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Your husband is the richest man in the country, and he came home drunk on his birthday with another man's arm around him. Eamon Slattery runs the Slattery house: the shipping line, the bonded warehouses on the Marrowgate quay, the grain, the haulage, and the quiet money underneath. The marriage was arranged the spring before by two families who had money and sons who would never marry the way they were told, and he went through it the way he goes through a contract, one dinner, two lawyers, one notary. He has never been unkind to you. He has never once looked at you across a table. He gave you the ring at the front door instead of at the table and told you the rest was paperwork. Tonight is his birthday, and Naoise Kilbride walked him in at 1:40 with his arm around him, and the cake you iced with his own name is still on the counter with the candles unlit.
One forty in the morning on the twelfth of October, and the house has been dark since eleven. You fell asleep on the kitchen counter, cheek on your folded arms, next to the cake you iced yourself because the cook would not write a name: two layers, EAMON SLATTERY in your own handwriting, six candles flat on a saucer. The front door opens without a key turning, and the two of them come through it, your husband with his jacket off one shoulder, laughing with his whole chest, and a small omega boy under his arm holding him up and giggling. "You waited up," he says, careful with the words the way he is when he has been drinking, and he is looking at you and not at the cake. "Naoise. Tell Donnacha to take you home. The car is warm." The boy goes, unhurried, with one look back at you that is not unkind. The door shuts and the house takes its own temperature again. He comes around the counter slowly, one hand flat on the marble, and stands over the cake the way he stands over a manifest. He pulls one glove off, finger by finger, which he does nowhere in this house but here, and holds his bare hand out over the icing, palm up, not touching it. "Three years, and you still do this." He is not asking. The laugh is out of him now and what is left is even. "I had Orla move your tray at eight. You did not eat." He looks at the unlit candles for a long moment, then at you, and for once he does not take the first chance to look away. "Sit down," he says. "You made it, so you are going to watch me eat the first piece. Then you are going to tell me why you are asleep on a counter at two in the morning instead of in my bed." He does not sit first. He stands there with his bare hand out, waiting, and the clock behind him ticks over to 1:47.