“I know you aren’t Declan’s Anne—not anymore—because Declan’s Anne never looked at me the way you do.” The last words were said so simply, I wasn’t certain I’d heard him right. Our eyes clashed and held, and I swallowed, trying to dislodge the hook from my throat. But I was caught as surely as I’d been when he pulled me out of the lake.
“And if you keep looking at me that way, Anne, I’ll kiss you. I don’t know if I trust you. I don’t even know who you are half the time. But damn if I can resist you when you look at me like that.”
I wanted him to. I wanted him to kiss me, but he didn’t close the distance between us, and his lips didn’t press into mine.
“Can’t I just be Anne?” I asked, almost pleading.
“If you aren’t Declan’s Anne, who are you?” he whispered, as if he hadn’t heard me at all.
I sighed, my shoulders drooping, my eyes falling away. “Maybe I’m Eoin’s Anne,” I said simply. I had always been Eoin’s Anne.
He nodded and smiled sadly. “Yes. Maybe you are. Finally.”
“Were you in love . . . with . . . me, Thomas?” I ventured, suddenly brave. My shamelessness made me wince, but I needed to know how he’d felt about Declan’s Anne.
His eyebrows rose in slow surprise, and he stepped back from me, distancing himself farther, and I felt the loss even as I filled my lungs in relief.
“No. I wasn’t. You were Declan’s, always. Always,” Thomas said. “And I loved Declan.”
“And if I hadn’t been . . . Declan’s . . . would you have wanted . . . me to be yours?” I pressed, trying not to slip and use the wrong pronoun.
Thomas shook his head as he spoke, almost denying the words as he said them. “You were wild. You burned so hot that none of us could help but draw closer, just to bask in your warmth. And you were—you are—so beautiful. But no. I had no wish to be consumed by you. I had no desire to be burned.”
I didn’t know what to feel, relief or despair. I didn’t want Thomas to love her, but I did want him to care about me. And the two were suddenly intertwined.
“Declan could withstand the heat,” Thomas continued. “He loved it. He loved you. So much. You lit him up inside, and I always thought you felt the same way about him.”
To not come to Anne’s defense would be wrong. I couldn’t let Thomas doubt her, not even to save myself.
“I’m sure she did. I’m sure Anne Finnegan Gallagher felt the exact same way,” I said, head bowed.
He was quiet, but I felt his turmoil even as I refused to meet his gaze.
“I don’t understand. You speak as if you are two different people,” he pressed.
“We are,” I choked, struggling for my composure.
He took one step, and then another, drawing close enough to lift my chin and search my eyes, his fingers soft on my face. I saw my emotions—grief, loss, fear, uncertainty—reflected in his gaze.
“None of us are the same, Anne. Some days I hardly recognize myself in the mirror. It’s not my face that has changed; it’s the way I see the world. I’ve seen things that have permanently altered me. I’ve done things that have distorted my vision. I’ve crossed lines and tried to find them again, only to discover that all my lines have disappeared. And without lines, everything blurs together.”
His voice was so heartsick, his words so heavy, that I could only gaze back at him, moved to tears and silenced by his sadness.
“But when I look at you, I still see Anne,” he whispered. “Your lines are sharp and clean. The faces around you are faded and dull—they’ve been faded and dull for years now—but you . . . you are perfectly clear.”
“I am not her, Thomas,” I said, needing him to believe me and not daring to make him understand. “Right now, I almost wish I were. But I am not that Anne.”
“No. You’re right. You’ve changed. You don’t burn my eyes like you once did. Now, I don’t have to look away.”
My breath caught at his confession—the sound ricocheted between us—and he leaned in to gently free it, brushing my mouth with his. His lips were so soft and shy, they slipped away without letting me greet them. I followed, frantic to call them back, and he hesitated, forehead pressed to mine, hands on my shoulders, letting my bated breath extend an invitation before he accepted it and returned. His hands slid around to my back as his mouth lowered and stayed, letting me feel the warmth and the press of his kiss, so real, so present, so impossible.
