Chapter 27
MARY CATHERINE
Daniel drove the way he did everything—carefully, with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, signaling early, leaving space between his car and the one ahead.
I had forgotten, in the chaos of the last forty-eight hours, what it felt like to be in a car with someone who drove like a reasonable adult.
Brock drove like a man who'd been trained to treat every road as a potential escape route.
Daniel drove like someone who had somewhere to be and intended to arrive.
I sat in the passenger seat with my bag at my feet and watched Charleston go by.
It was early afternoon, the light still high and pale over the rooftops, the kind of flat, bright March day that didn't commit to anything dramatic.
We passed the end of Wentworth Street—I did not look down it—and turned north toward the highway and the airport beyond.
The city fell away by degrees, the old architecture giving way to the ordinary sprawl that surrounded it.
We had just enough time, if the traffic cooperated, which in Charleston on a Sunday afternoon, it usually did.
"I looked at the flights to Dublin this morning," Daniel said.
I turned to look at him.
He was watching the road. Something in his jaw was working, very slightly, the way it did when he was managing something.
"Not to—" He stopped. "Not for any reason. Just. It came up on my phone. The alerts we'd set up." He made a quiet sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "The algorithm doesn't know about yesterday. They were nonrefundable. So.”
"No," I said. "It wouldn't know.”
A silence. Comfortable, in the way that silences between people who'd known each other for three years could be comfortable even when nothing about the situation was.
"I'd been looking forward to it," he said.
"The trip. More than I let on, probably.
I kept researching things—restaurants, off-the-beaten-track things, the kind you never actually get to when you're trying to do all the obvious things first." He paused.
"There was a pub in Killarney that had been there since the 1700s.
I'd written down the name three times in different places so I wouldn't lose it. "
I looked at my hands in my lap.
"I didn't know that," I said.
"I should have told you more of it," he said. "I think I—I kept the planning mostly practical. Logistics. Let you handle the aesthetic parts because you were better at them. I should have told you that I'd been researching pubs in Killarney."
I didn't say anything.
"I had a whole version of the future," he said.
"Very detailed. I could see it in a way I can't always see things.
The house, eventually—somewhere with a yard, which I know is a cliché, but I genuinely wanted the yard.
I wanted—" He paused, and his hands shifted on the wheel.
"I wanted to cook on Sundays. I had this idea about Sunday dinners, the kind that go all afternoon, and having people over.
I was going to learn to make your mother's bread. I'd already asked her for the recipe."
Something moved through my chest that I didn't have a clean name for.
"She gave it to you?" I said.
"She did. She wrote it out on an index card and put it in my jacket pocket at the rehearsal dinner." He smiled at the road. "Said not to tell you because you'd tease her for going soft."
My mother and her index card. My mother who had said God is telling us something in the kitchen this morning with her hands shaking. My mother, who had loved Daniel Whitaker in the way of mothers who recognized men who would take good care.
"Daniel," I said.
"You don't have to say anything," he said.
"I'm not—I'm not trying to make this harder.
I just want you to know that it was real, what I was looking forward to.
It wasn't just—a plan, or the next logical thing.
I wanted it. I wanted you. I wanted the yard and the bread and the Sunday dinners.
" He glanced over briefly. "I want you to know that someone wanted all of that with you. "
I felt my eyes go bright and pressed my lips together.
"I know," I said. "I know you did."
"And I also know," he said, returning his eyes to the road, "that you couldn't. I don't fully understand why—maybe I'm not supposed to—but I believe you when you say it wasn't about me.
I believe you that it was something you had to do.
" He was quiet for a moment. "I'm trying very hard to believe that. "
"It's true," I said. "I need you to believe it because it's true."
"I know." His voice was even. He was managing this so carefully, holding himself so steady, and I understood what it was costing him. I loved him for it in the way you loved someone who was doing the hardest version of a hard thing with all the grace they had.
"You're a good man," I said. "You are—you are genuinely one of the best people I know, Daniel, and I am sorry. I am so sorry for yesterday and for everything that came after. You deserved better than standing at that altar."
He was quiet for a long moment. The highway opened up around us, the afternoon light glinting off the traffic.
"Can I tell you something?" he asked.
"Yes."
