Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Right. I glance across the room and find Bridget at the far end, near Ashland's wife. Her shoulders have dropped slightly, some of the tension gone out of her. She says something that makes the woman beside her laugh. She's still a little flushed.
“Do you ride?” she asks me.
“Ride? Colm has a bike, and I sometimes go with him, but I—”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Dressage,” she says. “Horses? I’ve been riding since I was six. I haven't had as much time recently.”
Right. I nod. “We could arrange something. There's a yard outside of town, a good one. Bronwyn’s got horses.”
I try to school my face so she can’t see I’m feckin’ bored to death.
She looks across the room with a small, composed smile. “Perhaps I’ll talk to Bronwyn,” she says.
On the far side of the room, Bridget says something, and Bronwyn doubles over laughing, one hand clutching Bridget's arm, the other pressed to her own chest. I can't hear what it was. I don't need to. Bronwyn laughs like she means it, always has, the kind of laugh that makes whatever room she’s in feel warmer. She latched onto Bridget early and decided they were mates, which is the most Bronwyn thing ever.
“She is very…” Valentina begins, following my eye-line.
“Right.” I cut her off cleanly because if she finishes that sentence, I won't be responsible for what I do with my face.
And I need to make this work.
I promised.
I have to.
Chapter Twelve
BRIDGET
Time goes so much slower when you're paying attention to it. When you're praying that every second doesn't devolve into another symptom.
When you're cataloging every hour you didn't hear from someone, dividing it into morning and afternoon, and the particular awfulness of three a.m.
I mean, I’m not proud of it. I'm trying. I'm… doing other things.
Like lying on the sofa at eleven a.m. on a Tuesday morning because the idea of standing up for any sustained period has lost its appeal.
Like stalking Valentina’s socials again, mad at myself for being angry that she hasn’t posted a thing about Declan, the party, or the engagement, and I know full well if she did, that would piss me off even more.
But how can she post her perfect life in vivid detail and leave out the most important part? She hasn’t posted a damn thing. Hell, maybe Seamus made her promise not to.
My phone rings, and I look at the name. Erin.
“Hello?”
“Hey. Just calling to check in on you.”
“I’m alright. Could use some good news. Tell me you have good news, sis. Did you look into Esposito’s money? Is it tied to the Boston traitors?”
“Why would that be good news? We want it to be clean.”
I don’t elaborate.
“Well, is it?”
“It’s clean. The second payment was laundered, but through McCarthy enterprises.”
“Oh.” Disappointment stabs through me. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.
“Right. Was just checking in on you. Talk soon?”
“Love you.”
I consider refreshing my feed, but instead go back to eating bland crackers while staring at the ceiling, googling what Bronwyn told me her da has. Because if I google mine, I know exactly what I’ll find, and it might be nice if the focus was on someone else for a minute.
I know this nausea. I've had this nausea. It's the kind my body likes to produce when things aren't going the way they're supposed to, and I'm not going to think about that now. I'm going to eat another cracker and think about something else—not the glossy wedding invitation Erin has pinned to her refrigerator with a magnet, or the way Declan insists on texting me, as if nothing’s changed even though everything has.
I mean, he just met her, and I know he'll try because that's who he is—a McCarthy who’s ruthless and scary when he needs to be, but still holds doors open and means it, raised by a woman who wouldn't have it any other way.
But will she ever know him? Actually know him?
The way I do?
Will she know that he graduated late from school because no one figured out until third class that he needed help with his reading? That he never once talked about it as something that happened to him but as something he sorted?
Will she know about the cakes? The truly appalling, deeply committed relationship he has with cheap, packaged shite, which he eats without shame in the front seat of a very expensive car and stuffs the cellophane wrapping by fistfuls in his pockets like a child? And that it’s… adorable?
Will she know he kayaks, that it's the one thing he does entirely alone, and that I think is the only time he stops performing? He says he can think and breathe when he’s alone, surrounded by water and lapping waves.
Will she know that when he laughs, it starts in his chest before it reaches his face, and that there's about a half second when you can see it arriving, and it's the best half second in any room he's ever been in? And that it’s literally impossible to hear Declan McCarthy laugh and not join in?