Chapter 28

When Saoirse returns from the Ath, she retrieves her phone from behind the settee and blocks the number from which Aidan texted her. She and Emmit don’t end up getting dinner because Emmit is too immersed in his writing, and Saoirse finds this is fine with her ... maybe even preferable. She spends that night and the next morning rearranging—then editing—her new poem. At noon, she takes a break, gently shooing Pluto from her lap before heading to the kitchen, where she takes her meds, drinks a glass of water, and makes a salad.

You need more than your current scripts, water, and a few vegetables, she reminds herself. You’ve got to get set up with a new cardiologist and psychiatrist. She has a few refills left, but she wants, needs , to be proactive. I’ll call my old doctors in New Jersey this afternoon and ask for recommendations in the city.

With medications on her mind, she prepares a dose of insulin and tests Pluto’s blood sugar. His values are better than she expects, better than they’ve been on any of the previous days he’s been with her. She caps the unneeded syringe and almost slips it into the pocket of her sweatshirt before remembering it has to be stored in the fridge. After depositing it on a shelf next to the oat milk, she retrieves a little bell toy scented with catnip from under the table and tosses it toward the foyer, sending Pluto scampering after it.

Throwing the ball back and forth for the frisky cat, Saoirse’s thoughts turn to Emmit. She’s conflicted about his behavior at the library yesterday, and she’s still unsure how she managed to convince Roberto everything was fine when she returned to the alcove. They’d stayed at the Ath another two hours and planned to write again together next week, but several times, Saoirse caught Roberto looking at her strangely, as if he’d heard more of the commotion from a few alcoves away than he was letting on.

She’s still lamenting the loss of the poem she’d crafted in her head upon seeing the daguerreotype of Sarah. The poem she’d written after her interaction with Emmit wasn’t nearly as good; she realized that this morning, trying to mold it into something salvageable. It wasn’t just the time spent fielding Emmit’s heated questions that had caused her to lose the initial poem, nor the brief delay in transcribing the newly conceived lines. It was the way he’d accused her without saying the words, then launched into an explanation of his glorious return to writing. It wasn’t the interruption, like she’d initially thought; it was his manic, needy energy that—like a black hole—had sucked the poem right out of her head.

She looks up, realizing the ball is in her hand, and Pluto is staring at her expectantly. She lifts her hand to throw it again, but before she can do so, her cell phone rings from the counter. A knot of fear forms in her stomach. Did Aidan get another burner phone already?

But when she sees the name on the screen, her fear changes to a sinking, shameful dread. She wants to toss the phone back behind the settee. But she knows if she puts off the call, he’ll only call again. She lifts the phone, steels herself, and presses accept.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Saoirse. About time that we spoke.”

She closes her eyes. “I’ve been meaning to text you.”

“I don’t do the whole texting thing. You know that.” He says the word texting like it’s a fly he’s discovered in his ice cream. “Anyhow, I assume you’re settled in. Have you found a job yet?”

She walks into the living room and collapses onto the settee. Pluto jumps up beside her, and she weaves her fingers through the fur at the scruff of his neck. The action comforts her enough to swallow an acerbic remark. “Not yet.” She makes her tone as light as possible. “But I went to a career fair at Brown over the weekend. I have a few prospects to follow up on this week.”

“This week? Saoirse, it’s already Thursday.”

“I’ve been busy,” she says, trying to sound matter-of-fact rather than defensive.

“Doing what? Not wasting your time writing, I hope. Saoirse, I told you, once you lost your agent, that career path was a dead end. Even when you had that woman in your corner, those baking mysteries, well, they weren’t the type of book you’d expect a Brown graduate to write. Likely why they didn’t bring in a whole lot of cash.”

Saoirse’s muscles stiffen, but none of this, coming from her father, is surprising. “I have been writing, actually. Not for an agent but for myself.” She tells herself not to say this next part, that it will invite more criticism and too many questions, but old habits die hard, and despite never having had her father’s approval, she still desires it, and isn’t above seeking it through channels both grotesquely reliable and undoubtedly sexist. “And I’ve been seeing someone. He’s a professor at Brown and a renowned novelist. Emmit Powell. Have you heard of him?”

