I Woke Up at the Altar and Said No to the Mob Heir Who Let Me Die, but He Remembers Too novel · Chapter 2 of 40

Chapter 2: All of It

Cormac admits he remembers everything and lets her go; at the Milton house Philomena throws her things on the lawn and breaks her mother's sewing machine, Senan carries her father's toolbox to the cab, and in the cab Orla finds the tape is gone.

"You remember," I said.

It wasn't a question, and he didn't treat it like one.

"All of it."

"Say it."

He glanced at the drivers by the cars. Then he looked back at me.

"The container. The phone call. What I said."

My bouquet was crushing in my fist. I made my fingers let go.

"When?"

"This morning. I woke up in my apartment at five and I was thirty again."

He swallowed.

"I didn't know if you would. I hoped you wouldn't."

"Why? So you could do it all again?"

"So you wouldn't have to carry it."

I laughed. It came out ugly.

"Then you know why I said no."

"I do."

"Are you going to stop me?"

"No."

He said it.

Behind him, the church doors opened, and two of his cousins came out looking for him.

"Cormac! Your mother's having a fit!"

He didn't turn around.

"Where will you go?"

"That isn't yours to know anymore."

He nodded once.

I walked down the rest of the steps and flagged a cab on East Broadway in my wedding dress.

The driver didn't even blink. It was Southie.

"Milton," I said. "And hurry, please."

Everything I owned was in that house.

I had maybe two hours before the whole family came home from a reception with no wedding.

The Devane house sat on a hill in Milton, big and brick, with white columns and a lawn somebody else mowed.

I had lived there since I was fifteen.

I had never once been allowed to use the front door.

I used it now.

The housekeeper was arranging flowers in the hall for the party. She dropped a lily when she saw me.

"Miss Orla? Where's...?"

"Ask them," I said, and went upstairs.

My room was at the end of the back hall, next to the linen closet.

I changed out of the dress and into jeans and a sweater, and I left the dress on the bed.

I packed fast.

Clothes. My mother's sewing box. My mother's stork snips on their red ribbon, which I put around my neck.

My father's green metal toolbox from under the bed, heavy and dented.

And my mother's sewing machine, black with gold scrollwork, the only thing of hers the Devanes hadn't sold.

I was carrying the machine to the stairs when I heard the front door.

Philomena had left early.

She stood at the bottom of the staircase in her gray silk, still wearing her gloves.

"Put that down."

"It's mine."

"Everything in this house was paid for by my husband. Including you."

She turned to the housekeeper and the two girls from the caterer, who were frozen in the hall.

"Take her things out to the lawn. All of them. Now."

They looked at each other.

"Now!"

They went past me up the stairs, eyes down.

A minute later my clothes were coming out of my window in armfuls and landing on the grass.

Philomena came up the stairs one step at a time.

"Three hundred people," she said softly. "The Archbishop's secretary. Half the city council. You stood my son up in front of all of them."

"I didn't stand him up. I told him no to his face."

"Rat's daughter," she said. "Rats always run."

She put her gloved hand on the machine.

I knew what she was going to do half a second before she did it.

She pushed.

It tore out of my arms and went down the stairs end over end.

It hit the marble at the bottom with a crack like a gunshot.

The caterer girl screamed.

The machine lay on its side. The gold scrollwork was scraped. The wheel was snapped clean off.

My mother had sewn my christening gown on that machine.

Philomena brushed off her glove.

"Now it's yours," she said.

I walked down the stairs past her.

I didn't cry. I picked up the body of the machine, and then the wheel, and I carried them both outside to the lawn.

When I came back for the toolbox, my closet door was moving.

I opened it.

Nessa sat on the floor among my shoes, holding her gray rabbit by one ear.

She was four. She had black curls and her father's round blue eyes, and she was missing a button on her dress.

"I hided," she said.

"I see that."

"Grandma's yelling."

"She is."

"Are you going away?"

I knelt down in front of her.

In my first life, Philomena put this child on a plane to a convent school in Ireland when she was six.

I wrote to her every week for three years.

She was the only Devane who cried at my funeral.

"Yes," I said. "I'm going away."

Her face crumpled.

"Take me."

"I can't, sweetheart."

"I'll be good. I'll be so quiet. I'll wipe my own bum."

I laughed and it broke in the middle.

I held her until her breathing slowed down.

Then a voice came from the doorway.

"There's my girls."

Uncle Senan leaned on the frame, smiling, his tweed cap in his hand.

He was the family's favorite uncle. Silver hair, red cheeks, a joke for everybody.

He'd cried at my father's funeral louder than anyone.

"Bad business today," he said kindly. "But a girl's got to follow her heart. Let me help you carry something."

He bent and picked up my father's toolbox before I could stop him.

He weighed it in one hand.

"Heavy," he said. "What's your da got in here?"

"Wrenches," I said.

"Course." He smiled. "Funny what people keep."

He carried it all the way down to my cab and set it on the back seat himself.

Then he waved me off.

I made it four blocks before I opened the box on my knees.

I lifted out the top tray.

In my first life, I didn't find the trick to this box until I was twenty-nine.

I pressed the back left corner, hard, the way I'd learned that November.

The false bottom popped up.

Underneath, there was a square of dust where something had lain for nine years.

The tape was gone.

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