CHAPTER 6
THE VOWS
POV: RONAN
“I’m not marrying you.”
She says it to the kitchen table.
It’s seven in the morning. She’s sitting at the end of the long oak table in the kitchen at Draven House in the gray dress she wore last night, which Rosa washed and pressed and hung on her door at five.
No veil. Her hair is loose over her shoulders, the first time I’ve seen it down in daylight, and a bruise is coming up on her throat in the shape of my teeth.
She hasn’t touched the eggs.
“Eat,” I say.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve had half a bowl of porridge since Tuesday.” I pour her coffee and set it by her hand. “Eat. Then tell me again.”
She looks at the eggs. She looks at me. She picks up the fork like it personally offended her.
She eats.
I sit across from her with my own cup and watch her do it. Every bite. The way she chews on the left because of a filling that’s bothered her since September. The way her eyes keep going to the window, to the snow on Louisburg Square, to the black iron fence, like she’s measuring the distance.
She’s not going anywhere.
When the plate is half empty, she puts the fork down.
“I’m not marrying you,” she says again.
“Conor Kavanagh.”
She blinks. “Who?”
“The man who sent those two to your chapel last night. I sat across from him on Tuesday. Do you want to know what he said?”
Her mouth tightens. “No.”
“He said you’re on a boat by Christmas.” I set my cup down. “He said a woman with no husband and no people in this city is whoever’s got the nerve. Two of his men had the nerve last night. You hit one of them with a candle snuffer.”
“And you shot him.”
“And I shot him.” I let that sit. “There are forty more where he came from. I can’t shoot them all before Christmas. I could try. It’s quicker if you have my name.”
“So protect me.”
“I am.”
“Without—” She makes a sharp little gesture that takes in the kitchen, the house, me. “Without owning me.”
“There’s no such thing.”
She stares at me. Her cheeks go pink. She doesn’t look away, and I like that more than I should.
“And if I say no at the altar?”
“Then you walk out of St. Agnes alone,” I say. “And I stop standing outside.”
It’s a lie.
If she says no, I’ll carry her out of that church over my shoulder, burn Southie to the waterline before Christmas Eve, and marry her in the ashes. There is no version of this where I stop standing outside.
She doesn’t need to know that.
She searches my face a long time. I let her. I’ve had two years to learn how to hold still while she doesn’t see me. Holding still while she does is easier than I expected.
“Why me?” she asks finally.
“You asked me to come closer.”
Color floods up her throat, right over the bite. “That was a prayer.”
“It was answered.” I stand. “Four o’clock. St. Agnes. Rosa will bring you a dress.”
“I’m not wearing—”
“Then choose one.”
***
She chooses black.
Rosa brings three up at noon. Ivory silk. Pale blue wool. And a plain black one, long-sleeved, high at the throat, that I added to the rack as an afterthought.
At three-fifteen she comes down the stairs in the black one with my veil over her hair.
She looks like a widow.
She looks like the most beautiful thing that has ever walked through my house, and I have owned some beautiful things.
I don’t tell her that. I tell her, “Car.”
***
She doesn’t speak until we’re on the Expressway.
The snow’s coming down again, fine and dry, hissing on the windshield. Theo drives. She sits on the far side of the back seat with her hands folded in her lap on the black wool, and the veil falls around her face so I can only see her profile. The line of her jaw. The bruise.
“Where will I sleep?” she says to the window.
“Next to me.”
Her hands tighten. “In your bed.”
“In the room beside mine.”
“For now.”
“For now,” I agree.
The wipers go back and forth.
“You’re not Catholic,” she says.
“I was baptized at the cathedral. My mother made sure.”
“Do you believe any of it?”
I look at her profile. “I believe in doors.”
She turns her head at that. Through the lace, her eyes find mine. “What does that mean?”
“It means some are open and some are closed, and somebody decides which. And it’s never God.”
She’s quiet a long moment.
“After,” she says. “After I say it. What happens?”
“Then nobody touches you. Nobody in this city lays a finger on you without starting a war with me.” I watch her. “Except me.”
She looks back out the window.
Her hands are bare. She came down without gloves. Her fingertips have gone pink with cold, and she keeps pressing them together in her lap like she’s praying.
I reach across the seat and take her left hand. The one with my ring on it.
She goes still. She doesn’t pull away.
It’s the first time I’ve held her hand. Not her wrist. Not her pulse. Her hand. Her fingers are like ice. I pull my glove off with my teeth so it’s skin on skin, and I hold her hand on my knee in the back of the car while Theo drives us to St. Agnes through the snow.
Her pulse is going fast under my thumb. I don’t need the phone.
“If I say no,” she says, very quietly, to the window. “You’ll let me walk out alone.”
“Yes.”
It’s the second time I’ve lied to her today.
