Page 65 of The Beast
The almost-laugh again. "I'm a very thorough researcher."
"You are," I said. "You'd have been—you would have been wonderful at all of it. The yard and the Sundays and all of it. Someone is going to get something very good when they find you, Daniel."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Mary Catherine Donovan," he said eventually. "Is this your version of telling me to get back out there?"
"Not yet," I said. "Definitely not yet. But—eventually."
"Okay." He nodded, accepting it. "Eventually."
The airport appeared ahead of us—the terminals, the covered departures lane, the organized chaos of people and luggage andthe small, separate universe of air travel. Daniel followed the signs to short-term parking without consulting the GPS, because Daniel always knew where the parking was.
He pulled into a space and turned off the engine and we sat for a moment in the quiet of the car.
"Thank you for coming," I said. "You didn't have to. After everything, you didn't have to say yes to this."
"Yes, I did," he said. "Your father is a good man and his business is in trouble and I can help. It wasn't a complicated decision."
This. This was what I had meant, in the kitchen, about Daniel being the best of what he was. Not complicated. Present. Useful.
"Are you going to be okay?" he asked. "With everything that's—there's a lot happening, Mary Catherine. More than I think you've told me."
I looked at him.
"I'm working through some things," I said carefully.
"The man," he said. Not accusatory. Just—knowing.
I held his gaze. "Yes."
He nodded once. Looked out through the windshield at the airport and everything it represented—the flight in front of us, the life behind us, the complicated arithmetic of being two people who had almost married each other now getting out of a car at a departure terminal to go fix a problem neither of them had made.
"I hope he's good to you," Daniel said. Low. Simple. The most generous sentence I'd ever heard.
I felt something crack open somewhere in my chest.
"So do I," I said.
He got out of the car and came around to take my bag before I'd finished unbuckling, because that was also Daniel—the easy courtesy, the showing up, the steady gestures of a man who'dbeen raised to take care of things and had never once needed to be asked.
I stood in the parking structure with the low March light coming through the open sides of it, and I looked at him—really looked, the way I hadn't let myself look in a long time. I thought about everything he was carrying into this terminal without complaint.
"Thank you," I said. "For being good. For being—just exactly who you are."
He looked at me for a moment with the eyes of a man who had lost something he'd wanted, who was choosing to be larger than the loss.
"Come on," he said. "We'll miss the flight."
He lifted both bags—mine and his—and started toward the terminal entrance.
28
BROCK
Tommy called before I'd put two miles of interstate behind me.
"Where are you going?" Not a question, the way he said it. He already knew I was moving and didn't like the heading.
