Page 20 of The Beast
I should've saidfine.I should've saidgood.Any man with sense keeps the dangerous truths behind his teeth.
"Like the most beautiful runaway bride I've ever seen," I said.
Her face went pink to the ears. And I sat there in the wreckage of my own mouth, calling myself every kind of fool, because that is twice now I'd handed this stranger a line out of a movie I didn't even believe in.
But she let me off the hook. Smiled, soft at the edges.
"Thank you," she said. "I'll hold onto that. While I'm in there breaking Daniel's heart and asking my mother how I could ever, ever pay her back for all of it." The smile wobbled and held. She straightened. "Goodbye, Brock."
She'd half turned to go when she stopped and looked back.
"Can I buy you a drink?" she said. "Sometime. To say thank you, properly. A thank-you that isn't just the word over and over."
"My phone went swimming," I said, and shrugged. "Drowned somewhere off your pier. No way to reach me."
Her face scrunched up at that, working on it. And where any reasonable person would've taken the out, saidah, well,and walked off into the rest of her life?—
"Then, pick me up here," she said. "This corner. Midnight. On the dot." That shine flickered back into her, daring me. "If you've got the balls for it."
Surprised me again. She kept doing that. I was starting to think it was just what she did to a person.
"It'd be an honor," I said.
And there it was. Another one. Some sappy, gallant, ridiculous line, sliding out of a mouth that had spent years saying only what a situation required and nothing more, and me with no idea where the man saying it had come from.
She didn't tease me for it. Just held my eyes one beat longer than she needed to, then shut the door soft and turned and walked off down the dappled street toward the corner and the blue door and the firing squad—shoulders back, chin up, dress gaping open down her spine, picking her way over the brick in bare feet like a queen who'd lost her shoes and not one ounce of her crown.
I did my level best not to watch the way she moved.
I failed at that, too.
9
MARY CATHERINE
The blue door was unlocked.
I stood on the front step for three full seconds with my hand on the knob, the dress still gaping open down my spine, my bare feet on the worn stone threshold where I had stood a thousand times before—coming home from school, from Mass, from every ordinary Saturday of a life I had now irrevocably detonated—and I breathed. Once. Twice. Then, I opened the door and walked in.
It was my parents' house. Still, at twenty-nine, my parents' house—my name on no lease, my mail arriving at the address I'd grown up in, my bedroom exactly as it had been at seventeen with small concessions made to adulthood. I had been engaged and planning a future with another person and I had still been living at home, which had made sense in the way that things made sense when you were raised inside a particular gravity and never thought to question its pull.
The house was big enough and my parents had never pushed and Daniel and I had agreed it was practical to save money before the wedding, and now, I was standing in the doorway ofit in a wet wedding dress with no phone and no plan and the full weight of that practicality settling over me like one more thing I had let happen without deciding.
They were in the sitting room.
All of them.
My mother on the small sofa with a handkerchief she wasn't using, posture still immaculate even now, which was so deeply Patricia Donovan that something in me ached.
My father in the wingback chair by the window, elbows on knees, the posture of a man holding himself together by main force.
Colleen on the ottoman near the door, and she was the first one to look up, and the expression on her face when she saw me—relief and grief and something else, something private and specific to us—nearly undid me before I'd gotten past the threshold.
And Daniel.
He was there, too. Standing near the fireplace with his hands in his pockets and his kind face doing its best to manage something it had not been built for. I felt the guilt come back in a clean, cold wave.
I took off the wet dress and placed it over the arm of the nearest chair with both hands. I stood in my wet underthings in my own living room in front of the people who loved me most and had just cost a great deal, and I said:
