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“I know, Ma, but sometimes I just want to get out of the Manor. You know, go out in the world? Fresh air is nice, and we have other wedding business that requires an in-person visit.” She laughed at the expression I wore and cocked a brow at me. “Think you can handle the plebs for a few hours?”
I laughed, but the sound was bitter even to my own ears, and I knew the reason.
“My mother used to say that word. Plebs. She was such a fucking snob about anybody and everybody different. Not enough money, not the right status, the right religion, not right for me to be friends with. Or even consider a person worthy of my time. I hate that one little word.” I hated that it could still remind me of her.
Kat was oblivious to my bitterness, or maybe I always sounded bitter, and she didn’t recognize the difference. She laughed and shook her head. “Is there a right religion?”
“Only Catholic will do for little Sadie Rose Malone,” I said the words in the high-pitched trill that belonged to my mother, a woman Kat had never met. And as long as I lived, I’d make sure she never would.
Kat turned to me slowly, stiffly, still trapped in my grandmother’s dress full of pins. An apt metaphor for marriage, in my experience. “This is the most you’ve ever said about your parents. Are they dead?”
“To me, they are.”
I told her an abbreviated version of being disowned because they disapproved of Colm. “He was the right religion, of course, but that was it. His job, according to them, was no job at all. It held no future, and worse, he came from the wrong family. Very, very wrong. They indulged in vices and made money off them, which was a mortal sin in my parents’ eyes. They hated Colm on sight, which, of course, only made me want him more.”
Especially after everything that came before Colm. But she didn’t need to know that. No one did.
“Were you ever happy, Ma? With Dad, I mean? Before all the awful stuff he did to you?”
I nodded slowly, unsure how to tell her much more of the truth. I’d told her so much already, but that wasn’t all there was to our marriage. At least in the beginning.
“There were times I was deliriously happy with your father. I thought he was my savior, my best friend and protector all wrapped up in one beautiful package. But there were other times I thought him no better than the fucking Devil.”
I sighed like I always did when I thought about Colm, with a heavy, wistful heart. “Your father had his own demons, more than I knew when I met him. They ate at him over the years until the demons won. The part of him I loved, that I thought I couldn’t live without, passed on to you and the boys.”
“Even me?” The surprise in her tone was genuine and without sarcasm. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. Not that you don’t love me because I know you do, but the rest of it…you know.”
The worst part of listening to her matter-of-fact tone was that she just accepted that I thought less of her as fact, not just an idea. A thought.
I turned to finger the lace and tulle confections on the rack closest to me while I spoke. “I cried when I found out I was finally having a little girl. I always wanted a little girl, and you were everything a mother could want, a beautiful baby girl.”
The happiness I felt for that brief moment was probably the last time I was genuinely happy in my life. “That was before I found out the reality of what my life was going to be like. And how difficult it would be for a female in this family. In this business. It was never about anything else, Kat.”
She nodded and disappeared into the fitting room to take off the family dress. “It was that and the disappointment you felt that I’m not more like you.”
I sighed and nodded at the truth of her words. It was easier with the barrier of the fitting room curtain between us. “I admit, it would have been easier if you’d been more like me. I wouldn’t have worried so much about you. Hell, I don’t think I got one full night of sleep when you went off to college. I worried that my enemies would come after you, would find you and do horrible things to you. I worried about all the men you would encounter and how I couldn’t protect you from them all.”
Kat stepped from the fitting room in her street clothes and nodded before leaving the designer with a few more ideas for the dress. Then we headed to the car where Oliver waited for us with a bland smile.
Before we got into the Rolls, Kat said out of Oliver’s hearing, “Thank you for telling me that, Ma. It makes sense that you worried so much, and I’m glad you did.”
“You’re glad your choice to go away for college nearly killed me prematurely? Thanks.”
She laughed and slid into the car right beside me. “No, I’m glad I’m not like you, and if you think about it for a moment, you are too. You made a life for me that meant I wouldn’t have to know the pain and hardship and trauma that you suffered. That’s the gift you gave me, and it is a gift, not a curse. It’s one I will never forget, and I’ll always love you for it, Ma.”
I let out a groan and reached across the limo to the small bar. “I need a drink. It’s getting too fucking feely in here.”
Kat laughed and bumped me with her shoulder. “Those pesky feelings are exactly how you conned me into wearing a one-hundred-year-old wedding dress instead of modern couture.”
“Touché. Now shut up and have a drink with me.”
“Gladly. We still have all the boring wedding shit to do, and I think it’ll be more entertaining if we’re drunk—or stoned.”
Maybe, just maybe, Kat was more like me than either of us realized.
CHAPTERTWELVE
Thomas
