"I've neglected you since Tom died, Maggie Mae."
"No. We all had our own lives, and Brie and I both understood that Mother didn't make it easy for you to visit. As to that . . ." She pulled back, took a deep breath. "I'd like to apologize for last evening. I shouldn't have provoked her, and I certainly shouldn't have left without saying good night."
"There's no need for apologies from you, or from Brianna as I've told her already today." Niall patted Maggie's cheek. "Maeve had settled on her mood before she arrived. You provoked nothing. You're not to blame for the way she's chosen to go through life, Maggie."
"Whether I am or not, I'm sorry the evening was uncomfortable."
"I would have called it illuminating," Christine said calmly.
"I suppose it was," Maggie agreed. "Uncle Niall, did you ever hear her sing?"
"I did. Lovely as a nightingale, to be sure. And restless, like one of those big cats you see caged in the zoo. She was never an easy girl, Maggie, happy only when the people would hush and listen to her music."
"Then there was my father."
"Then there was Tom. From what I'm told they were blind and deaf to everything but each other. Maybe to each other as well." He stroked the big hand down her hair. "It could be neither of them saw what was inside until they were bound. And when they did, what they saw was different than they'd hoped. She let that sour her."
"Do you think if they hadn't met, she'd have been different?"
He smiled a little and kept his hand gentle. "We're tossed by the winds of fate, Maggie Mae. Once we end where they blow us, we make of ourselves what we will."
"I'm sorry for her," Maggie said softly. "I never thought I could be."
"And you've done well by her." He kissed Maggie's brow. "Now it's time to make yourself what you will."
"I'm working on it." She smiled again. "Very hard on it"
Satisfied that the timing was right, Christine spoke up. "Niall, would you be a darling and give me a moment with Maggie?"
"Girl talk, is it?" His round face creased in smiles. "Take your time, I'll go for a walk."
"Now then," Christine began as soon as the door shut behind Niall. "I have a confession. I didn't go into the parlor right after last night. I came back, thinking I might be able to smooth things over." Maggie lowered her eyes to stare at the floor. "I see."
"What I did, rudely, was listen. It took all my control not to barge into that room and give your mother a piece of my mind."
"It would only have made things worse." "Which was why I didn't give in to the urge— though it would have been greatly satisfying." Chris tine took Maggie by the arms, gave her a little shake. "She has no idea what she has in you."
"Perhaps she knows too well. I've sold part of what I am because there's a need in me, just as there is in her, for more."
"You've earned more."
"If I've earned it, or been given it as a gift, it doesn't change things. I wanted to be content with what I had, Mrs. Sweeney. I wanted so much to be, because otherwise I'd be admitting there hadn't been enough. That my father had failed us, and he didn't. Before Rogan walked through that door, I was content, or I'd talked myself into believing I could be. But the door's open now and I've had a taste of it. I haven't done a decent hour's work in a week."
"Why do you think that is?" "He's pushed me into a corner, that's why. It can't be for myself anymore, I can't be for myself anymore. He's changed that. I don't know what to do. I always know what to do."
"Your work comes through your heart. That's plain for anyone who's seen in. Maybe you're blocking off your heart, Maggie."
"If I am, it's because I have to. I won't do what she did. Nor what my father did. I won't be the cause of misery, or the victim of it."
"I think you are the victim of it, my dear Maggie. You're letting yourself feel guilty for succeeding, guiltier yet for harboring the ambition to succeed. And I think you're refusing to let out what's in your heart, because once you do, you won't be able to take it back again, even though holding it in is making you unhappy. You're in love with Rogan, aren't you?"
"If I am, he brought it on himself."
"I'm sure he'll deal with it admirably."
Maggie turned away to shuffle tools on a bench. "He's never met her. I think I made sure he wouldn't so he couldn't see I was like her. Moody and mean, dissatisfied."
"Lonely," Christine said softly, and drew Maggie's eyes back to hers. "She's a lonely woman, Maggie, through no one's fault but her own. It'll he no one's but yours if you're lonely, too." Coming forward, she took Maggie's hands. "I didn't know your father, but there must be some of him in you as well."
"He dreamed. So do I."