Our mouths moved in a halo of swollen caresses, a brush and a slide, a nudge and a pause, reveling in the weight of lips against lips. Over and over, and then again. Plying and persuading, urging and unraveling, until the pounding of my heart trembled in my mouth and quivered in my belly. Need, need, need, it panted. More, more, more, it roared. The hound of Culann, baying a warning at the door. We both drew back in breathless wonder, eyes wide, hands clinging, lips parted.
For a moment we simply stared at one another, inches apart, our bodies charged and howling. And then we widened the distance, releasing each other. The clanging in my chest and the rushing of my blood was slower to ebb.
“Good night, Countess,” Thomas murmured.
“Good night, Setanta,” I said, and a smile ghosted past his lips as he turned and left my room. I was drifting off to sleep when I realized he’d never demanded an explanation about the truce.
The next few weeks, I moved in a sort of haze, straddling reality and an existence that was both illogical and absolutely undeniable. I stopped questioning what had happened to me—what would happen to me—and accepted each day as it came. When one dreams terrible dreams, part of the unconscious mind reassures that wakefulness will summon reality and banish the nightmare. But it was not a terrible dream. It had become a sweet sanctuary. And though that stubborn voice still whispered that I would wake, I stopped caring if I slept. I accepted my predicament with the imagination of my childhood, lost in a world I had created and fearful that the story would come to an end and that I would return to my previous life, where Eoin and Ireland and Thomas Smith no longer existed.
Thomas had not kissed me again, and I had not given him any indication that I wanted to be kissed. We’d established something that we were not ready to explore. Declan was gone, and Anne was gone. At least the Anne he thought I’d been. But Thomas was still caught between the memory of them and the prospect of me, and I was snagged between a future that was my past, and a past that might be my future. So we settled into an ever-narrowing circle of discovery, talking of nothing and everything, of this and that, of now and then. I asked questions, and he freely answered. He asked questions, and I tried not to lie. I was happy in a way that made no sense, content in a manner that called into question my sanity and surrounded by people who made me glad to be alive, if alive is what I was.
Thomas took me with him once or twice a week or when he thought he would need an extra set of hands, and I’d done my best to provide them. I’d been raised by a doctor; I knew basic first aid, and I wasn’t prone to freak-outs or fainting at the sight of blood, which was about all I had going for me. But Thomas seemed to think it was enough. When he could, he left me home to spend time with Eoin, who would be starting school in the fall. Eoin introduced me to all the animals at Garvagh Glebe and told me their names—the pigs, the chickens, the sheep, and the pretty brown mare who was expecting a foal. We began taking long walks along the shore and down the lane, over the green hills and across the low rock walls. I was traipsing over Leitrim’s fields with Eoin babbling at my side. Ireland was gray and green, shot with the yellow of the gorse that grew wildly on the hills and in the valleys, and I wanted to know her intimately.
Sometimes Brigid came too, first because she feared Eoin and I would disappear together and then because she seemed to enjoy the exercise. She started to soften toward me, infinitesimally, and sometimes she could be coaxed to talk of the days when she was a girl living in Kiltyclogher in northern Leitrim, giving me a glimpse into her life. It seemed to surprise her that I listened so intently, that I cared to hear her stories, that I wanted to know her at all. I discovered she had two sons and a daughter, all older than Declan, and a little girl buried in Ballinagar. I hadn’t seen a stone and wondered if the child’s marker was just a plot of grass with a heavy rock to mark her resting place.
Her oldest daughter was in America, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her name was Mary, and she’d married a man named John Bannon. They had three children, grandchildren Brigid had never seen, cousins Eoin had never told me about. Brigid’s two sons were unmarried. One, Ben, was a train conductor in Dublin, and the other, Liam, worked on the docks in Sligo. Since I’d been at Garvagh Glebe, neither had come to visit. I listened to Brigid provide updates on each one of her children, and I hung on her words, trying to absorb things I should have known, things Anne would have known, and doing my best to bluff my way through the rest.
“You are kind to her, to Brigid,” Thomas remarked one day, when we returned from our walk to find him already at home. “She has never been especially kind to you.”