Chapter 29 #2
“She threatened me tonight.” I turn to look at him. “Quietly, in a way that might have slipped past anyone who overheard. But she stood next to me and let me know that she knows, too, and that she could do something about it if she wanted to.”
He frowns. “Did she? What did she say?”
“Aye. It doesn’t matter what she said. What matters is that she said it, and you insisted on driving me home. I’m still the person nobody is supposed to know about, and I am so—” My throat closes. I press my fingers to my eyes. “I’m so tired, Declan.”
“I understand. I know—”
“You don’t.” My hands are clenched into fists, and my heart is beating too fast. My cheeks feel hot, and I want to break something.
“You can’t. Because you’re the one who gets to go home, and I’m the one who watches you drive away.
And I’ve been telling myself I understand that, that I’m not supposed to want more than this.
But tonight? When she threatened me? I thought, she’s right. I’m not necessary. I’m a liability.”
“You are not a liability.” He reaches for me, but I dodge his touch.
“I mean it. Whatever this is”—I gesture between us, at the car, at everything—“I need you to let it go. All of it. The check-ins and driving me home, and the… the…” My voice clogs. “The texts. It’s killing me slowly, Declan. And I think you know that.”
“Bridget.”
“Let me go.” I’m proud of the fact that my voice doesn’t break. “Please. Just let me go. Let us go.” Him, me, the baby, all of it.
I know him well enough to know that he’s going to fight for me, and I don’t want to hear it.
I put my hand on the car door handle.
“Don’t touch that fucking door.”
“Don’t fucking threaten me.”
“Bridget, listen to me.” He grabs my hand. “Listen. Valentina knows. She found your jumper in the back of my car. She doesn't fucking care. She just wants me to still marry her.”
I stare at him. “When the fuck were you going to tell me? Or were you abdicating that to me? Did you want me to walk into the family house and say, 'Hey, Declan's mistress is here'?”
“It's not like that.”
“Did it somehow not occur to you that I needed that information? That I’m scared of her knowing?”
“That’s not going to happen.” I sigh.
“It isn’t just the alliance, Bridget. For fuck’s sake. It’s all about you and always has been.”
He’s got my attention now, even if I’m still seeing through a red haze of fury. “What is that supposed to mean?”
He drags a hand down his face. “I didn’t want to tell you. When your parents betrayed the family, do you know what was supposed to happen to you? Do you?”
I stare at him. Cold fingers of fear trickle down my spine. “No,” I say in a small voice. “What?”
“You were supposed to be punished with them. There was no reason for you not to be, not according to the fucking law that binds every one of us. Being Erin’s sister didn’t grant you immunity. The only one who had immunity was Erin because she was married to Cavin.”
I stare, dumbfounded. What did he do?
“But you know what? Fuck the alliance.”
“Declan, no. You can’t do that. It would start a war—you know it would. And it would put everyone we both love in jeopardy. Even my sister.”
“I love you, Bridget. All I want is you. You and this baby that’s ours.”
I sigh and blink hard. If he breaks the alliance with Valentina, everyone’s in danger, including my sister and me, and he knows that. He hasn’t thought this through. I have to walk away.
I lean in. Tears swim in my eyes, and my vision blurs. “And I love you. That’s why you have to let me go.”
He leans over, framing my face with his hands, and kisses me. It’s salty and bittersweet, and I never want it to end.
“I need to go.” I don’t know if he understands how far away I need to be.
“Bridget, you can’t—”
The screen in his car lights up with a call from Seamus. “Fuck.”
I know the rules. I know how this works. He’s obligated to answer when Seamus calls him. So that’s my out.
“Take the call, Declan.” I open the car door and leave quickly while he’s busy answering the call from Seamus. I walk to my front door so he can’t stop me.
And that night, I start looking for jobs for women with my skill set in Australia.
Declan’s gone home.
And I hate it. I want to wake up next to him.
So I take a shower, slide into a T-shirt he left behind, and bring my tired, pregnant arse to bed just as a knock sounds on my door. “It’s me! Open up, Bridge.”
Bronwyn?
I open the door, and she stares for a minute at me in Declan’s shirt.
