Made With Love

Chapter 4

I wake the next morning to a blast of light. Kate stands over me, curtain rod in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other.

Shit. It wasn’t a dream.

‘Morning,’ she smiles.

I groan into the pillow, my head splitting hot. Ah yes, this is what a hangover feels like. I’dforgotten how rotten they are. I’m pretty sure I might actually die! Yick. What is that awful taste?! Oh God—not Captain Morgan! He shows up to the party, and it’s YO HO to the porcelain god. I try to make out the bleary hands on the wall clock.

‘It’s one,’ Kate says. ‘Here.’ She hands me the coffee, and I pull myself onto one elbow.

‘My head feels like a burst couch.’

‘Good night, right?’ Kate laughs.

She isn’t the slightest bit hung-over. Is that a talent or a pitfall? I try to decide, but the effort sends a lightning ache across the inside of my skull. I roll over to go back to sleep.

‘Ohhh no,’ Kate says and pulls me upright. ‘We’re office hunting, remember?’

Are we?

‘For our firm?’ Kate prods.

‘Oh right,’ I nod, a sudden splinter of memory slicing through my brain. We’re really going through with this?!

Kate flicks on my laptop to scan the rental ads, and I pull myself to the edge of the bed and look over her shoulder at the long list of properties—all of them airy and city central and far too expensive.

My God—I knew office space was at a premium, but this is ridiculous! Twenty, thirty, fifty-five thousand a month?!

‘Try further out,’ I sigh.

‘Further out and no one’ll take us seriously.’ Kate shifts the laptop over to me and pops up to brew a fresh pot of

coffee. ‘You want anything to eat? Bacon maybe?’ she calls from the kitchen.

‘Noooo!’ The thought of food makes my stomach reel. What was in those drinks last night—Drano?

‘Good. I sort of ate it all.’ Kate potters back in, coffee pot at the ready, and a stack of mail tucked under her arm. ‘Cannot believe you didn’t at least crack the new Vogue,’ she says and pulls the magazine out of the stack. A letter topples to the floor and she snatches it up. ‘Mr. Cathal Heaney, Solicitor. What the freak...’ She turns the letter over in her hands and then squints at the postmark. ‘Ireland? You never told me you had a boyfriend in Ireland.’

A dead cold spasm jolts me to my feet.

‘Hey, weren’t your parents from there?’ Kate asks.

‘Yeah,’ I nod. My folks weren’t the watered down, silly hats on Paddy’s Day, ‘my great-great-granny was Irish’ Irish. They were from Ireland, and their parents had been from Ireland, and their grandparents backward to no one knew how far. That made them different—made me different—as if the three of us had been pitching on a raft between the Old World and the New. When they’d slipped off into the blue dark, it’d been up to me to dig in my hands and swim to shore. I’d promised myself that I’d make it. I’d find a way to live on alone.

My hands tremble just visibly as I reach out for the letter. Kate has it open and is reading before I can stop her.

‘It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the recent passing of your grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Tully.’ She looks up at me, eyes glassy. ‘You have a grandmother?’