Because I had never once chosen right.
I stopped walking.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the strange part—I had imagined that a moment like this, if it ever came, would feel enormous and cinematic, would announce itself with thunder, but what actually happened was simply that my feet stopped moving and the world continued on around them. My father took a half step before he felt the resistance of my arm in his and turned to look at me.
“Mary Catherine?” His voice was low, private, not yet alarmed.
I looked at him. At the face I had loved my entire life, the steady, quiet, honest face of Martin Donovan, who had cried walking me down this aisle because he believed in me and believed in this and had sacrificed things I would never fully know to give me this Saturday.
I loved him. I loved him so much I couldn't speak.
I let go of his arm.
I shook my head.No.
I heard the music continue for two more bars before it stuttered—the organist losing the thread as the movement in the nave shifted, heads turning, something rippling back through the rows. I heard my mother's voice, a single syllable, sharp and low. I heard someone—Mrs. Hannigan, I thought—inhale audibly. I heard Daniel say my name, once, from the altar.
I was already turning.
The dress was seventeen pounds of ivory silk and it moved when I did, a great shifting sweep of it. I gathered the skirt in both hands—ruining the train, I thought, and then thought:it doesn't matter—and I walked. Back up the aisle, back the way I had come, past the faces that had arranged themselves intoconfusion and concern and the beginnings of something I didn't stay to witness.
Past Mrs. Hannigan.
Past the memorial plaque in the vestibule with my grandfather's name on it.
Through the heavy doors of Saint Sebastian's and out into the March afternoon.
The air hit me first—cool and alive, the breath of Charleston in spring, the smell of the Cooper River somewhere in it and the sweetness of something blooming nearby. The light was different out here, ordinary and generous, the kind that didn't mean anything, didn't ask anything, just fell where it fell.
I stood on the front steps of the church in seventeen pounds of ivory silk with my bouquet still somehow in my hand and the doors swinging shut behind me and the sound of the organ dying away. For one moment—one single, terrifying, exhilarating moment—I had absolutely no idea what came next.
I had never not known what came next.
My feet moved before the thought did. Down the steps, onto the sidewalk, the uneven Charleston brick rising to meet my heeled shoes in ways that required my entire attention. I walked. Away from the doors, away from the steps, away from the sound of them opening again behind me and the voices beginning.
I didn't look back.
4
BROCK
Charleston had spent eighteen hours trying to keep me out, and somewhere over Atlanta I'd started taking it personal.
The flight out of El Paso got pushed for weather that wasn't there, then pushed again for a crew that never showed, then a third time for a reason the gate agent read off her screen in the flat voice of a woman who'd quit apologizing around noon. I could've driven it in the hours I spent folded into vinyl chairs watching the same four commercials cycle on the terminal TVs. But a man in my line learns to wait. Waiting is most of the work. The trigger's the easy part. It's the hours before it that sort the living from the names on stones.
So, I waited. And sometime before first light, a regional jet finally hauled me east over a country going black to gray to gold, and set me down into a morning thick enough to chew.
I hadn't called Tommy.
He'd know I was coming. My brother always knew—the one thing about him that hadn't changed, the way he could feel another Dane on the move like a shift in the air. Butknowing I was inbound and knowing where I stood were two different things. I meant to keep that gap open as long as I could. You don't walk onto ground you haven't read. Not even friendly ground. Especially not friendly ground, because friendly is where men get lazy and lazy is where they die. Whatever had Tommy puttingit's badin writing, I'd be no use to him blind. So, before I went to my brother, I'd do what I always did first.
I'd learn the place.
I rented a gray four-door from the off-airport lot, the kind of car nobody remembers, under a name that wasn't mine and a license that said it was. The clerk didn't look twice. They never do. I pulled a ballcap low, slid my sunglasses on against a sun already climbing mean, and drove into the city with the windows down and the radio off, the way I'd come down every road that mattered in my life.
Charleston wasn't anything like home.
Home was dry. Home was distance—land that ran flat to the curve of the earth and let you see a man coming for an hour before he arrived. This was the opposite of that. The heat here had weight to it, wet and close, the kind that laid down on your skin and stayed, that turned a clean shirt to a rag by the second block. Texas heat burned you off. This heat moved in.