July 2009 - Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland

Pausing his game, Dessie set the Xbox controller on the coffee table. Next to him, Catherine rustled around, having a more difficult time than usual finding a comfortable position.

Thirty weeks pregnant, Dessie was sympathetic to her plight. Although after fifteen minutes of her restlessness, he was mildly annoyed.

"You okay?" he asked. Grabbing the throw pillow on the other side of him, Dessie fluffed it and then tucked it under her ankles resting on the table. "You haven't been lookin' very well the last couple days."

Catherine pressed down on the upper part of her belly, trying to nudge Danny's head away from her ribcage. She was so uncomfortable she didn't know which aliment to start listing first.

"That's because I feel like shite."

At her admission, Dessie's heart fluttered. She wasn't the type to ever outright confess she was feeling unwell. It was far from a good sign she had.

Groaning and leaning as far forward as she could, Catherine kneaded her fingers into the relentlessly tender spot on her calf. Over the last three days, she tried soaking the ache away in an Epsom salt bath and stretching it out during prenatal yoga. No matter what she did, the nagging pain never seemed to go away. Dessie tried to brush it off as nothing more than a strained muscle from too many yoga sessions. What Catherine failed to tell him was the soreness was growing worse. At this point, walking was becoming unbearable.

More concerned than ever, Dessie grabbed Catherine's leg and moved it over onto his lap. He took over massaging but stopped the moment she helplessly winced.

"You promised you'd tell me if it wasn't gettin' any better," scold Dessie. "Gotta stop pushin' yourself so hard, Catherine. You're not twenty-three anymore."

She scoffed, "Thanks for the reminder."

Now she wasn't going to tell him about the blinding headache she's had for almost a day now. The vision in her left eye twisted like a kaleidoscope, oftentimes blurring in and out.

In the days after they buried Seamus, Catherine had officially been diagnosed with preeclampsia so every minor ache and pain she felt had Dessie on edge. Over the last two months, she spent more time at her doctor's office than she did during the entirety of her pregnancies with Eamonn and Sean. She was over it—she was counting down the days until she gave birth.

Swinging her leg off Dessie's lap, Catherine stood up. Somehow she managed to hide the fact she was feeling rather uneasy on her feet.

"Do ya want a cuppa while I'm up?"

Dessie slid his fingers up the back of Catherine's black tank top, tracing the tips of his fingers along her soft skin. He studied her face intently, trying to decide whether or not he was going to force her to go to the emergency department. Something was wrong, he could sense it.

A proper husband would have ordered his wife to sit down and prop her feet up as he made her a cup of tea, but Dessie wanted to see just how bad her leg was hurting. He nodded, nudging her towards the kitchen with a playful tap on the ass.

She took three steps unscathed. On the fourth, once her left foot hit the hardwood floor, Catherine nearly burst into tears. She stopped walking and grabbed hold of the bookshelf so she could lift her foot off the ground and alleviate the pain.

Dessie shot up, bolting to her side. Catherine wrapped an arm around him to lean against him for balance.

"I've let this slide for three days too long; you're goin' to hospital. Don't think about fightin' me on this because I'm not changing me mind."

Catherine looked out the window to see Eamonn and Sean playing in the garden. She thought about fighting Dessie on it simply because she didn't want to interrupt the time her boys were spending outside, but it was the shooting pain through her head that quickly changed her mind.

"Aye," she breathed. "Let's go."


Daisy Hill Hospital - Newry, Northern Ireland

Patrick and Olivia rushed through the front entrance of the Newry hospital. It didn't take long for Olivia to spot her son-in-law, who was sitting in a chair in the main waiting area. A cup of coffee was nestled in his hands; his head was lowered as he tuned out the commotion going on around him. Patrick interwove his fingers with his wife's, tugging her in the direction of Dessie. After the news which had interrupted their dinner, he felt like he was crawling out of his skin.

Feeling the presence towering over him, Dessie looked up. He quickly wiped the tears away from his cheeks not wanting to give Patrick a reason to think he couldn't hold it together during the worst times in life. Standing, he threw away the paper coffee cup then jammed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.

