The bar takes longer to reach than geography suggests: three more embraces from women who’d been peripheral friends at best, two men whose faces she recognizes but can’t place offering to buy her drinks she doesn’t want, and a gauntlet of questions she parries with the skill of someone who’s made deflection an art form. “London’s grand, yeah, keeps me busy.” “The tech sector, consulting mostly, deadly boring to explain at a party.” “No, no one serious, you know myself.” Each answer calibrated to satisfy without revealing, to seem open while remaining entirely closed.
She’s aware of Deirdre tracking her progress from the far corner, that perpetual smile somehow conveying both welcome and challenge. Caoimhe deliberately doesn’t meet her eyes. Not yet. That confrontation requires fortification.
The bartender pours her Redbreast 12 without comment. She wraps both hands around the glass, letting its weight anchor her, and finally allows herself to properly scan the room. Brendan’s still watching, half-hidden behind a couple she vaguely recognizes from the debate society. There’s something different about him, beyond the grey in his hair. A softness around the edges that wasn’t there before, or maybe a hardness worn away. He’s holding his pint like a shield.
In the darkest corner, almost invisible, a woman with severe dark hair sits utterly still, her eyes moving constantly. Caoimhe doesn’t recognize her, which is odd: the reunion committee had been militant about verification. Gate-crasher? Unlikely. Someone’s plus-one? The woman’s isolation suggests otherwise.
And there, by the fireplace, broad shoulders and calloused hands wrapped around a pint glass. Their eyes meet for half a second before he looks away, and something in Caoimhe’s chest twists unexpectedly.
She takes a long swallow of whiskey and reminds herself she’s only staying an hour.
She navigates toward the bar with practiced efficiency. Accepting a hug from someone whose name she’s forgotten, deflecting a question about London with a self-deprecating joke about the weather, her body angled always toward escape routes while her voice projects the easy confidence of someone who’s conquered the world beyond this room. The whiskey she orders is expensive enough to signal success, neat enough to signal she’s not here to lose control.
The bartender, young, competent, blessedly disinterested in conversation, pours with the precision of someone who’s worked enough reunions to recognize the walking wounded. Caoimhe slides a tenner across the scarred wood and doesn’t wait for change.
She positions herself with her back to the wall, a trick learned in boardrooms where showing your back meant showing weakness. From here she can see the entire room without appearing to watch anyone in particular. The whiskey burns pleasantly, warmth spreading through her chest, loosening the knot of tension she’s been carrying since she stepped off the Luas.
Around her, the noise swells: laughter with edges of competition, voices raised to prove points that stopped mattering a decade ago, the desperate gaiety of people trying to convince themselves they’ve made the right choices.
From her position, Caoimhe’s gaze snags on faces she half-remembers, names hovering just out of reach like words in a language she used to speak fluently. There’s the woman who’d been brilliant at economics, now apparently brilliant at something involving blockchain: the enthusiasm in her gestures suggests she’s explaining it to someone who doesn’t care. A cluster of former rugby players have thickened around the middle but not in their certainty, their voices still carrying that particular timbre of men who peaked at twenty-two and haven’t noticed yet.
And there. Of course it is. Still luminous, still wearing pearls like they’re casual, still making genuine interest look effortless. Caoimhe takes a longer drink than intended.
The music swells, a reel that demands foot-tapping, and Caoimhe positions herself near the musicians with strategic precision, close enough that conversation becomes optional, distant enough from the bar that she won’t seem to be hiding. The fiddle player’s eyes are closed in concentration, and she envies that absorption, that ability to disappear into something pure while surrounded by people performing their life choices.
Caoimhe’s hand rises in reluctant acknowledgment, her smile calibrated to suggest warmth without invitation: but Deirdre’s already navigating toward her with the determination of someone who genuinely believes all conflicts are simply misunderstandings waiting to be resolved. There’s no malice in it, which somehow makes it worse. Caoimhe takes a fortifying sip of wine and braces for the inevitable hug.
The hug happens before Caoimhe can deploy a defensive handshake, Deirdre’s cashmere wrap soft against her cheek, some expensive perfume that probably costs more than Caoimhe’s flight from London, and the embrace is warm, genuine, completely oblivious to the fact that Caoimhe’s spine has gone rigid as rebar. When Deirdre pulls back, she keeps hold of Caoimhe’s shoulders like they’re old friends reuniting rather than university acquaintances who moved in entirely different orbits.
