I was sitting at this table with my hands folded and my voice soft and my whole self oriented toward what the room needed from me, and I had slipped into it the way you slipped into a coat you'd worn for years—without noticing, without choosing, through the simple muscle memory of a lifetime.
I noticed it now.
I didn't fault myself for it. My family needed me here and I was here. That was a choice, not a surrender. The difference mattered, even if it was invisible to everyone in the room. But I held the awareness like a small flame—I see you, I know what you are—and I did not let it go out.
Colleen came back to the table.
"I reached someone," she said. She sat down and looked at our father, and then at me. "A contact. Federal practice, very good, the kind you want for this." She set her phone on the table, face up. "He’s in New York right now. Midtown. He said he can make time for a Donovan representative if someone can get there today."
The kitchen went quiet in a particular way.
"Today," my mother said.
"This afternoon, if possible. He has a window." Colleen looked at me. "It needs to be someone who understands the full situation."
She meant me. I was the only one in this family who understood the full situation—the studio, Craine, Brock, all of it. My father's business was my father's, but the thread that had led to the raid ran through me.
"I'll go," I said.
Something moved around the table. Not objection—more like the collective intake of breath before objection organized itself.
"Mary Catherine," my mother started.
"I'll go," I said again. Steady. "I'm the one who can speak to everything that happened. I can be at the airport—" I looked at Colleen.
"The window is four o'clock," she said. "You'd need to fly this afternoon. Early afternoon."
I did the math. It was manageable. Barely.
Something occurred to me then—the irony of it arrived without warning and I had to set my tea down carefully so the laugh I was swallowing didn't show.
Yesterday, I had swam in the ocean and talked about hitchhiking to New York, and a man had looked at me with those dark eyes and saidnolike he was informing me of a policy he'destablished and expected me to honor. Said with such absolute certainty, such easy possession, that I had felt it low in my stomach and not minded at all.
Well.
He didn't get a say. My family needed something that required New York, and I was going to New York, and Brock Dane's opinions about my travel plans were not a variable in this equation.
"I'll go," I said, for the third time, which, in the Donovan kitchen, was how you closed a matter.
Daniel cleared his throat.
Everyone looked at him. He had the expression of a man who had been measuring whether to speak and had decided, carefully, that he should.
"I'd like to come with you," he said. He looked at me, not at my parents. "Not to—" He stopped. Started again. "I'm an attorney. I can help you navigate the conversation, make sure you understand what's being said, ask the right questions. Federal practice has its own language and it helps to have someone in the room who speaks it." A pause. "And I'd feel better knowing you weren't navigating this alone."
The kitchen was very quiet.
I opened my mouth to say no. Thenowas already there, fully formed, sitting right behind my teeth—because this was exactly the kind of thing that looked like Daniel being kind and was also, underneath, the thing my family would latch onto, the familiar shape of Daniel-and-Mary-Catherine solving problems together, the architecture of the life I had left.
"Thank you," I said. "But I'll be fine on my own."
My mother looked at my father.
My father looked at his coffee.
"Mary Catherine," my mother said, in the tone that meant she had composed what came next before saying it. "You'venever—" She stopped. Chose her words. "You haven't traveled much. Especially not alone, especially not on something like this. Something with these stakes."
"I've been to New York," I said.