Seeing how exhausted and utterly defeated Dessie appeared, Patrick and Olivia braced themselves for news worse than they expected.

"How are Catherine and Danny?" Patrick cut right to the chase. There was no reason to pussyfoot when his baby and her baby were far from well.

Dessie fought through his trembling jaw, forcing shaky words out over the knot in his throat. "She had another seizure about a half-hour ago so they moved her from High Dependency into the ICU. They've got her pumped full of blood thinners for the clot in her leg, anti-convulsants, and meds to bring down her blood pressure. Her OB said after the last seizure, Danny started showin' signs of distress on the monitor-"

Olivia interjected, "What does that mean for the both of 'em."

"They're both decompensating so quickly, the only way to get anythin' under control is for her to deliver. She on the board for an emergency C-section, but she's refusin' to go into surgery until she sees you, Paddy."

Patrick cursed under his breath and when he got Catherine's room number took off for the elevators. Pressing the button about a dozen times in a row, he instead opted for the stairs when the doors didn't open fast enough. He took the steps two at a time. At fifty-one and a pack-a-day smoker, Patrick was about ready for an oxygen mask by the time he reached Catherine's room in the Intensive Care Unit.

It took everything in him not to break when he saw Catherine lying in bed. Surrounded by beeping screens with IV's in both arms, and a fetal monitor strapped around her belly, Patrick couldn't bring himself to enter just yet.

Never once in the thirty years since her birth did Patrick recall a time where she seemed so small and helpless. She had spent her entire life being strong for everyone else, the unnecessary stress she put on herself was finally biting her in the ass. Patrick realized that right now she needed him and Dessie to be the strong ones so for the first time she didn't have to be.

Moving out of view of the giant windows, Patrick rested his hands on his hips. To compose himself he took several breaths. Maybe Olivia should have been the one to come up first—she was far more emotionally equipped to deal with shit like this. It didn't matter how tough Patrick seemed on the outside, the one thing he never could properly handle was seeing his youngest child, his only daughter, so fragile.

When she was a child and waltzed into the house with a skinned knee from falling off her bicycle or a wound from catching an elbow to the face during a rough rugby match with the neighborhood boys, Patrick would become more worked up than Catherine.

This was far worse than a skinned knee and a bloody nose, yet Patrick felt oddly calm.

"Are you gonna come in or what?" He heard a groggy Catherine through the open door. He hadn't been as clandestine as he thought.

Walking into her room, he couldn't believe how worn out she looked. Two seizures in only five hours took their toll on her exasperated body. She was paler than usual, with such dark circles it seemed like she had two black eyes behind the thick frames of her glasses. Her left leg was propped up on a mountain of pillows, a nasal cannula was jammed in her nose, and a pulse oximeter was clamped on her index finger.

"How'd you'd know I was up here?"

Catherine gestured to the glass wall so the nurses could see right into her room. "Saw ya comin' down the hall." Strolling over to her, Patrick took a seat on the edge of her bed. She rested her hand on top of his, asking, "You doin' okay?"

"I should be askin' you that, not the other way around."

She shrugged. "It is what it is. Was Dessie downstairs? He hasn't been up here since Kieran came to pick up the boys."

"Aye. He told us the doc wants you to deliver tonight, but you don't wanna go through with it."

"It's too soon!" Catherine swallowed her tears. "Thirty weeks is too early for him to be born. I don't care if I have to sit in bed for another seven weeks bein' pumped full of a pharmacy worth of drugs, he's not comin' out."

Patrick reached out and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Seeing her choke up was making it difficult for him to control the sting of tears in his eyes.

"Catherine-"

"No! I can do this, Da…I can carry Danny to term. My body will not fail my son. It can't—I can't fail him."

Pulling Catherine in for a tight hug, Patrick nuzzled his nose into her hair as she buried her face into his chest. He rubbed her back through the thin generic gown she was wearing, feeling the tears fall from his eyes while hers dampened his t-shirt. She went limp in his arms as if the last ounce of strength she had been holding on to was leaving her body.

