Colleen came in with the look of a woman who had been walking fast from somewhere and had the whole picture already. I could see it in her face, the assembled knowledge of it, which meant she'd heard from someone. She stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked from our mother to our father to me and took the temperature of the room in about three seconds.
"I heard about the raid," she said.
"Sit down, Colleen," our father said.
She sat. The kitchen held all four of us and the weight of the weekend and the untouched coffee and my mother at the counter, still not cooking. I thought about Nora taking grocerieshome. I thought about Craine sayingyour sisterand leaving it open like a wound.
"He threatened you," Colleen said to me. Not a question.
"He threatened all of us," I said. "The studio. Daddy's business. He knew—" I stopped. Looked at Colleen. Tried to put something into my eyes that saidnot everything, not now, but I know and you're safe with me.
She received it. I watched her receive it. Something in her shoulders changed.
"What did you tell him?" she asked.
"No."
She nodded once. The same nod she'd given me in the bride's room. Steady. Sure.
My mother had turned from the counter. She looked at Colleen and then at me and I watched her do what mothers did, which was read the room for the thing that wasn't being said. I watched her decide, for now, not to ask.
"What do we do?" my father asked. The practical question. The Martin Donovan question, the one that meant he had accepted the situation and was ready to move.
"You don't talk to anyone," I said. "Not the agents, not the press, not the parish—nobody. Not until we have a lawyer." I paused. "A good one. Not Daniel's kind of good. The kind that handles federal matters."
My father nodded slowly.
"I know someone," Colleen said quietly. "I'll make a call."
She would. Colleen always knew someone. I had a sudden, fierce gratitude for my sister that had nothing to do with this morning in the grocery store and everything to do with thirty-two years of her being the steadiest person in any room she walked into.
My mother sat down.
For a while, the four of us just existed in the kitchen together—the Donovan family, missing Mass, sitting with the shape of a weekend that had started with a wedding and arrived here. The coffee went cold. The light moved. Someone's phone buzzed and nobody looked at it.
I thought about Brock in the studio. About the way he'd looked at me when I saidbecause of youand the way that look had?—
I shut the door on it.
I was mid-thought when the knock came.
Two beats. Not measured this time. Urgent, apologetic, the knock of someone who wasn't sure they should be here but had come, anyway.
My mother went to the door.
The silence that followed was specific. The kind that announced something before the words did.
Then: "Daniel."
I closed my eyes. Opened them.
He came into the kitchen the way he came into every room—well-dressed, careful, taking the temperature as he entered. He looked at my father first, which was right, which was so Daniel, and he put out his hand and my father shook it, and then he looked at my mother and said something quiet that I didn't catch. Then, he looked at me.
"I heard about the raid," he said. "I wanted to make sure everyone was—I wanted to check on the family."
There he was. Daniel Whitaker, thirty-three, Charleston attorney, genuinely good man. He had heard about the raid and he had come. Not to the woman who had left him at the altar with two hundred and twelve witnesses. To the family. To check on the family.
Something moved through me that I wasn't prepared for.