“Ah, Kate!” Granny’s nurse glances at Drew behind me and makes a flustered sound that manages to include him in her greeting, even though she doesn’t know his name. “Will the two of you stay for lunch? I’m making ham and cheddar sandwiches.”
Drew offers a slight shrug. “No thank you, ma’am. I’ll just wait out here.”
“In the sun?” Mrs. Watson sounds appalled. When he simply shrugs again, she says, “Let me at least get you a chair from the kitchen.”
“I’m fine, ma’am,” Drew says.
The nurse insists, though. I feel vaguely ashamed as she brings out a ladderback chair and settles it in a sliver of shade under the eaves.
“Kate?” she asks, once we’re inside. “A sandwich?”
“No thank you.” I suspect neither Granny nor Breagha will have any appetite either, after I tell them about my trip to Baltimore. Gritting my teeth, I step into the sunroom.
Granny sits in her padded chair by the great wall of windows, with my sister at her feet. My grandmother’s arthritic fingers are wrestling with a mess of scarlet yarn, doing their best to wind a ball from the skein stretched across Breagha’s hands.
“Kate!” Granny says, as if it’s been days since I last visited instead of twenty-four hours. “And how was Sunday Roast?”
Before I can answer, my sister’s mobile chimes with the sound of a hooting owl. “Kate?” Breagha asks urgently, gesturing with her bound hands. “Come take the yarn. I need to answer my phone.”
“Can you wait? I need to tell you both?—”
But Breagha has already slipped the loose skein over my hands and disappeared into the bedroom. Glaring at the closed door, I ask, “Do you know who she’s talking to?”
Granny purses her lips. “That Nathan Cohen. For the third time this morning.”
I sigh. “All the more reason she needs to hear what I have to say.”
Granny’s gaze is sharp over her growing ball of yarn. “What happened up in Baltimore? How’s my Barry-boy?”
Granny has never made excuses for Da. She’s never said he’s a loving father or a dedicated husband or even a competentcaptain. But she’s worked all her life to make him a stronger man than he is. She’s given him advice on the rare occasion he’ll take it, and she’s pulled strings to prop him up when she can.
She loves him. So I offer a truth that isn’t a real answer. “He truly loves Cook’s colcannon.”
Granny’s frown shows I didn’t fool her. “What happened,a chroí?”
It’s thea chroíthat tears me apart. Granny has called me that for my entire life—before the Bad Men, when we were in County Donegal, through all the years I’ve spent fighting Mam and Da since then. When she says I’m her heart, I believe her. She’ll be there for me, no matter how terrible the news.
So I tell her all of it as quickly as I can—Da’s damage, Mam’s plotting, Ilya Danilov expecting to steal away my sister. With every word, Granny’s face grows more drawn. By the end, she’s fumbling for her emergency inhaler.
After I help her with the medicine, I say, “I wish everything could be as simple as it was when I was little.”
She works on taking a full breath before she offers a wry smile. “Things weren’t so simple then,a chroí.”
She’s right, of course. If things were simple, then Breagha and I would never have been kidnapped. Pyotr Tarasov wouldn’t have hurt me. Granny would never have taken me away to County Donegal.
Donegal… Nowthatwas simple. Granny and I ate. We walked. We slept—with the light on, sure, but Granny helped me through each night.
The world felt safe with an ocean between us and Baltimore. The bratva didn’t have a toehold in Ireland. And if any Russian mobster ever thought of taking over, I knew Mad Robbie Malloy would see him gone, straight away.
Now I say his name out loud, like a charm against evil: “Robbie Malloy.”
“What’s that?” Granny tilts her head like a bird.
“Mad Robbie Malloy. Back in County Donegal. If we brought him here, the Crew would have a chance.”
Robbie is some sort of cousin, third or fourth, or maybe thrice removed. His granny and mine grew up in the Irish countryside together. They walked miles to their one-room school. They sewed their own dresses and cooked for their clan and watched the family rise to power. They were like sisters until Granny married, until she became a Lynch.
When Granny took me to safety in County Donegal, Old Malloy—Robbie’s grandad—ran the mob there. Robbie was a soldier, known for his bare-knuckle brawls and his repeated run-ins with thegarda. He fetched Granny and me from the airport in Dublin the day we arrived, and I couldn’t understand a word of his brogue. By the time we left, I sounded just like him.