There’s a short silence, and then her father says, “I haven’t, but I’ll look him up, see if I’ve read anything he’s written.” Another pause. “While I’d much prefer to hear you’d found a job, it wouldn’t be the worst thing for you to get married again. It pains me that you lost Jonathan. He was such a good man. He would have made a fine father, and you would have been a good mother to his children.”

His reaction to her being in a new relationship and his comments about Jonathan despite Saoirse having told him what had happened are like a knife in her side. “We’ve been over this,” she says through gritted teeth. Though, had they, technically, if her father always refused to listen? She decides to try again. “Even if Jonathan hadn’t died, we could have never been parents. The doctors were very clear that, with my condition, my chances of dying during childbirth were extremely high. And cardiomyopathy is the leading cause of serious complications and death during pregnancy.”

“Nonsense,” her father says. “They can manage anything at the big-city hospitals these days. And I know better than anyone how, if you do the right things, the disease doesn’t have to dictate your life.”

She balls her hands into fists to stop the tremors in her fingers. Right, because having cardiomyopathy as a near-seventy-year-old man is the same as having it as a woman of childbearing age. “Even if they could have,” she says, as if speaking to a toddler, “I told Jonathan that any joy associated with having a child was not enough to make me want to undertake the risks. It was bad enough he blamed me for his inability to become a father, but that you can’t seem to understand why I wouldn’t want to risk my own life for that of an unborn child’s is ... well, it’s devastating. It’s like you’re saying you’d prefer a future grandchild over your present daughter.”

Her father huffs out a disgruntled breath. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he says, “since that’s not at all how I meant it. Anyway, I’m glad you’re dating someone new. I just googled him; he appears to be very successful. I bet prenatal care for someone with your condition has come a long way since you and Jonathan were trying. Maybe the opportunity for you to have a family has had new life breathed into it by this Emmit character.”

A scream rips loose in Saoirse’s head. How had she not seen, once they’d been married for a few years and Jonathan’s true nature started emerging, that he was exactly like her father? She covers the speaker and sucks in a shaky breath, then puts the phone back to her ear. “It was nice talking to you, Dad, but I have to go. I’m sending out some résumés and applications now, so I need to concentrate. Have a nice day.”

“Please remember, Saoirse, I’m only this hard on you because I care. My success as a father is entirely dependent on you being able to take care of yourself, and on having someone to pass on your legacy to. You can’t do either of those things without a job or a man.”

“Bye, Dad,” Saoirse says and hangs up. She’s about to throw the phone across the room for the second time in two days when she sees the red notification above her messages. Despite her staggering anger, she sends a hasty response to her mother: I’m okay. No bad dreams, no flashbacks. Trying to live in the moment. Love you too. She stands, but her legs feel like the brittle stalks of a rosebush and her heart—goddamn her heart. It beats like a horse fleeing a bolt of lightning.

Saoirse steps around the coffee table, but her eyes fill with tears. The Zuber panels, with their scenes of lush forest and thick canopy leaves, melt into one another, until her vision swims green, like flooded watercolors. She lurches into the foyer, not sure where she’s going, needing only to move, to run away from her thoughts, from the words of her father, from her past.

The door handle spins uselessly, her hand too wet with the tears she’s wiped from her eyes, and she is trapped inside this house. Trapped inside her mind. She drags her palm across her jeans and grips the handle more firmly. In the moment after throwing open the door, she is blinded by the afternoon sun. Before she can shield her eyes, a figure steps onto the stoop, blocking the light.

And then Emmit is there, taking her tear-stained face in his hands. His eyes are heavy with concern, and his mouth is twisted in an expression of love and longing. He throws his arms around her, then reaches up to stroke her hair. Her head is pressed into his chest, and the smell of him relaxes her. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he says, and she wants to laugh with relief.

Though, the longer they stand there, through the hammering of her heart and the spinning of her thoughts, despite her messed up head and her haunted soul and her misgivings about her and Emmit’s relationship and her anger at her father, despite the past and the love she once had for Jonathan—a love that was weaponized—and the love she thinks she has for this man holding her now, on this whitewashed stoop that once belonged to a woman who held the heart of another mysterious, macabre man, the more his words don’t sound like a lie at all.

They sound like a promise.