“You look absolutely incredible,” Deirdre says, and the terrible thing is she means it, her eyes scanning Caoimhe’s face with what appears to be actual delight. “London’s clearly treating you well. I’ve been following your career. That piece in the Financial Times about disrupting legacy systems? Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”
Of course she’s been following. Of course she remembers. Deirdre O’Malley-Ashford probably has a color-coded system for tracking everyone she’s ever met, organized by potential usefulness and indexed by birthday.
“Thanks,” Caoimhe manages, aiming for gracious and landing somewhere near suspicious. “You’re looking well yourself.”
It’s an understatement. Deirdre’s practically glowing with that particular radiance that comes from never having worried about rent, never having calculated whether she can afford both heating and groceries, never having had to charm her way past gatekeepers because the gates simply opened at her approach. Her honey-blonde hair catches the firelight like something from a shampoo advert, and her smile suggests she’s genuinely thrilled to be here, at a university reunion in a pub, as if this is exactly where she wants to be rather than some charitable obligation she’s ticking off before returning to whatever rarefied existence she actually inhabits.
“I’ve been hoping to run into you,” Deirdre continues, and Caoimhe’s internal alarm system starts blaring. Nothing good ever follows that particular preamble.
“I’ve been meaning to reach out for months,” Deirdre says, releasing Caoimhe but maintaining that earnest eye contact that suggests she’s actually interested in the answer to her next question. “I’m launching a social enterprise initiative, tech education for disadvantaged communities, and your name kept coming up in every conversation. You’re exactly the kind of person we need.”
Of course I am, Caoimhe thinks, her smile fixed in place. The scholarship girl made good. The perfect poster child for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, now available to validate your charitable impulses.
“That sounds fascinating,” Caoimhe says, which is what you say when you mean absolutely not but haven’t figured out the polite exit yet. “Though I’m based in London now, so I’m not sure how much help I’d be.”
“Oh, but that’s perfect! International perspective, connections to UK funding streams.”We should grab coffee while you’re in town. I’d love to pick your brain.”
Pick your brain. As if Caoimhe’s expertise is just lying there, available for harvesting by anyone with good intentions and family money.
Caoimhe accepts the hug with the stiffness of someone tolerating a necessary business greeting, her body language screaming this is a professional courtesy, not an invitation to intimacy. The embrace lasts precisely two seconds, she’s counted, and brings with it a cloud of expensive perfume, something French and understated that probably costs more than her flight from London. The scent clings to her own cheaper blazer like an accusation.
Over Deirdre’s cashmere-clad shoulder, she catches sight of Killian O’Rourke standing by the fireplace, pint in hand, watching this interaction with an expression she can’t quite read. His eyes meet hers for a fraction of a second before he looks away, and something in her chest does an inconvenient flutter she absolutely refuses to acknowledge.
The hand on her arm feels like a claim being staked, ownership asserted through touch, and Caoimhe’s instinct is to shake it off with the same dismissive energy she’d use on a persistent LinkedIn recruiter. But they’re being watched, she can feel eyes tracking this interaction, old classmates mentally updating their scorecards of who’s thriving and who’s merely surviving, so she holds still, trapped by the tyranny of appearing gracious.
The words land like stones in still water, each one rippling outward with implications Caoimhe doesn’t want to examine: that Deirdre’s been thinking about her, that she’s somehow become a solution to problems she didn’t create, that her hard-won expertise is being conscripted into someone else’s redemption narrative, the kind of noblesse oblige project that looks stunning in foundation newsletters.
Deirdre’s hand touches Caoimhe’s arm with the casual confidence of someone who’s never been rejected, and Caoimhe feels the familiar heat rising in her chest. Not quite anger, not quite panic, something more complicated that tastes like old resentments dressed in new clothes. “I’ve been thinking about you constantly since I heard you were coming,” Deirdre says, her honey-blonde waves catching the candlelight like something from a shampoo advert, “there’s this absolutely brilliant opportunity with the foundation, community tech hubs in underserved areas, and you’d be perfect to consult on the structure.”