“What? It’s just a T-shirt. You act like you’ve never seen me in an oversized tee.”
“Right,” she says with an eye roll. “You have got to see this.”
I walk over to the couch. Does she see the little belly I’m sporting under the oversized tee? I hope not.
“Okay, come on, show me what you’ve got. You told me you suspected something was off with her socials, right? You’ve been stalking her since you found out Declan was engaged.”
I nod, shameless. “Well, take a look at this,” Bronwyn says, pulling out a veritable spreadsheet that would make any stalker proud: pictures, socials, everything.
“I am so proud right now.”
Bronwyn beams. “Take a look at this right here.” She pulls out a picture of a woman at the beach. “This is Valentina, right? What do you notice about her?”
“She’s beautiful and Italian and has excellent genes but questionable taste in bikinis,” I say with a frown.
“She has a cowlick,” Bronwyn says as she zooms in and shows me something. “Look, right there.”
“For crying out loud, Bronwyn, who cares if she has a cowlick? I guess her mother didn’t train her hair when she was a baby or something.”
“I didn’t even know that was a thing, but whatever, that’s not what I’m talking about, Bridget. You can’t just get rid of a cowlick. It’s something that’s there no matter what you do.”
“Are you serious? Okay, so what’s the purpose of this conversation?”
“Take a look at this.” She shows me a picture from the engagement party.
Declan and Valentina are very far away. Every single picture she posed for, she made sure that she was far away from the camera.
“She said she liked full-body pictures, no close-ups, remember? And look. No cowlick.” I squint. I can’t really see anything.
“There’s no cowlick, but there’s more,” Bronwyn says, and she points out more details.
“Look. One eye is a tiny bit lower than the other, and like… her ears sit differently.”
“Hmm. Strange.”
“We need to invite her out somewhere, just you and me. We need to talk to her alone.”
“Oh no. I am not doing that.” I shake my head. Bronwyn doesn’t know the truth yet, and if she did…
“Look, I don’t care what we do, but we have to see her up close.”
“Listen, here’s the thing. People present themselves on social media as these models, but in real life, they’re not. Filters and all that.”
“Well, that’s just the thing. What are the chances that the real-life Valentina is actually more attractive than the online version?”
Unlikely.
“The face doesn’t quite match, and now this account’s gone quiet. She has the little blue checkmark, verified.” Bronwyn pulls up her phone, taps on the socials, and it pops right up. “Look at this.”
I squint at the phone. “What’s that, a tag or something?”
“Yes. Her friend tagged her.” She gives me a knowing look.
“I don’t understand the significance of your look right now.”
“In Bali. Yesterday.” It probably slipped through the radar of whoever is running this.
“Well, she’s not in Bali; she’s here. That’s my point.”
“That woman,” Bronwyn says, pointing in the vague direction of Ballyhock, “the one who’s supposedly marrying Declan.” She looks at me. “That’s not the real Valentina.”
“What?”
“Will you believe me now? We have to prove it, and I think we need to get Erin involved.”
I nod. I think so too. Then we’d be dealing with the exact science of research, and there’s no one better for the job.
“Right, then, I’m going home.”
“We need to bring this to Cavin,” I say.
Bronwyn shakes her head. “Look, I tried. He said it's”—she pauses to make air quotes—“confirmation bias. That we don't like her, so we're looking for reasons.” She pauses. “He's not wrong that we don't like her. But he's wrong about the rest of it.”
She's right, and nobody's going to believe us until we have something they can't dismiss. Which means we need more. “Mam is a bit out of it since Da went to the hospital, and I want to make sure she’s eating and going to bed and such.”
“How is he?”
“Better,” she says with a smile. “Thanks to you.”
She gives me a huge hug before shutting the door.
“Hey,” I whisper at the closed door after she leaves. “I’m pregnant, Auntie Bronwyn.”
I collapse on the bed, my eyes heavy.
When my phone buzzes with a text, I look at it with one lazy eye, thinking it’ll probably be him, offering me another crumb when I want the whole goddamn meal.
But it’s not him. It’s Erin.
Erin: I have something to tell you. Tomorrow, at the McCarthys?