"It's my fault," she cried. "If I would've just slowed down as my doctor said to, this never would've bloody happened."

This wasn't the time to start hurling blame, but Patrick didn't have it in him to sugarcoat the situation. Her ignorant life choices were what led to this mess, so now she needed to suck it up and deal with the consequences. Gently laying Catherine back down, Patrick told her what was going to happen.

"Aye, you didn't take it easy and now we're here. The best thing you can do for Danny is to deliver him and let the doctors work their magic to make sure he stays healthy. It's also the best thing you can do for all four of your boys because it's only a matter of time before you end up havin' a goddamn stoke. I know you're scared; there are a lot of unanswered questions floatin' around in your wee head. If anyone can get through this, it's you, Catherine."

In the six hours since she got to the hospital, Catherine took a deep breath. Hearing Patrick put it into perspective made sense to her. She needed to do what was right for Danny and keeping him inside her failing body, wasn't it.

Seeing a figure in the doorway, she looked up to see Dessie. Waving him in, he took a seat in the chair next to the bed and grabbed her hand.

"You remember what the doctor said, yeah? Babies born this early have a high rate of survival, and a low chance of long term complications. It's just a bump in the road that we'll get through," Dessie warmly assured.

"Is Ma here?" she asked.

Patrick nodded and Dessie told her Olivia was in the ICU waiting area since only two people were allowed at a time in her room. "She said she'll see you after surgery."

"Knock, knock," Dr. Kennedy, Catherine's OB, came into the room having changed into a pair of dark blue scrubs from the suit he'd been wearing when she last him. He introduced himself to Patrick, and then checked the print out of the fetal monitor. "We ready to head into the OR and have a baby?"

Dessie answered for them both, though she could hear the same fear in his voice which plagued her. What frightened them the most was knowing their newborn would be alone in the NICU without them for an unknown amount of time. What brought her the biggest heartache was not being able to have the chance to hold Danny, to swaddle him, feed him. All the things Catherine had been so looking forward to since the moment the pink plus-sign appeared on the stick.

Dr. Kennedy flipped through Catherine's chart, not looking up when he asked Dessie, "Do you plan to be in the OR with her?"

There was nothing to even think about, quickly telling the doctor he would be. Never in a million years would he miss the birth of his son.

Wanting to keep anxieties down as much as possible, Dr. Kennedy carefully explained every detail of what they could expect once he made the first cut into her belly. Dessie's hold on Catherine's hand tightened as they were told they wouldn't even have the chance to see Danny before he was whisked away by the neonatal team. So far, it seemed the worst part would be waiting for Danny's doctor to come by and tell them how he's doing.

"Will I be able to see him once I'm out of recovery?"

It broke Dr. Kennedy's heart to tell her no. "Dessie, you'll be able to see him once they've got the results of his blood work and scans, but Catherine, you have to go at least thirty-six hours without a seizure before you'll be allowed into the NICU."

"I won't go until you can," Dessie said. "It doesn't seem right to see him without you."

Catherine shook her head. "No, you should go. He needs one of us."

He wasn't going to her fight her. Until both his wife and son were home safe, sound, and healthy, he would do anything she asked of him.

"I'll have the labor and delivery nurses come up here to start gettin' you prepped," Dr. Kennedy paused to look at his watch, "then I should see you two in the OR in about a half-hour."

Once the doctor left, Patrick stayed with Catherine for as long as he could. When the anesthesiologist came by to give her the epidural, both Patrick and Dessie nearly fainted after seeing the size of the needle going into her back. Thankfully she didn't see it coming, but it stung them to see it pierce through her skin like a hot knife through butter.

She handed Patrick her glasses and rings just before being wheeled away with Dessie following close behind. Clenching her wedding band and engagement rings tightly in his fist, Patrick headed to the waiting room all the while praying to a God he wasn't sure he even believed in anymore. Life was finally looking up for Catherine and Dessie; it didn't seem fair to worry about losing a child weighing heavily on their broken souls.

