Reginald’s brows drew together.
Her hands knotted harder. “What matters is that when she saw me, she did not look ashamed.” The words came flat now. Old and sharp. “She looked triumphant.”
Reginald lowered his gaze then, not from discomfort, but with the grave stillness of a man who understood he was hearing the center of a wound.
Aingeal forced herself onward. “I said ugly things. She answered with uglier. We walked from the orchard toward the hill beyond the chapel path because neither of us wanted servants to hear. By then, we were both angry in the way women are taught not to be. Sharp. Mean. Hungry to wound first.”
She could see it all in her mind. Máire’s brown braid half loosened by the wind. The flush in her face. The man already gone, leaving the sisters to bleed for what he had stirred and abandoned.
“I accused her of stealing him because she needed every man’s admiration.” Aingeal’s mouth twisted. “She accused me of believing I was owed whatever I wanted.”
Her voice thinned. “I said she had never once understood loyalty. She said…”
Reginald did not press.
Aingeal swallowed and made herself speak the words that had followed her for years. “She said, ‘I wanted to be chosen.’”
The sentence fell into the chapel and stayed there.
Aingeal lifted her eyes to him for the first time since she began. “I had wanted that too,” she said quietly. “That was why it cut so deep. Not because she had stolen what was mine. Because she had spoken aloud the thing I was most ashamed to want.” Her breath trembled. “To be chosen. To be seen first. To be loved above another woman.”
Rain moved against the stone in a soft, steady hush.
“I shoved her,” Aingeal said.
Reginald shut his eyes.
“We were near the slope behind the chapel. The ground was slick from earlier rain. She turned as if to walk away, and I…” Her face tightened. “I was so angry. I put my hands on her and pushed.”
The memory did not blur there. It sharpened. The brief, startled widening of Máire’s eyes. Then the slipping.
The fall.
The crack below. “She lost her footing. She went down the slope and struck her head on the stones.”
The chapel had grown very quiet. No sound now but the rain, the candle flame, and the roughness of her own breathing.
“I ran to her. I remember that. I remember falling beside her in the mud and trying to lift her and saying her name over and over as if enough repetitions might call her back.” Her voicedropped almost to nothing. “There was blood in her hair. Her eyes opened once. I do not know if she saw me.”
She turned toward the altar because she could not look at him just then. “She died before anyone else reached us.”
For a few breaths, Aingeal only stood there, feeling the old helplessness move through her body again. Young hands slick with rain and blood. The world already divided into before and after.
“I confessed it,” she said, looking up at the crucifix. “Not at once. It took me two days to force the words out. Father Cillian heard me. He gave me absolution. He told me what priests tell the guilty and grieving. That God knew the difference between malice and madness. Between planned murder and one terrible moment of rage. He told me repentance mattered. Mercy mattered. That I had not ceased to be redeemable because of one terrible act.”
She looked down at her hands. They had twisted themselves into something that looked almost like prayer. “I did penance. I fasted. I prayed. I stood through Mass with the taste of shame in my mouth and told myself I had been forgiven.” Her mouth trembled once and steadied. “I have repeated that to myself for years.”
Reginald spoke at last, very quietly. “But you never absolved yourself.”
Aingeal looked at him. “No.” The answer felt both small and enormous. She bowed her head. “I never trusted the girl who pushed her. I buried her under duty. Under caution. Under all the coldness men mistake for pride and women mistake for strength. I told myself I had learned. That I would never again let love outrun judgment.”
Her mouth trembled again, then hardened. “That is why marriage frightened me. Not only because men are faithless, though many are. Not only because wives are often miserable,though many are.” She lifted her gaze to his. “It frightened me because I know what I become when love mixes with shame.”
Understanding moved through Reginald’s features.
Aingeal saw it arrive in him and knew, suddenly and completely, that he understood what jealousy had meant. Why Étaín’s brightness near him had cut so sharply. Why the thought of loving him without certainty had filled her with terror.
“It was never only you I feared,” she said. “It was myself. What loving you might wake. What being betrayed by you might make ofme.”
