Epilogue #2
"Marry me," he said. Not a speech. Just the plain fact of it, delivered in the flat, direct way he delivered everything that mattered.
"I know what I am and I know what I come with—the history, the family, all of it.
And I know what you are, and I know what you're building, and I want to be there for it. All of it." A beat. "Marry me."
I was crying. I hadn't cried this whole trip, had held it carefully together through the pub and the card and the fire, and I was crying now in a Killarney lane in the evening light with the mountains behind him and this man's whole enormous heart right there in his hands.
"Yes," I said. "Obviously, yes."
He put the ring on my finger and it caught the light exactly the way she had promised.
I laughed—part joy, part the absurdity of it, part the relief of a moment that had been building since an alley in Charleston finally arriving and being exactly what it should be.
"You know," I said, "there are people who would call me a flight risk."
He looked at me. That jaw. Those eyes.
"You ran out of a church," he said. "In a dress that weighed seventeen pounds." The almost-smile. "I figure a woman who can do that can go anywhere she wants."
"I'm not running from you," I said.
"I know," he said. "You ran straight into me. That's different."
I looked at the ring on my finger, the light moving through it, changing.
"It is," I said. “Completely different."
Weeks had passed since the airport.
Not many—we had not needed many to understand what we were and what we were going to be—but enough. Enough for things to settle into their new shapes. Enough for the world to begin to look, cautiously, like something that could be lived in.
Craine was still out there.
That was the truth that lived in the back of every day.
The Danes had won the battle—had kept their people safe, had kept Project Trueborn out of his hands, had closed ranks around the families and the information and everything Craine had sent men to take.
The militia was gone, dismantled, scattered by quiet pressure from people with the reach and the leverage to dismantle things quietly.
The FBI had not moved openly against Dominion Hall—couldn't, not without exposing what Craine was doing with the badge.
A standoff. A breathing room. But not an ending.
Craine was patient, and patient men didn't stop; they waited for a better angle, and the Dane family understood that and had closed itself into a formation that made every angle harder.
We lived at Dominion Hall, for now.
Brock's suite, which had gone from strange to familiar to home in the way of places that held the right people.
The house was extraordinary and continued to be extraordinary, and I had stopped expecting to stop being astonished by it. Teddy brought coffee without being asked. The grounds were tended by people who understood beauty. The kitchen became the site of the dinners I had not expected.
Big family dinners.
That was the thing nobody had prepared me for, and also the thing that had made everything else make sense: all those brothers, building, adding wives and lives—gathering around a huge table.
The noise of it. The way it looked like chaos from a distance and like something ancient and necessary from close up.
I had been welcomed by the women. I had expected to be measured, assessed, and had been, but the measuring had been fair and the welcome that followed it had been genuine.
Hallie Mae was the one who understood something particular about me.
She was Noah's wife, and she was the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher.
She had arrived at Dominion Hall by a road nearly as improbable as mine.
She understood, without my having to say it, what it felt like to be raised inside a faith that loved you and pressed on you at the same time, and what it cost to find yourself somewhere outside the frame you'd been given and discover that you were not, in fact, lost.
Her baby was beginning to babble now—Jamie Lynn, named for Hallie Mae's father who had been killed. She had Hallie Mae's wide eyes and Noah's jaw and absolutely no opinion yet on the Dane family mythology she'd been born into, which seemed wise.
I had held Jamie Lynn at one of the dinners and felt something move through me that I filed away carefully, not ready to examine in full. There was time. We had time.
My parents had met Brock.
That had been its own story. My father had been careful and honest, the way he was careful and honest about everything, and he had asked Brock one question when they had a moment alone that Brock had reported to me afterward with something close to respect in his voice.
Are you going to take care of my daughter or is she going to take care of you?
And Brock had said: Both. We're going to take care of each other.
My father had nodded and that had been that.
My mother had cried. She cried at everything now, a loosening of something that had been held very tight.
I found I loved her more for it. She had looked at Brock with the eyes of a woman revising a picture she'd been carrying and had said, eventually, well.
He has very good manners for someone so large.
Which was, from Patricia Donovan, a considerable endorsement.
There had been one Sunday.
Brock had come to Mass with us. He was not a Catholic—was not, to my knowledge, anything in particular—and he had sat in the pew of Saint Sebastian's in the good shirt Teddy had pressed for him with his back straight and his hands on his knees and his eyes forward.
The light had come through the stained glass in its red and gold, the same light that had been falling on Donovan lives in this building for generations.
I had sat beside him and felt Colleen on my other side.
Beside Colleen, Nora, who had come to Sunday Mass for the first time that day because my sister had asked her to and because my parents had asked her to come, which was the thing that had made Colleen cry in the car on the way there.
On the end, our father, and on the other end, our mother.
The congregation had seen all of it. Charleston saw everything and chose what to make of it over time.
I had looked down the pew at my family—all of my family, the new and the old—and I had thought about the Sunday I had walked into this church in seventeen pounds of ivory silk and had taken the first step and the thought had arrived: I could run.
I had run.
And running had brought me here.
I had a studio on Wentworth Street. I had two days a week at Providence Academy teaching art—not running campaigns or donor events or scholarship galas, just teaching, which turned out to be a thing I had always loved without knowing it. I had a body of work I had been quietly building for years.
And now, I had the ring on my finger that caught the light differently every time I looked at it. I had a man who asked what I wanted like it was the only question that mattered.
I had my grandmother's country under my feet today. The mountains in the evening light. A lane in Killarney where I'd said yes to something that had begun in an alley outside a church on a Saturday in March and had turned out to be the most important thing I would ever run toward.
My mother had said God is telling us something in the kitchen that Sunday, with her hands shaking, and I had thought she was wrong.
I was less certain about that now.
Not the theology of calamity—I still didn't believe in suffering as a message.
But the other thing. The quieter thing. The sense that the sequence of an ordinary Saturday had been tending toward something.
That it had been running in a direction I couldn't see until I was already in the middle of it.
Fate was too simple a word. Destiny too grand.
Maybe it was just this: that the world moved, and sometimes you moved with it, and sometimes you moved against it, and the only difference was whether you were paying attention when the door opened.
I had paid attention.
I had run.
I had found what I was running toward.
Brock took my hand in the Killarney lane, and the ring caught the light, and the mountains behind him went gold and extraordinary.
I thought: I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
And I believed it. With my whole self. With the certainty of a woman who had learned, at last, the difference between a life she'd built for everyone else and a life she'd chosen.