothed a hand over the bodice of the dress, a useless gesture—everything was already as smooth as it would ever be.

I could feel her looking at me. I could always feel Colleen looking at me in a certain way, had been able to since we were children, because she was the one person in my life who had never entirely accepted the surface of me as the whole of me.

It was the thing I loved most about her and occasionally found most inconvenient.

"I want you to be happy," she said.

"I am happy."

"Cat."

"Colleen."

The room held us for a moment, warm and close, the sweetness of the tulips thickening the air.

They were already beginning to curl at the edges from the heat, petals going soft.

I had noticed that earlier and set the observation aside, because today was not the day to become a person who found omens in flower arrangements.

My bouquet sat on the side table beside them—roses and gardenias and trailing ivy. It was beautiful.

I had spent four months selecting beautiful things. I had a talent for it, the curation of appearances, the assembly of precisely the right elements into something that read as effortless. Everyone said so.

The campaigns I ran at Providence Academy, the donor events, the scholarship galas—everyone said that Mary Catherine Donovan had an eye, a gift, that rare combination of taste and discipline that made difficult things look inevitable.

It was a real skill, and I was genuinely proud of it.

I was also aware, in a way I had only recently begun to articulate, even to myself, that I had spent my career making other people's visions beautiful without ever asking what I might build if the vision were my own.

I thought about a phone call I'd received last month. Then, I stopped thinking about it because it was not useful right now.

"I want you to be happy," Colleen said again, quieter this time. Not a reassurance. Something closer to a question.

I looked at my sister—really looked, in the way sisters did when they'd known each other long enough that the looking said more than the talking.

She was single and the subject of parental attention that had grown more textured and persistent over the past few years.

The gentle, redirected hoping, the careful mentions of this colleague or that family friend, our mother's voice going soft whenever the subject of Colleen's future arranged itself into the conversation.

Patricia Donovan was not a cruel woman. She was not even an unfair woman, by her own lights. She simply loved her daughters and wanted them safe, and in the architecture of her love, safety meant settled, and settled meant a life she could recognize and speak about with pride at coffee after Mass.

She had two daughters and no grandchildren and a body that had made its sacrifice on a table when I was born—something I had understood since childhood in the way you understood things that were never said aloud, absorbing them from tone and texture and the shape of certain silences.

She had never once made me feel responsible for what she'd lost. But daughters knew things, and I had known. I had spent my life trying in every quiet way available to me to be worth it.

The grandchildren she would someday have.

The certainty that her daughters were cared for.

The full house she had once imagined.

I had been building toward that house my entire life, and the building had been so gradual and so natural-feeling that I had not stopped to notice, until quite recently, that I had never once asked myself whether I wanted to live in it.

The organ shifted outside into something I recognized—the processional beginning its slow, inevitable build—and I heard my mother's voice on the other side of the door, the murmur of a woman managing a thousand details at once.

I understood that we were almost out of time.

Colleen stood. Found her shoes. Crossed to me and took both my hands in hers. She looked at me with the expression that meant she was giving me something real.

"Whatever you're thinking," she said, "you can tell me. Now or later or whenever it is." Her voice was steady and even. Underneath it was something that asked nothing of me. "I mean that."

I looked at my sister and thought about all the things we had never said to each other, and all the ways we had each, in our own fashion, been very good at standing still and letting the moment pass.

"I know," I said.

She pressed a kiss to my cheek, careful of the makeup, and stepped back.

Then the door was opening and my father was there in his morning coat, eyes going immediately bright when they found me—the brightness of a man who loved his daughter and believed completely that he was watching her happiness arrive.

I took his arm.

The light inside the nave was doing what it always did in late afternoon—red and gold through the stained glass, pooling on the stone floors in long burning shapes, the whole church drenched in it.

I knew this light. I had always found it beautiful in a way that felt, if not quite religious, then close enough—that sensation of being inside something vast and old that had held a great many human moments and would hold a great many more.

My father's arm was solid beneath my hand. My bouquet was cool and fragrant against my wrist. Daniel was at the end of the aisle with his kind face and his good life and the whole future we had planned together arranged behind him like a room I had already decorated in my mind.

Ahead of me, barely audible beneath the music, I heard Colleen exhale.

Two hundred and twelve people rose as one.

The thought arrived the way forbidden things did—quietly, and with complete conviction: I could run.