Page 53 of The Beast
And I'd take her with me. She'd be angry a while. Let her be angry. Anger, I could weather. Once her father was back on his feet and Craine was a story she told instead of a fear she lived in, the anger would burn off, and she'd see I'd kept my word. I decided that like I decide everything. Like it was already true.She's coming with me.I just had to put the world right enough that she'd want to.
I went down the stairs and out and dropped into the armored Bugatti and fired it up. I cut the wheel hard into a U-turn in the middle of Wentworth, pointing the nose back toward that house full of lies, and I had my foot moving to the gas?—
—when I saw the man.
He was walking down the center of the street. Right down the middle of it, dead at me, unhurried, like the asphalt belonged tohim and the idling two-million-dollar car in his path was a thing he'd move through, if it didn't move first.
My hand went to the gun without my telling it to.
Fuck this,I thought. The cold came down over me, clean and welcome, the way it always does. They wanted a war. Fine. They'd brought it to her door and now they could have it at mine. I sat there with my pulse gone slow and even and weighed it—decoy or shooter, was there a second man working an angle while this one held my eyes, would it be cleaner to just put my foot down and let two tons of armored steel solve the whole equation?—
The man kept coming. And his face came up out of the sunlight’s glare and resolved, feature by feature, into focus.
I blinked.
No.
No, that wasn't?—
No fucking way.
I knew that face. I'd know it blind, know it in the dark, know it at the bottom of the sea. It was the face I still saw in the worst of my dreams and, God help me, sometimes the best of them—the face that had haunted me and steadied me in equal measure for more years than I let myself count. The face of the man we'd put in the ground in our hearts a long, long time ago, the absence that had scattered seven sons to the seven winds.
He walked right up to the front of the idling car and stopped, and looked at me through the windshield with eyes I'd been seeing in the mirror my whole life.
My father.
Byron Dane.
23
MARY CATHERINE
The kettle boiled and my mother made tea nobody wanted.
That was how we moved through the next hour—through the motions of hospitality, the making and pouring and holding of cups, because the Donovan family had been trained since birth to respond to crisis with something warm in hand.
It didn't fix anything. It gave your hands something to do while your mind worked on the unfixable, and that was, perhaps, enough.
Daniel sat across the table from me and did not make it strange, which was itself a kind of strangeness. He asked my father quiet, practical questions about the raid—what the agents had said, whether they'd left paperwork, whether anyone from the office had witnessed it—and my father answered him with the careful precision of a man who'd spent thirty seconds being afraid and decided to spend the rest being useful.
I watched them and thought: this is what Daniel is. This is the whole of him. Good in a crisis. Steady. Present without requiring anything in return.
I had left him at the altar yesterday.
He was sitting in my parents' kitchen helping my father organize his thoughts.
I folded my hands around my tea and kept my face composed.
Colleen was on her phone. She'd moved to the far end of the kitchen, turned slightly toward the window, speaking in low, efficient tones that told me she'd reached someone and was getting somewhere. I watched her the way I'd been watching her all morning—with the new attention of a woman who'd only just understood how much had been happening in the room she thought she knew. She caught my eye once and gave me a small nod. Progress.
My mother refilled my tea without asking.
I let her.
And somewhere in the middle of it—in the middle of the tea and the quiet questions and my mother moving between counter and table—I became aware of a feeling I recognized. It was the feeling of the bride's room. The feeling of the vanity and the lipstick and the smile I'd put on without deciding to. The feeling of a posture I'd inhabited so long, it fit without effort.
I was being good again.