The words tumble out with that breathless enthusiasm Deirdre’s always had, the kind that assumes the world will rearrange itself to accommodate her vision because it always has before. She’s leaning in now, close enough that Caoimhe can smell her perfume, something French and expensive that probably costs more than Caoimhe’s first month’s rent in that bedsit in Rathmines all those years ago, and her blue eyes are shining with what appears to be genuine excitement.
“We’ve got the funding approved,” Deirdre continues, her grip on Caoimhe’s arm tightening slightly, as if physical contact might transfer her conviction, “and the board is completely on board, but what we need is someone who actually understands the technology side, someone who knows what these communities actually need rather than what we think they need, you know?”
The irony isn’t lost on Caoimhe: that Deirdre recognizes the problem of assumptions while making a spectacular one of her own, that of course Caoimhe would want to help, that privilege and expertise should naturally align for the greater good like some sort of cosmic justice. As if Caoimhe’s hard-won knowledge exists to absolve Deirdre’s inherited guilt, to transform family money into something that feels earned.
The presumption lands like a slap disguised as a gift, and Caoimhe feels her shoulders tense as she recognizes the familiar pattern of Deirdre’s world, where problems get solved by throwing money and good intentions at them, where someone like Caoimhe becomes a token of authenticity, the girl who clawed her way up now expected to validate the charitable impulses of those born at the summit.
“That’s very flattering,” Caoimhe says, her voice carefully neutral even as her mind races through a dozen cutting responses, each one perfectly calibrated to wound. But something stops her: maybe exhaustion, maybe the three years of therapy she’d actually attended before her schedule made it impossible, maybe just the bone-deep weariness of carrying resentments that Deirdre doesn’t even know exist.
Deirdre’s still talking, oblivious to the tension radiating from Caoimhe’s body, something about impact assessments and sustainable models, her enthusiasm like a golden retriever that hasn’t learned not everyone wants to be jumped on. The cashmere cardigan, the pearl earrings, the assumption that Caoimhe’s expertise exists to be borrowed like a book from a library: it’s all so perfectly, maddeningly Deirdre.
The scene across the room sharpens into uncomfortable focus. Caoimhe watches him lean into the attention like someone who’s forgotten what it feels like to be seen as anything other than a caregiver, a carpenter, a son with obligations. The spike of feeling in her chest is purely observational, she tells herself, merely noting how transparent the whole performance is, how Roisin’s warmth seems calculated even in its apparent spontaneity.
The feeling twisting through her ribcage is purely academic interest in human behavior patterns, nothing more. She’s simply observing how Roisin touches his forearm when she laughs, how Killian’s shoulders drop from their perpetual defensive hunch, how pathetically easy it is to manipulate someone starved for uncomplicated affection. That’s all. Strategic observation. Definitely not the hot, uncomfortable clench of wanting something she has no right to want.
Deirdre’s voice becomes pleasant static, something about stakeholder engagement and community partnerships: all those bloodless corporate phrases Caoimhe usually wields like weapons, now meaningless because across the room Roisin’s copper curls catch firelight as she leans closer to Killian, and Caoimhe’s chest tightens with something that absolutely isn’t jealousy, because she doesn’t do jealousy, doesn’t do wanting, doesn’t do any of this.
Caoimhe’s smile feels like armor she’s forgotten how to remove: she nods at Deirdre’s pitch about “leveraging synergies between private sector efficiency and social good,” words that should mean something but slide past her like water off glass, because she’s watching Killian O’Rourke across the room and remembering the summer he taught her to read tide patterns, back when she still believed belonging to a place wasn’t the same as being trapped by it.
He’s aged into his face properly, she thinks, the way men are allowed to. Those silver threads at his temples suggesting wisdom rather than decline, the lines around his eyes evidence of laughter rather than exhaustion. She catches herself cataloging these details like a weakness, like noticing makes her vulnerable to something she’s spent twelve years outrunning.
“So what do you think?” Deirdre’s expectant expression suggests this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.
“Mmm,” Caoimhe manages, taking a sip that buys her three seconds. “It’s certainly ambitious.”
The diplomatic non-answer is reflex, the same tone she uses when tech bros pitch blockchain solutions to problems that don’t exist. Deirdre’s face does something complicated, not quite disappointment, more like recognition that she’s being managed rather than engaged with, and Caoimhe feels a flicker of something that might be shame if she let herself examine it too closely.
