Page 42 of Faithless Vows

Glass crunches under my shoe as I move around the desk. I grab the waste bin and drag it closer, then bend to pick up the larger pieces first. One of them slices my palm. I don’t pull my hand back right away. Blood wells slow and bright, drippingonto the floor. I watch it fall, detached, like it belongs to someone else.Figures.

I dump the glass into the bin and pull my handkerchief from my pocket, wrapping it around my palm and pressing until the bleeding slows, then sink into the chair behind my desk. I stare at the empty space where Seamus’s glass shattered. Whiskey streaks the wall where it hit.

Alannah is safe.

The knowledge should calm me. It doesn’t. Not when I know the person she needed to be safe from was me.

Chapter Sixteen

Alannah

The room is dim. The curtains are closed, and even the thin strip of light that slips in around the edges feels like too much.

The sheets are twisted around me. I don’t remember the last time I changed them, or bathed, or did anything but lie here while day turns to night and back again. I’ve been crying on and off for days, rubbing my eyes raw until the skin around them burns. Yesterday, when I went to the washroom, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror. The skin beneath my eyes was dark enough to look bruised, and my lids were red and swollen. I looked as though something inside me had been scooped clean out, leaving only the shape of me behind.

I can’t even sleep properly. Every time I begin to drift off, the wedding comes back. All of it. From the beginning, when everything still felt like a dream, like something I had waited for and finally been given. The church. The dress. The way he looked at me when I came down the aisle, like I was the only thing in the room. Like it was what he wanted. Like I was what he wanted.

I had believed that look completely.

And then it shifts to the reception. Kitty finding me and telling me, in that smug, awful way, that she and Ronin had been together for years, that they were in love, and that he’d slept with her the night of his stag party. Ronin looking at me as though I were the one in the wrong, speaking to me as though I were the one making a scene, before taking Kitty’s hand and walking out of our wedding reception, leaving me humiliated in front of the whole room.Dear Lord, everyone saw.Fresh tears spill down my face at the memory, and the pain of it feels as sharp now as it did that day, as if I amstanding there again with every eye in the room on me while my whole life comes apart in front of them.

I go over it all, piece by piece, trying to see whether any of it had been real. Whether he had lied so well I never once saw it, or whether there had been a point where things changed and I had been too in love to notice. I just don’t know which is worse.

A soft knock sounds at the door. “Alannah, love.” Grandmam’s voice comes through the wood. “Would you come down and sit with me today, do you think?”

“Not today, Grandmam.” The words come out low and rough from lack of use. “I’m not ready.”

I hear the soft clink of the tray as she sets it down outside the door, then her footsteps fade away down the hall.

I’m not even sure how long I’ve been home. Around two weeks, maybe longer. The days have all run together. Every morning my grandmam knocks and asks me to come downstairs, and I give her the same answer, listening as she sets a tray outside the door before her footsteps fade down the hall. Most mornings I bring it in and make myself eat a little, though I barely taste it. Some mornings I don’t touch it at all.

I feel like I haven’t stopped crying since I first saw Uncle Conor at the airport. I remember coming through the arrivals gate, worn out by the flight, by everything that came before it. I saw him before he saw me, his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving over the crowd, and the second our eyes met, I couldn’t hold it together anymore. He pulled me into his arms, and my knees buckled out from under me as my sobs came hard and uncontrollably. He held me up and let me cry. “You’re home now, Alannah girl,” he said quietly. “You’re home.”

The drive home comes back to me only in bits and pieces after that. Fields I knew by heart. Thick green hedges crowding the road, left to grow wild. The lane opening at last onto our family’s land, stretching wideand open in every direction. My grandparents’ house sat at the centre of it, with my aunts, uncles, and cousins’ houses scattered around it, never far from one another. Farther back past the fields are the sheds and work buildings where Grandda and the men handle their business. That part of the land has always been theirs.

Then the car pulled up, and I was barely out of it before arms were around me. I looked into my grandmam’s face as she took mine in both hands, her thumbs brushing away my tears, as if she could smooth the hurt away.

“Maura, let the girl breathe,” my grandda said gently, and then he was there too, pulling me into his arms.

Inside the house, I was settled in a chair before I knew what was happening, with tea pressed into my hands and food set in front of me whether I wanted it or not. My aunts fussed, and my cousins hovered close. By then I was so worn out from the journey, from the crying, from it all, that I fell asleep sitting there. When I woke, I was here in the guest room. I have hardly left it since.

The bedroom door opens and Grandmam steps in, already dressed for the day, an apron tied at her waist. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she mutters when she gets a look at me, then goes to the window and draws the curtains open. Light fills the room, sharp enough to make me flinch, and I throw an arm over my face.

She sits on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath her, and pats my leg through the blanket. “That’s enough now,” she says. “Up with you.”

“I can’t, Grandmam,” I whisper. “It hurts too much.”

“I know it does.” She gets to her feet and holds out a hand. “Come anyway.”

It takes nearly everything in me to sit up. The room sways when my feet touch the floor, and Grandmam catches me by the arm to steady me. We go downstairs slowly, one step at a time, my eyes fixed on my feet.

In the kitchen, she sits me in a chair and sets a pot of potatoes on my knees. A knife waits on the table beside me, a basin at my feet. “There now,” she says gently. “Get those peeled for me.”

This was always my job when I was younger, perched at this very table while dinner was made. I pick up the knife and start peeling. The skins come away in long, thin curls, falling soft and damp into the basin below. My hands know the work without thinking. Peel. Turn. Peel again. Sitting here now, doing it again, it doesn’t feel like coming back to it. It feels like I never left at all.

My grandmam humsThe Rose of Traleeas she moves about the kitchen, low and a little off-key, the way she always has. She keeps to the chorus, wanders into a verse, then slips back again before she reaches the end of it. I used to listen for her to finish it when I was younger, but I don’t think I ever heard her do it.

The kettle rattles softly on the stove. The window above it stands open to the late morning air. Outside, I can hear my cousins Róisín and Declan arguing as they cross the yard, their voices fading as they move farther off.