Patrick found Olivia in the otherwise empty room, flipping through the pages of a tabloid. She tossed it back onto the table when he plopped into the chair beside her. Not a single word was spoken between the two. There was nothing that needed to be said. Olivia knew Catherine was okay based on the lack of outward emotion by her husband. If things were bad, he would've been a mess.

Just over an hour later, they scrambled to their feet as Dessie walked in.

He burst into a wide smile, tears rimming his eyes. "It's a boy!"


Catherine was flipping through the channels on the television when movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She sat up a little straighter, expecting her visitor to be Janna, her night nurse doing rounds.

It wasn't the perky, fresh out of school blonde.

"Visiting hours are over, Jimmy," she said. She hadn't seen him since she put a knife through his thigh muscle. "How did you even manage to get past the nurses?"

Jimmy stayed silent. He only adjusted his trousers before taking a seat in the chair Dessie occupied only an hour earlier. He leaned back, resting an ankle over the opposite knee. Catherine tensed as he gazed around the room. His focus fell on the monitor displaying her vitals.

"What are you doin' here? Come to smother me with a pillow? Tinker with my morphine drip so I overdose in my sleep?"

Jimmy wasn't in the mood to entertain her caustic attitude. Crossing his arms over his chest, he mildly snapped,

"I'm here because believe it or not, I still give a fuck about you, Catherine." Leaning forward, he covered his face with his hands, taking a breath. He interlocked his fingers and looked over at her. "When I heard what happened…scared the shite outta me. Made me realize I'm still in love with you despite everything over the last few months."

Catherine was taken by surprise. The last thing she expected was Jimmy showing up at the hospital in the first place, let alone his visit turning into a quasi-therapy session. The prospect of Jimmy opening up, telling her how he felt made her more uncomfortable than the staples in her abdomen did.

Ten years ago Catherine would have been jumping for joy to hear Jimmy say he was in love with her. Now she wished he would have held it in like every other self-respecting Irishman she knew.

For a split second, she considered pressing the button on the side of her bed to summon Janna so the no-nonsense nurse could tell Jimmy to get lost. This wasn't the conversation she wanted to have less than twenty-four hours after giving birth to her son ten weeks early, while her husband was forced to juggle work and taking care of the boys as she was stuck at Daisy Hill.

There was enough on her plate.

"You need to figure out how to not be in love with me, okay?"

"Ya know, you've been actin' like such a cunt ever since you got together with Dessie."

Catherine spat back, "Did you ever think that's because of the way you've treated me over the last decade? You treated me like shite, Jimmy. Utter shite. Honestly, you should be considering yourself lucky a knife to the leg was the only thing I did to you."

"And you should be considering yourself lucky I didn't have you fuckin' shot in the middle of the Falls Road when you showed your face in Belfast."

"I was only in Belfast because we were burying Seamus. You remember Seamus, don't ya? He's the lad you had killed for no bloody reason-"

"Lower your goddamn voice," he scolded, looking over his shoulder to make sure none of the nurses at the nurse's station heard her. "And you're wrong. I didn't have him... What I told you at the funeral is the truth, so it is. He was never supposed to get hurt, just wanted to give him a wee scare."

"Well, excuse me for not believin' you."

Jimmy couldn't blame her for being skeptical. There were far too many times in the past he lied to her, it was karma that the one time he was telling the truth she didn't have faith. Falling back into the chair, he tried to steady his heart rate. Starting a fight wasn't the reason why he came to visit Catherine—he wanted to mend the past.

"How are you feelin'? How's the baby? Eamonn? How's Eamonn doin'?"

"I feel like I just my belly sliced open, and they told me Danny's doin' well in the NICU. As for Eamonn, I'm not sure. Dessie said it scared the shite outta him when I had the first seizure in A and E…he doesn't wanna come to see me."

