Page 63 of The Beast
Live video. A car interior, dash cam or a phone propped on the glass. Two people in the front seats. The driver I didn't know—lean, well-dressed, hands at ten and two like a man who'd taken a safety course. The passenger, I knew in my bones.
Mary Catherine. Her profile against the window light. Her hands folded in her lap the way they were when she was holding herself together.
"That's Daniel Whitaker behind the wheel," Craine said, "in case you were wondering. The man she was going to marry on, what was it, a day ago?" He let it breathe. "They're crossing the city right now. If you leave this minute, you might just beat them to the gate in that Bugatti."
And it all dropped into place, ugly and complete. The look she kept giving me. The thing behind her teeth she folded up and put away, twice, three times.We'll have all the time in the world. Later. Yes, I promise.She'd been about to tell me—and hadn't. She was crossing Charleston this minute with the man she'd left at the altar, to go to New York, and she'd let me kiss my way down her body and ask her to promise instead of saying it to my face.
Why?After what she'd said aboutnobody else.After what we'd just done not an hour past, twice, three times, the last-water-in-the-desert of it.
They were clear across the city from me. I ran the map in my head and didn't like the answer—traffic, bridges, the distance, the timing. I might make it. I might not.
I flipped the phone back across the bench. Craine caught it one-handed, smooth, and went back to his coffee like we'd been discussing the weather.
And I ran.
I'm not proud of it. I told myself it wasn't running, it wasmoving with new information, but a man knows the differencein his own legs. I crossed that park fast and dropped into the Bugatti and put it toward the interstate with my heart going and my hands too tight on the wheel.
I knew I was being played. Knew it cold, even as I did exactly the thing he'd built the whole meeting to make me do. That was the part that crawled. It wasn't just Craine—it was all of them. Tommy, guarded on the phone. My father, walking out of the grave. Dominion Hall, watching from the dark. Craine, with his three things and his little screen. Every last one of them had a hand on a string, and the strings ran down into my spine, and they were all pulling at once, moving me around a board I couldn't see the edges of.
I have spent my whole life being the one who moves other men. I did not care one bit for how it felt to be the one getting moved.
But she was in that car. So, I drove.
27
MARY CATHERINE
Daniel drove the way he did everything—carefully, with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, signaling early, leaving space between his car and the one ahead.
I had forgotten, in the chaos of the last forty-eight hours, what it felt like to be in a car with someone who drove like a reasonable adult. Brock drove like a man who'd been trained to treat every road as a potential escape route. Daniel drove like someone who had somewhere to be and intended to arrive.
I sat in the passenger seat with my bag at my feet and watched Charleston go by.
It was early afternoon, the light still high and pale over the rooftops, the kind of flat, bright March day that didn't commit to anything dramatic.
We passed the end of Wentworth Street—I did not look down it—and turned north toward the highway and the airport beyond. The city fell away by degrees, the old architecture giving way to the ordinary sprawl that surrounded it. We had justenough time, if the traffic cooperated, which in Charleston on a Sunday afternoon, it usually did.
"I looked at the flights to Dublin this morning," Daniel said.
I turned to look at him.
He was watching the road. Something in his jaw was working, very slightly, the way it did when he was managing something.
"Not to—" He stopped. "Not for any reason. Just. It came up on my phone. The alerts we'd set up." He made a quiet sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "The algorithm doesn't know about yesterday. They were nonrefundable. So.”
"No," I said. "It wouldn't know.”
A silence. Comfortable, in the way that silences between people who'd known each other for three years could be comfortable even when nothing about the situation was.
"I'd been looking forward to it," he said. "The trip. More than I let on, probably. I kept researching things—restaurants, off-the-beaten-track things, the kind you never actually get to when you're trying to do all the obvious things first." He paused. "There was a pub in Killarney that had been there since the 1700s. I'd written down the name three times in different places so I wouldn't lose it."
I looked at my hands in my lap.
"I didn't know that," I said.
"I should have told you more of it," he said. "I think I—I kept the planning mostly practical. Logistics. Let you handle the aesthetic parts because you were better at them. I should have told you that I'd been researching pubs in Killarney."
I didn't say anything.
