Page 21 of The Beast
"I owe every one of you more than I know how to give right now. But I'm not sorry for leaving."
The room was very quiet.
My mother's chin moved. My father's jaw worked. Colleen looked down at her hands.
Daniel was the one who spoke first, which surprised me and then didn't, because Daniel was good and Daniel was decent and even now—even standing in my sitting room after I'd humiliatedhim in front of everyone he knew—he was trying to do the right thing.
"Are you okay?" he said. "Mary Catherine. Are you okay?
It wasn't quite a question. It was a man making sure before he let himself feel anything else.
"Yes," I said. "I'm fine. I'm—" I gestured vaguely at the dress situation. "I went swimming."
A silence of a very particular quality.
"You went swimming?” my mother asked.
"I needed—I needed some air. And then I needed the ocean. And it escalated."
Another silence.
My father stood up. He crossed the room and he looked at me for a long moment, this man with the steady eyes and the quiet that lasted three days, and he put both hands on my face the way he had since I was small. He said nothing because there was nothing yet that fit.
I felt two tears run down my cheeks before I could stop them, which I hated, because I was not going to cry in front of everyone and make this about my feelings when Daniel was standing ten feet away.
"Daddy," I said.
"I know," he said. "I know." He pressed his forehead to mine for one second. Then, he stepped back and let me have the room.
What followed was an hour I would carry in my body for a long time—not as a wound, exactly, but as a weight.
Daniel and I spoke in the kitchen while the others stayed in the sitting room. It was quiet and honest and genuinely painful in the way that honest things often were.
He was not angry. That was the part I hadn't prepared for. He was—sad. Careful. Asking the questions a person asked when they were trying to understand rather than assign blame. I answered them as truthfully as I knew how, which meant sayingthings I had never said out loud to anyone, things that had no shape until I found the words for them while my mother's clock ticked on the wall.
I hadn't been ready. I didn't know if I'd ever been ready. It wasn't him. There was nothing wrong with him. He was going to be fine—he was going to be more than fine, because he was good and kind and the world was full of women who would recognize that without needing to destroy a Saturday to figure it out, and he deserved one of them.
He left before my mother worked up to what she had to say about it.
Then, my mother said what she had to say about it.
I stood and received it, because I owed her that, and because she was not wrong about any of the practical devastation—the money, the guests, the Whitaker family, the parish, what people would think and say and assume. She was not wrong. She cried twice and stopped herself twice. By the end, she had run out of words and sat looking at the handkerchief in her hands like she was waiting for it to tell her something.
"I love you," I said.
"I know you do," she said. "That was never the question." She looked up. Her eyes were red but steady. "What do you need?"
That was the moment I loved her most fiercely in years. That she could arrive at that question inside this hour.
"Time," I said. "Space. I need to be somewhere that isn't here for a little while. I need to—figure out what I actually want. Not what I'm supposed to want. What I want."
She didn't like it. I watched her not like it, visibly, in real time—the way she folded and refolded the handkerchief. But she nodded. Once.
Colleen stayed.
She helped me into dry clothes—finally, mercifully—and while I began to gather what I needed, she sat on the edge ofmy bed and watched me with that careful expression and didn't ask where I'd been or how I'd gone swimming in March with a wedding gown. I loved her for the restraint.
"I'm going to the studio," I said. "For a few days. Maybe more. I'll call from there."