She doesn’t take her hand back.
***
St. Agnes at four in December is already half dark. Candles lit. The Advent wreath with one purple candle burned low and the next still waiting.
No music. No flowers.
There’s the priest from Quincy, who owes me eleven thousand dollars and one very quiet DUI, sweating into his stole at the altar rail.
There’s Mother Clare in the front pew, hands folded, face shut.
There’s Sister Bernadette two seats down, with a purple bruise on her cheekbone and her arms crossed like she’s watching a hockey game.
There’s Theo beside me as witness.
And there’s her.
She walks up the aisle alone. Nobody gives her away. There’s nobody left to do it.
Her heels click on the stone. Her hands are empty. The lace falls past her shoulders, and through it I can see her face, pale and set, her lips pressed together.
She stops beside me.
Her wrist is right there. I don’t take it. Not yet.
“Dearly beloved,” the priest begins, and his voice cracks on beloved, and Bernadette snorts.
I don’t hear most of it. I watch her.
I watch her eyes go up to the choir loft, to the pale new rail, and stay there a long moment. I watch her swallow. I watch the bruise on her throat move above the black collar.
“Do you, Ronan Michael Draven, take Magdalene Catherine Holloway—”
“I do.”
The priest jumps. I hadn’t let him finish.
He clears his throat and turns to her.
“Do you, Magdalene Catherine Holloway, take Ronan Michael Draven, to have and to hold, from this day forward—”
She doesn’t answer.
The candle flames stand straight up. Nobody breathes. Mother Clare’s hands tighten in her lap.
I don’t prompt her. The last time I did, I used my thumb.
Mae turns her head. Not to the priest. To me.
Her eyes are wet. Her chin is up.
“I do,” she says.
And then, before the priest can open his mouth—
“Amen.”
Quiet. For me alone.
Something in my chest cracks down the middle.
“The ring,” the priest says faintly.
I hold out my hand. She looks at it. Then she lifts her left hand and lays it in mine.
The gold rosary is already on her finger. She put it there herself, the first night, alone at her window.
I slide it off.
Her breath catches.
I hold it up where she can see it. The tiny beads. My initial where the cross should be. Then I put it back on, slowly. Over the knuckle. All the way down.
“The first time, you put it on yourself,” I say, low. “This time, I do.”
“By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” the priest says in a rush, “I now pronounce you—”
I don’t wait for him.
I lift the lace. I put my hand on the side of her neck, over the bite, and I kiss my wife.
It isn’t gentle. I don’t know how to be gentle about this. Two years of watching her mouth move in prayer, and I take it like I own it, because I do. Her lips are cold from the chapel, and then they aren’t. She makes a small sound against me. Her hand comes up and fists in the lapel of my coat.
Her lips part.
When I let her go, her mouth is red, her eyes are dazed, and the priest is staring at the floor.
Bernadette says, to nobody in particular, “Well. That’s done.”
***
In the sacristy, the floor has been scrubbed. You’d never know. The register lies open on the vestment press where a man bled out twenty hours ago.
The priest holds out the pen.
I sign. Sharp. Fast.
Mae takes the pen and bends over the book. For a moment, the nib hovers over the line.
Then she writes. Steady and careful, the handwriting of a girl taught by nuns.
Magdalene Catherine Holloway.
She straightens and looks at the name like she’s reading it off a headstone.
Theo takes a photograph of the page with his phone.
“The card?” he asks me.
I take it from my breast pocket. Cream stock. My hand. One word.
Amen.
“Conor’s pub,” I say. “Put it in his hand. Not the bartender’s. His.”
“And the photo?”
“Text it to him. He’ll want to frame it.”
Theo goes.
Mae is watching me. “You’re sending him our marriage certificate?”
“I’m sending him a warning.”
“With a card that says amen.”
“He’ll understand.”
“What will he understand?”
I take her wrist. My thumb finds her pulse. It’s fast. It’s been fast since the aisle.
“That it’s finished,” I say. “That you’re closed.”
***
Theo texts me at seven-forty, from the car outside Conor’s pub.
Delivered. He read it. Said congratulations. Said to tell you a gift’s on its way.
I look at that for a while.
Then I look up.
Mae is standing in the doorway of my study. Still in the black dress. Still in the veil. She hasn’t taken it off since the church. One hand rests on the doorframe, the other at her side, and her ring catches the lamplight.
She doesn’t come in.
She doesn’t go upstairs, either.
“Rosa says my room is next to yours,” she says.
“It is.”
“She says there’s a door between them.”
“There is.”
“She says it locks on your side.”
“It does.”
She holds my gaze. Her throat moves. The bruise moves with it.
Then she turns and climbs the stairs, slowly, her heels on the wood, and she doesn’t look back.
I turn the phone face down on the desk.
Tonight she learns what a vow costs.