ONE

The Wedding

—————

The dress is too white.

Too white, too perfect, too much like a lie — and I am the one wearing it. I stand in front of the mirror in my childhood bedroom and try to find myself somewhere in the glass. Lace and silk and a hundred tiny seed pearls that caught the light when the seamstress turned me, three weeks ago, in a shop that smelled of steamed wool and money. My father spared no expense. He never does, when the expense buys him something.

And what this buys him is me.

I press my palm flat against my stomach to stop it from turning. Outside, a January wind off the harbor throws sleet against the window in fistfuls, and the radiator under the sill ticks and knocks and gives off no heat at all. My breath doesn't quite fog, but it wants to. The whole house has felt cold since my mother died in it, and no furnace has ever fixed that.

Behind me, the door opens. I know the footsteps before I see her — light, careful, a little uneven now with the weight she's carrying.

"You're not dressed," Siobhan says, and then, softer, when she sees my face in the mirror:"Oh, Saoirse."

"I'm dressed." I gesture at the gown."I'm just not ready."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"No." I almost laugh."They're not."

She comes to stand behind me and takes the zipper between her fingers. My cousin is twenty-five, two years older than me and a whole life ahead — married, and married to a man she chose, with a child due in the spring that she actually wants. Her hands are gentle as she draws the zipper up the line of my spine, and I hate, for one ugly second, how much easier her road was than mine. Then I hate myself for hating her, because none of this is her fault, and she's the only person in this house who's touched me kindly all week.

"There," she says."Look. You're beautiful."

"I look like a virgin sacrifice."

She doesn't flinch. That's the thing about Siobhan — she won't lie to me even when a lie would be a mercy."You are a virgin sacrifice," she says."But you're a beautiful one."

This time I do laugh, and it comes out cracked down the middle."At least someone in this house is honest."

She turns me by the shoulders so I'm facing her instead of the mirror. Up close I can see she's been crying earlier and fixed it, the way the women in my family fix everything — quietly, and before anyone important notices."It might not be as bad as you think," she says."Cormac Brennan is —"

"A killer."

"— is —"

"A criminal. A man who spent two years trying to put my father and my brother in the ground."

"— is handsome," she finishes, stubborn."And rich, and powerful, and there are women in this city who'd cut someone for the match you're crying over."

"Then they're welcome to him."

"Saoirse." She takes my face in both hands. Her thumbs are cold."You have to do this. You know you do. If you don't, the war starts again, and the next funeral is one of ours. Maybe Liam. Maybe your father. Maybe you. This ends it. You end it."

I close my eyes. The wind throws another handful of sleet at the glass."I know," I say. My voice comes out small, and I hate the smallness of it, the way I've hated it my whole life."I just wish —"

"Wish what?"

I don't finish, because the wish is a child's wish and I'm meant to be a woman today.I wish my mother were here. I wish I were the kind of person who could run. I wish, just once, I'd been brave.

But I've never been brave. I've spent twenty-three years being careful and quiet and useful-when-needed, and my mother is dead, and being brave was never one of the things the women in this family were allowed to learn.

The knock at the door is heavy. Two knuckles, once. I'd know it anywhere.

My father doesn't wait to be told to come in. Connor Doyle never has. He fills the doorway the way he fills every room — broad through the shoulders even at sixty, gray hair combed back hard, hands that have broken more than they've ever built. He looks at me in the white dress and something moves across his face, fast, gone before I can name all of it. Pride. A flicker of grief. And under both, plainest of all, relief — that the daught