Page 1 of Irish Vice

1

SAMANTHA

“Samantha Kelly.” My husband sounds stiff as he introduces me to the stranger in our dining room. “This is Birte Antóinín Mason. My wife.”

My wife.

I start to laugh, because Braiden must be playing a joke. He’s hired this bizarre woman to stand in our dining room, wearing her high-necked white gown, clutching her tiny gold cross, and chanting in her sing-song little voice.

But Braiden isn’t laughing.

Last night, he killed a man for me. He was shot, his arm grazed by a bullet aimed at me. He acted without even knowing who sent the man with a gun. Braiden killed to save his wife. To saveme.

Now, his voice cuts through the rabid-squirrel chittering of my brain. “Say something.”

I can’t piece together words, can’t ask the questions I’m terrified of having answered. But Birte Antóinín Mason dropsan obedient curtsey, as if she’s just stepped out of finishing school or an etiquette class taught by the world’s strictest nuns. “Dia duit, Samantha,” she says.

“English,” Braiden says to his wife. And then, to me, “That means ‘God be with you.’ It’s a common greeting in Ireland. Like ‘hello.’”

It feels absurd to respond, as if this woman hasn’t just turned my world upside down. But it’s rude to stay silent. So I say, “Hello, Birte.”

Braiden looks more relieved than he should at those two words. He glances at the pair of plates in his hands, at the neatly halved omelet he made for us in the kitchen. “Please,” he says, gesturing toward the dining room table. “Let’s eat.”

I can’t imagine shoving eggs into my mouth, chewing and swallowing like my stomach isn’t folding into an origami crane. But I can’t figure out what else to do, so I take my usual place at Braiden’s left hand. I watch as Birte settles at Braiden’s right.

Once he’s put a plate in front of each of us, he retreats to the sideboard. It takes him an absurd amount of time to match two cups to their saucers. He adds four spoons of sugar to one cup and a splash of milk to the other. He tops both with tea.

Braiden sets our drinks in front of us before he sits at the head of the table. Birte gets the one sweetened for a child. I get the one for an adult.

Birte crosses herself and bows her head. I have a feeling she changes whatever she was going to say, translating from the Irish, or maybe from Latin. “Bless us, o Lord,” she says. “And these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

She crosses herself again and then looks at Braiden and me expectantly. I sat through enough blessings before meals at Zia Sara’s house to remember to say, “Amen.”

Braiden chimes in half a beat late. Birte frowns at him, but then she spears a bite of omelet. After chewing and swallowing, she says to Braiden, “Get some tea. Just like me. That’s the key.”

He leaps up like a Kentucky Derby favorite breaking free of the gate. He doesn’t bother with a saucer; instead, he fills a cup almost to the brim with tea as dark as motor oil. He drinks it straight down, like medicine, ignoring the wisps of steam that curl around his face.

As he goes back for more, I finally find my own words. “Birte,” I say. “Do you live on the third floor?”

“Third floor,” she says, turning the words into a little song. “Locked door. No more.”

Her weird little rhymes must exhaust her, because she settles down to a steady refueling, shoveling bites of omelet into her mouth so fast she barely takes time to chew.

“Braiden?” I ask.

He’s the one who told me the door at the end of the hallway was forbidden. He spanked me for defying him, for testing the knob when I thought he wasn’t watching.

He doesn’t want to answer. I know him well enough by now to read that on his face and in his posture. But there’s no way in hell I’m letting this go. “Braiden!” I say more sharply. “Does Birte live on the third floor of this house?”

“Yes,” he says.

His flat answer ignites all my lawyer instincts. He sounds like every reluctant witness I’ve ever deposed, coached by his own attorney to limit his responses to single words as long as humanly possible.

There’s a story I’m owed here. A story he’s been covering up. A lie he’s been living, that he’s forced me to live from the moment I entered Thornfield.

“It was Birte I heard singing my first night here, wasn’t it?”

He nods, but he doesn’t answer out loud.