Hearing the raw melancholy in Catherine's voice over Eamonn's refusal to visit broke Jimmy's heart. Just hearing about what happened nearly made him lose his mind in fright; he couldn't even begin to imagine how terrifying it must have been to see it. For the first time, Jimmy felt for Dessie.

Reaching out, he gently caressed her hand. Though he had been absent through most of her pregnancy with Eamonn, Jimmy was never more thankful it had gone smoothly with zero complications.

"Fi said your ma is stayin' at your place with the boys so I'm surprised your husband isn't here," he noted condescendingly.

After he gave Dessie half a Glasgow smile, Catherine knew to engage in any sort of interaction with Jimmy probably wasn't the best of ideas. But her hormones were still out of whack and she was still trying to make sense of the last day. Dessie, too, was having a hard time coming to terms with what happened. When Danny's doctor in the NICU stressed the first forty-eight hours were critical for the newborn, Dessie wanted to avoid the hospital altogether because he wasn't sure if he wanted to be there if things took a turn for the worst.

It upset Catherine beyond all belief at how selfish she thought Dessie was being. She was just as scared as he was, but she didn't have the option of avoiding reality. With everything piling on top of her and no one there to unload on, having Jimmy beside her suddenly didn't seem so bad.

"He blames me," she said, picking a loose thread on her blanket. "We got into a wee row about how I wasn't takin' care of myself, and how if I had, this never would've happened. It's complete shite because he'd say I needed to slow down, and then he'd pile more work on me. Maybe it was my fault…I easily could've said no-"

"Don't you for a second blame yourself, Catherine. You had two perfectly healthy pregnancies before. No one would've guessed this one would be so complicated."

Catherine pursed her lips and nodded. "To be fair, the circumstances were a lot different then. I didn't have anywhere the same stress as I do now because all I was doin' was workin' at the law firm in Andytown. And Dessie helped me way more than Darragh ever did."

"You, a chuisle, deserved to do nothin' but put your feet up and be waited on hand and foot."

"…Says the man who had me runnin' all over Norn Iron when he found out I was pregnant. Seriously, what are you doin' here, Jimmy? We both utterly hate one another right now."

Careful not to tangle and tug on the IV lines coming out of her arm and hand, Jimmy curled his fingers around hers. "I just wanted to see you. And I wanted to apologize for what I did to you and Dessie."

"Do you have cancer or somethin'?" Jimmy dying of some sort of illness seemed like the only logical explanation to Catherine as to why he would show up to not only profess his love to her but also apologize for terrorizing her and Dessie. "You're high then. You've gotta be."

"No! I'm not…why would you even think that?"

"Because you never feel about bad about anything you've done, let alone apologize."

Jimmy thought that was a little unfair. There had been times in the past when he did genuinely apologize. It took him a little bit to come around and realize what he had done was wrong, but all that mattered to him was that he acknowledged his wrongdoings. Why wasn't that good enough for Catherine?

"That's not fuckin' true and you know it," he huffed. "Look, you have no idea the kind of pressure I've been under since the brilliant idea of mergin' everyone together. All of it has fallen on my shoulders and I snapped when I put two and two together and realized you poached Misha right out from under me. A heads up would've been nice. I get why you went for Misha, but what I can't figure out is why you tried to have me excommunicated. Was it your idea? Or was it Dessie's?"

Staring straight into Jimmy's icy blue eyes, Catherine felt no fear despite the heart monitor saying otherwise. She wanted to rip off the electrodes stuck to her chest to silence the quickening beeps. Doing so would only alert the nurses.

Jimmy assured, "You and Dessie don't fall under my command anymore so you have nothin' to worry about in tellin' me the truth."

"Bullshit. You nearly took our lives once. Who's to say you wouldn't try again?"

"It was him, wasn't it? Dessie approached you after you were promoted, didn't he?"

Catherine reminded herself Jimmy was too smart to go after Dessie now, considering ONH established themselves as a legitimate organization and most other paramilitaries knew Dessie was chief of staff. Offing him would upset the relative peace that seemed to be settling since Seamus' funeral. However, that didn't mean Jimmy and the Kings wouldn't still try to force Catherine and Dessie out of Ireland.