"When I was standing there—at the altar, waiting—there was a moment, before I knew something was wrong, when I looked down the church and I thought—" He stopped.
Seemed to be choosing. "I thought: I hope she's happy.
Whatever happens. I just—I want her to be happy.
" He exhaled. "That was the thought I had.
And I've been trying to hold onto that one, because the others are—" He stopped again. "The others are harder."
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth for a moment.
"You shouldn't be this kind to me," I said. "You're allowed to be angry."
"I am angry," he said. "That's the thing. I'm angry and I'm—I have a lot of feelings that I'm not going to put on you in a car on the way to the airport." He looked at me briefly, something almost rueful in it. "I'm also an attorney. I know how to compartmentalize."
I made a sound that was part laugh and part something else.
"I'll be okay," he said. "I want you to know that. I will be okay, and I'm going to be okay, and I don't need you to carry that as a weight." His voice was level. "That's not me being noble. It's me being honest."
We drove in silence for a while. The airport signs appeared at the edges of the highway—the universal grammar of departures.
I thought about Sunday dinners that weren't going to happen. An index card with my mother's bread recipe in a jacket pocket. A pub in Killarney that had been there since the 1700s, the name written down three times so it wouldn't be lost.
I thought about a different version of this afternoon—Daniel and I, today, driving to an international terminal instead of a domestic one. Passports out. The giddiness of an airport when you're going somewhere you've always wanted to go.
"I should have told you more," I said quietly.
He glanced at me.
"I should have been more honest, earlier.
A year ago. Two years ago. I should have—I should have said the things I was feeling instead of letting them pile up underneath.
" I looked at him. "You deserved someone who could be fully present.
I was always—half somewhere else. In the studio.
In my head. I don't think I knew how to give you everything, and I should have understood that sooner and said so. "
"We were both doing our best," he said simply. "I think that's probably what's true."
"You were doing better than your best," I said. "The bread recipe. Backup copies of the pub name."
The almost-laugh again. "I'm a very thorough researcher."
"You are," I said. "You'd have been—you would have been wonderful at all of it. The yard and the Sundays and all of it. Someone is going to get something very good when they find you, Daniel."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Mary Catherine Donovan," he said eventually. "Is this your version of telling me to get back out there?"
"Not yet," I said. "Definitely not yet. But—eventually."
"Okay." He nodded, accepting it. "Eventually."
The airport appeared ahead of us—the terminals, the covered departures lane, the organized chaos of people and luggage and the small, separate universe of air travel. Daniel followed the signs to short-term parking without consulting the GPS, because Daniel always knew where the parking was.
He pulled into a space and turned off the engine and we sat for a moment in the quiet of the car.
"Thank you for coming," I said. "You didn't have to. After everything, you didn't have to say yes to this."
"Yes, I did," he said. "Your father is a good man and his business is in trouble and I can help. It wasn't a complicated decision."
This. This was what I had meant, in the kitchen, about Daniel being the best of what he was. Not complicated. Present. Useful.
"Are you going to be okay?" he asked. "With everything that's—there's a lot happening, Mary Catherine. More than I think you've told me."
I looked at him.
"I'm working through some things," I said carefully.
"The man," he said. Not accusatory. Just—knowing.
I held his gaze. "Yes."
He nodded once. Looked out through the windshield at the airport and everything it represented—the flight in front of us, the life behind us, the complicated arithmetic of being two people who had almost married each other now getting out of a car at a departure terminal to go fix a problem neither of them had made.
"I hope he's good to you," Daniel said. Low. Simple. The most generous sentence I'd ever heard.
I felt something crack open somewhere in my chest.
"So do I," I said.
He got out of the car and came around to take my bag before I'd finished unbuckling, because that was also Daniel—the easy courtesy, the showing up, the steady gestures of a man who'd been raised to take care of things and had never once needed to be asked.
I stood in the parking structure with the low March light coming through the open sides of it, and I looked at him—really looked, the way I hadn't let myself look in a long time. I thought about everything he was carrying into this terminal without complaint.
"Thank you," I said. "For being good. For being—just exactly who you are."
He looked at me for a moment with the eyes of a man who had lost something he'd wanted, who was choosing to be larger than the loss.
"Come on," he said. "We'll miss the flight."
He lifted both bags—mine and his—and started toward the terminal entrance.