"And your grandmother, with her quick mind and ready temper. She's in you as well. Niall, with his wonderful lust for life. All of that's in you. None of it makes up the whole. Mall's right about that, Maggie. So right. You'll make yourself what you will."
"I thought I had. I thought I knew exactly who I was and wanted to be. Now it's all mixed up in my head."
"When your head won't give you the answer, it's best to listen to your heart."
"I don't like the answer it's giving me."
Christine laughed. "Then, my dear child, you can be absolutely sure it's the right one."
Chapter Twenty
BY midmorning, her solitude tucked around her, Maggie took up her pipe again. Two hours later the vessel she had blown was tossed back into the melt for cullet. She pored over her sketches, rejected them, tried others. After scowling at the unicorn she'd set on a shelf, she turned to her torches for lamp work. But she'd hardly taken up a rod of glass before the vision faded. She watched the tip of the rod dip, melt, begin to droop. Hardly thinking of what she was doing, she began dropping the bits of molten glass into a container of water. Some broke, others survived. She took one out by the tip to study. Though it had been formed by fire, it was cool now, shaped like a tear. A Prince Rupert's drop, no more than a glass artist's novelty, one a child could create. Rubbing t
he one drop between her fingers, she took it to her polariscope. Through the lens the internal stresses in the drop exploded into a dazzling rainbow of colors. So much, she thought, inside so little. She slipped the drop into her pocket, fished several more out of the bucket. Moving with studied care, she shut down her furnaces. Ten minutes later she was striding into her sister's kitchen.
"Brianna. What do you see when you look at me?"
Blowing a stray hair out of her eyes, Brianna looked up and continued to knead her bread dough. "My sister, of course."
"No, no. Try for once not to be so literal-minded. What is it you see in me?"
"A woman who seems to be on the edge of something, always. One who has enough energy to tire me to the bone. And anger." Brianna stared down at her hands again. "Anger that makes me sad and sorry."
"Selfishness?"
Startled, Brianna glanced up again. "No, not that. Not ever. That's one flaw I've never seen in you."
"But others?"
"You've enough of them. What, do you want to be perfect?"
The dismissive tone had Maggie wincing. "You're still upset with me about last evening."
"I'm not, no." With renewed vigor Brianna began to pound the dough. "With myself, with circum stances, with fate, if you like. But not with you. It wasn't your doing, and God knows you warned me it wouldn't work. But I wish you wouldn't always leap to defend me."
"I can't help it."
"I know." Brianna smoothed the dough into a mound and slipped it into a bowl for a second rising. "She was better behaved after you'd gone. And a little embarrassed, I think. Before she left she told me I'd cooked a nice meal. Not that she ate any of it, but at least she said it."
"We've had worse evenings."
That's God's truth. Maggie, she said something else."
"She says lots of things. I didn't come to go over all of that."
"It was about the candlesticks," Brianna contin ued, and had Maggie lifting both brows.
"What of them?"
The ones I had on the sideboard, the ones you'd made me last year. She said what pretty work they were."
With a laugh, Maggie shook her head. "You've been dreaming."
"I was awake and standing in my own hallway. She looked at me, and she told me. And she kept standing there, looking at me until I understood that she couldn't say it to you herself, but she wanted you to know."
"Why should she?" Maggie said unsteadily.
"I think it was a kind of apology, for whatever passed between you in the dining room. The best she could make. When she saw I understood her, she started in on Lottie again, so the two of them left the way they'd come in. Arguing."
"Well." Maggie had no idea how to react, how to feel. Restlessly, her fingers reached into her pocket to toy with the smooth glass drops.
"It's a small step, but a step it is." Brisk, Brianna began to dust flour on her hands in preparation for kneading the next loaf. "She's happy in the house you gave her, even if she doesn't know it yet."
"You could be right." Her breath hitched a bit as she released it. "I hope you are. But don't be planning any more family meals in the near future."
That I won't."
"Brianna ..." Maggie hesitated, ended by look ing helplessly at her sister. "I'm driving to Dublin today."
"Oh, you'll have a long day, then. You're needed at the gallery?"
"No. I'm going to see Rogan. I'm either going to tell him I'm not going to see him again, or that I'll marry him."
"Marry him?" Brianna hobbled the next ball of dough. "He's asked you to marry