If there was a lesson Catherine learned after she stabbed Jimmy, it was that she was untouchable. Jimmy didn't have it him to put her six feet under, and none of his men dared to cross him and do it themselves. To protect Dessie, she decided to take the fall.

She lied, "It was my idea. I approached him."

"Why the fuck would you do that to me?" hissed Jimmy. He shot up out of the chair and moved to sit on the bed. "After everything I bloody did for you, you tried to push me out of the position I fuckin' busted my ass for."

Catherine glanced over his shoulder to see if any of the nurses were paying attention to her room. They weren't. She slyly twisted her finger around one of the wires connected to an electrode on her chest. If he started to lose his temper, she would disconnect it.

"It was nothin' personal, Jimmy. We wanted to topple the Kings, but for them to fall, you needed to fall as well. Getting through you was the only way we could get to 'em. If it were a successful operation, I purposed to bring you back for nomination into the Executive, but there was a vote and it was unanimous on keepin' you out of the new project altogether. They feel you're too…too much of a liability."

"So youse think I'm unhinged, huh?" Jimmy asked self-deprecatingly. "A loose cannon. Is that how you feel, too? Is that why you won't be with me or let me see Eamonn?"

Catherine was speechless. She had been telling him that for over five years and yet he still failed to grasp it. The utter lack of self-awareness he possessed left her in disbelief.

She nodded.

"I can change, ya know that, right?"

"No. You can't." Catherine was startled when her automatic blood pressure cuff turned on, tightening around her bicep. "I'll give you credit for tryin' because I know you really did after Darragh died, but this is just who you are."

Jimmy stayed calm, even though he could feel himself starting to become agitated with every word Catherine spoke. She was wrong—this wasn't who he was. This was who he became after his tour in south Armagh as a doe-eyed British army soldier and then seeing combat during the Falkland's war.

"Because I can't fuckin' move on. Being here is just a constant goddamn reminder of what was. And I fuckin' hate Dessie because he's the personification of the hell I went through durin' my tour in south Armagh. I didn't think I was gonna make it outta there alive and it would be my fuckin' countrymen to kill me."

Hearing Jimmy open up about his time in the military shocked Catherine to the core. He buried those four years so deep into his past it would take a metric ton of Semtex to unearth it.

"Runaway with me, Catherine. You and Eamonn, runaway with me. We can go to Moscow or—or Berlin. I know how much you love Germany, and you can speak Russian so the transition wouldn't be so rough."

"Okay, now you've gone bloody mad. I can't run away to Russia or Germany with you and Eamonn."

"Why not? What's stoppin' you?"

Jimmy cupped her jaw, gliding his thumb along her cheekbone. She didn't dare slap his hand away as the last thing she wanted to do was upset him when he was clearly going through some sort of psychotic break.

"Maybe because I have Sean, who I can't leave behind. I also have wee Danny, who I haven't even seen yet," she held up her left hand, showing off her wedding band and engagement ring, "my third and final reason is Dessie. When I said 'till death do we part' I meant it."

"We'll bring Sean with. Dessie'll be fine here with Danny."

Catherine started to see stars as the machine monitoring her vitals began buzzing loudly to draw attention. Before Catherine had a chance to figure out what caused the bells and whistles, Janna came rushing in.

"I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to cut your visit short," Janna said to Catherine. The bubbly nurse in salmon-colored scrubs unlocked a drawer of the medication cart in the room, grabbing a vial and syringe. After measuring out a dose, she started flushing it through the catheter in Catherine's hand. She scolded, "You've had a very eventful twenty-four hours, Mrs. Dennehy. Can't be gettin' yourself all excited now."

"She's right, Mrs. Dennehy," Jimmy mocked. "You should listen to her." Getting off the bed, he kissed her forehead. "I'll swing by in a couple'a days, a chuisle. Give Eamonn my love."