Chapter 4 — Declan!
To understand any of it, you have to go back three weeks, to the worst phone call of my life. My husband, Declan Gallagher, had been driving home along the highway outside Syracuse when another vehicle crossed into him.
One minute I was setting the table and listening for his car in the drive. The next I was standing in our kitchen with a stranger’s voice in my ear, answering impossible questions, staring at the half-full coffee mug he’d left by the sink that morning and would never come back to rinse. I was eight months pregnant.
Grief does strange things to time. Some mornings lasted ten minutes. Some afternoons went on for days. I slept badly and forgot to eat and kept one of Declan’s soft old T-shirts folded under my pillow because it still carried the faint smell of him, and I could not yet make myself wash it.
The house became the one place on earth where I could still half-hear his footsteps in the hall if I held very still and did not breathe. I did not know, in those foggy weeks, that the same house was about to become the thing my father tried to take from me before my husband was even properly buried.
I did not know Declan had seen it coming from a long way off. I only knew that the walls still smelled like him, and that I could not imagine living anywhere else. People who have not lost someone suddenly imagine grief as sadness, a very large sadness, but sadness all the same.
It is not that, or not only that.
In those first weeks it was more like a concussion.
I would walk into a room and forget why.
I would pick up the phone to tell Declan something small — a thing the baby had done, a noise the car was making — and get halfway through dialing before the floor dropped out again.
I answered the door for people bringing casseroles and could not, an hour later, have told you who had come.
The world had a thin, unreal quality to it, like a set built to resemble my life.
And into that fog, into a woman who could scarcely track the days, my father walked with a folder and a plan, having chosen his moment with some care, because a grieving woman is easy to move and easier to convince she has agreed to things she has not.
He was counting on the fog.
He had every reason to.
What he had not counted on was that even a concussed animal will still, if you corner it and put your hands on its young, turn around and fight — and that my husband, who knew my father better than I did, had left that cornered animal something sharper than instinct to fight with.
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