But she was . . . much . . . sharper.” He latched upon the word as if he couldn’t think of a better one, but I flinched, and I felt my face grow hot.
“I’m plenty intelligent.”
“Are ya, now?” His lips actually twitched, humor chasing the strain from his face.
Outrage bubbled in my throat. Was he laughing at me?
“I’m not talking about your intelligence, Anne. The old Anne was all sharp edges. She didn’t have your tranquility. She was . . . intense. Forceful. Passionate and, frankly, tiresome. Maybe it was because she felt she had to be. But your softness is beautiful. Soft eyes. Soft curls. A soft voice. A warm, soft smile. Don’t be ashamed of it. There’s very little softness left in Ireland anymore. It’s one of the reasons Eoin loves you so much.”
My anger deflated, and my breast swelled with a different feeling entirely.
“You’re good, you know,” he mused. “Your accent. You sound like one of us. You sound like the same Anne. But sometimes you slip. You forget . . . and then you sound like the girl you claim to be.”
“The girl I claim to be,” I muttered. I had hoped, just for a moment, that we’d moved past disbelief. But maybe not. “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t make it less true, Thomas. I need you to pretend that I am exactly who I say I am. Can you do that? Because regardless of whether you believe me or not, regardless of whether you think I’m lying or deranged or sick, I know things that haven’t happened yet, and I don’t know half of the things you think I should. I am not Anne Finnegan Gallagher. And you know it. Deep down, you do. I don’t know the names of your neighbors or the shopkeepers in town. Or how to style my hair or how to wear these infernal stockings or cook or sew or Riverdance, for God’s sake.” I yanked at the corset strap beneath my skirt and it snapped against my leg.
Thomas was silent for several long breaths, considering, his eyes on mine. Then his lips quirked all over again, and he began to laugh, his hand hovering near his mouth like he wanted to stop but couldn’t. “What the hell is Riverdance?” he wheezed.
“Irish dancing. You know.” Keeping my arms straight to my sides, I began kicking up my heels and shuffling in a very poor imitation of The Lord of the Dance.
“Riverdance, eh?” he chortled.
He began to kick up his heels too, stepping and tapping, his hands on his hips, laughing as I tried to copy him. But I couldn’t copy him. He was wonderful, exuberant, dancing down the lane toward the house as though he heard fiddles in his head. Gone was the morose doctor, the doubting Thomas, and as the thunder cracked and the rain started to fall around us, we were transported back to Dublin, to the rain and the rocking chair, and the intimacy I’d shattered with impossible truths.
We didn’t go back to the house. Brigid would be there and so would at least four O’Tooles. Thomas pulled me into the barn, to the scent of clean hay and the chuff and whinny of the mare and her new baby. He bolted the door behind us, backed me up against the wall, and tucked his mouth close to my ear.
“If you’re crazy, then so am I. I’ll be Tom the Lunatic, and you can be Crazy Jane,” he said. I smiled at his Yeats references even as my pulse pounded, and my fingers curled in his shirt.
“The truth is, I feel crazy. For the last month I’ve been slowly going insane,” he panted. His breath stirred my hair and tickled the whorl of my ear. “I don’t know the right or wrong of it. I can’t see beyond tomorrow or next week. Part of me is still convinced that you’re Declan’s Anne, and it seems all sorts of wrong to feel the way I do.”
“I’m not Declan’s Anne,” I said, urgently, but he continued, the words spilling from his lips, lips so close that I turned my face so they could trail across my cheek.
“I can’t fathom where you’ll go or where you’ve been. But I’m afraid for you and terrified for myself and for Eoin. So if you tell me to stop, Anne, I will. I’ll back away, and I’ll do my best to be what you need. And when . . .