He Missed the Delivery Room. I Married His Enemy Instead. novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Cork

We flew to Cork in the first week of November, eight of us and an oxygen tank.

Grandda had the window seat.

He told the flight attendant he'd been shot in Cork in 1961.

She brought him two extra whiskeys.

"You were never shot in Cork," my mother said.

"She doesn't know that," said Grandda.

The kid had never been on a plane.

He held the armrests through the whole takeoff and pretended he was stretching.

My charge nurse sat beside him and held his hand without making a thing of it.

Conall sat across the aisle from me with Niamh asleep on his chest, and slept himself somewhere over the Atlantic.

His sling had been gone a month.

Under his sweater there were two scars now, a long one and a round one, both mine.

The church was on a hill above the river, gray stone and older than Boston.

Grandda had been christened in the same stone font in 1937.

He told the priest so four times.

Niamh wore the cream knit blanket he'd brought from Cork the night she was born.

My charge nurse was her godmother.

"I'm not religious," she'd said when I asked her.

"You're not anything. You're family."

She'd cried in the car park and told me it was the wind.

Grandda had picked the godfather himself.

"The lad," he'd said, pointing his cane at the kid. "He's the only one of you who knows how to read a doctor's writing. She'll need that."

The kid stood at the font in a borrowed suit, white as the stone, and said "I do" so loudly the priest jumped.

The priest poured the water.

Niamh took one look at him and screamed the church down.

Grandda laughed so hard he had to use his tank.

Conall filmed the whole thing on his phone, steady, and sent it straight to Davis.

Davis wrote back in under a minute.

"Thank you. She's got your lungs, Brig."

Then, a minute later: "Tell Conall thank you."

Conall read it over my shoulder.

He didn't say anything.

He wrote back, "She's got yours too," and put the phone away.

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