Page 50 of Faithless Vows

“You’re always starving.”

“I’m a growing girl.” She grins.

We find a table in a small café off the main street, its windows steamed over from the heat inside and the smell of soup and fresh bread hanging in the air. Catríona orders for both of us without consulting me, which I’ve learned is just how she operates.

“Finn said you’ve been helping your grandda with the accounts,” she says, unwinding her scarf.

“Just the ledgers. Grandmam and my aunts don’t exactly enjoy sitting over columns of figures.”

Catríona looks as though she’s just bitten into a lemon. “And you do?”

The look on her face makes me laugh. “I do.”

The soup arrives, thick and hot, and we eat without rushing. Outside the window, people pass in coats and scarves, their arms full of parcels.

It’s good here. It took me a while to feel that. At first, I was too raw from everything that had happened to take much comfort in being home. But slowly, I’d begun to feel settled.

Still, the holidays have a way of bringing old hurts back to the surface. I felt it last week, when Grandmambrought the Christmas boxes down from the attic. I helped her unwrap the ornaments I’ve known since childhood—the little glass birds, the painted wooden angels, the star that has always sat at the top of the tree. Seeing them again felt bittersweet.

I’d had plans. Not grand ones. Just a house. Our house. The one with the wide windows and the water beyond the back fence, the one I’d worked so hard to choose the furniture and finishings for, hoping to make it somewhere that felt like ours.

Ronin and I had talked about our first Christmas there. The first of many, we’d said. Making our own traditions. I’d imagined waking up there on Christmas morning for the first time, in a house that was ours, that we’d chosen, that we’d filled with our own things.

I’d thought about the little room next to ours. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, tucked at the end of the hall. The first time we walked through, I hung back in the doorway while everyone else moved on, taking in the soft yellow walls and the large picture window overlooking the water. Ronin was already in the next room by the time I followed.

For a moment, I saw it differently. A border of little lambs or ducks running around the walls. A rocking chair by the window. Later, when we hired the decorator, I asked her to leave that room as it was.

Not yet,I had thought.But someday.

I’d had plans. But there is no someday now.

There is noourhouse, no Christmas mornings waking up together, no building the kind of traditions we talked about. There is no small yellow room waiting to become something else.

I hadn’t expected that one to hurt as much as it does. It had only ever been a quiet, private hope I’d never even spoken out loud, and yet losing it still feels like losing something real. I press my lips together and look back down at my soup.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Catríona says.

“Just thinking.”

She doesn’t press. That’s the thing about her—she knows when to leave things be. She tears off a piece of bread and nudges the basket toward me. “Your grandmam’s invited thelot of us for Christmas Eve,” she says. “Mam’s already said yes, so there you are—my Christmas present to you.”

“The whole lot of you?” I laugh. “That’s quite the gift.”

“I know,” Catríona says, looking far too pleased with herself. “And I’m the best part.”

***

Christmas Eve arrives the way I remember it from when I was a girl, with days of preparation and a house that grows louder with every hour that passes.

The house smells of pine and cloves and the good candles my grandmam always saves for special occasions. The tree stands in the corner of the sitting room. Catríona, Róisín, and I put it up a few weeks ago while my grandmam was in town. We made popcorn for the garland, but after Róisín started a popcorn war, it took us three batches to get enough strung for the tree. The memory still makes me smile.

I sit on the window seat, watching everyone. My grandda is beside the fire, telling Uncle Conor and Finn’s father, Eamon, a story I know I’ve heard before. Catríona, her mam, and Róisín sit together on the sofa, glasses of wine in hand as they talk. Grandmam and my aunts have taken over the kitchen, so no one else is allowed in. My job was the shortbread—apparently no one else can get theirs right—but once the last tray came out of the oven, I was told to get out from underfoot.

This is my family, everyone together for Christmas in a house that has held us for generations. But with everyone here, it’s hard not to think about Mam and Da.

Neither of them has written. Neither has called.

I’d asked my grandmam about it a month or so ago, when we were sitting by the fire one evening while the radio played softly in the corner. I had turned the question over in my mind for days before I finally asked it. Whether I should write them myself. Whether it was my place to reach out first.