Killian laughs at something Roisin says, a genuine sound that carries across the room’s din, and Caoimhe realizes with uncomfortable clarity that she remembers exactly what that laugh sounds like at close range, how it rumbled in his chest that last night before she left, when they’d promised to stay in touch and both knew they were lying.
“I should,” she gestures vaguely toward the bar, toward anywhere that isn’t here, watching Deirdre’s careful optimism curdle into polite dismissal.
“Of course,” Deirdre says, smile still intact but cooler now, professional. “We’ll catch up later.”
The gin tastes like London, expensive, precise, utterly joyless. Each sip carries notes of juniper and elderflower that some mixologist probably agonized over, the kind of drink you order to signal you’ve arrived, that you know the difference between good and merely adequate. Nothing like the naggin of vodka she and Killian passed between them on Sandymount Strand that last August, the burn in her throat tasting like freedom and stupidity in equal measure.
She’s been curating herself for so long that she’s not entirely sure what’s performance and what’s person anymore. Does she actually prefer craft cocktails, or has she just convinced herself that preference is the same as sophistication?
The thought arrives with the gin’s bitter finish: what if she’s spent twelve years running from a self she never bothered to understand, and the woman she’s built in its place is just an expensive mistake with good credit and no forwarding address?
Her eyes catalog the room’s geometry of failure and compromise, Brendan’s rumpled blazer that doesn’t quite fit his broader shoulders, suggesting weight gained from stress or American portion sizes; the way Niamh sits with her back to the corner like someone expecting ambush; Roisin’s hand resting just a moment too long on Killian’s forearm, a territorial claim disguised as friendly warmth. Each person a mirror reflecting some version of the life Caoimhe rejected or the one she’s terrified she’s actually living. Deirdre glides past in cashmere that probably costs more than Brendan’s monthly rent, and Caoimhe feels the old resentment flare: not at the wealth itself, but at how effortlessly it sits on her, how Deirdre never had to sharpen herself into a weapon just to claim space at the table.
The transformation happens in layers she can almost track: first the mental spreadsheet, calculating Brendan’s tech salary against Dublin’s cost of living, Niamh’s studio rent from the paint under her fingernails, Killian’s income from the quality of his boots. Then the secondary assessment: who’s useful, who’s a liability, who might open doors or slam them shut. The corporate autopsy complete before she’s even tasted her gin, and somewhere beneath her sternum, a small voice that sounds distressingly like her sister asks: when did you become this?
The validation she’s hunting for remains elusive, replaced by a growing vertigo: because the faces around her look content in ways her six-figure salary and passport full of stamps can’t quite replicate, and the question she came here to answer, did I make the right choice?, is metastasizing into something more dangerous: what if success and failure are just different currencies, and she’s been calculating in the wrong denomination all along, mistaking motion for progress, distance for freedom?
Caoimhe watches Deirdre glide through the crowd like she’s hosting a garden party rather than attending a reunion, and the observation lands with an unfamiliar sting. Because Deirdre moves through the room touching arms and remembering not just names but children’s names, asking after someone’s mother’s hip surgery with the kind of specific recall that suggests she actually listened the last time, actually cared enough to file it away. The cashmere cardigan probably costs more than Caoimhe’s flight from London, but Deirdre wears it like it’s nothing, like money is just a tool rather than a scorecard, and when she laughs at someone’s joke the sound is unguarded, genuine, the kind of unselfconscious warmth Caoimhe trained herself out of years ago.
The worst part is that it’s not performance. Deirdre actually cares about these people, about their small triumphs and domestic dramas, and when she corners Caoimhe near the bar talking about “leveraging social capital for community impact,” her eyes light up with the unmistakable gleam of someone who’s actually thought this through, who’s done the research and run the numbers and isn’t just playing at purpose between charity galas.
Caoimhe’s instinct is to dismiss her as a privileged dilettante, to armor herself in cynicism and superior worldliness, but the defense feels suddenly petty, small, the intellectual equivalent of pulling pigtails. Because maybe (and this is the thought that makes her want another drink) maybe having resources and wanting to use them well isn’t the moral failing she needs it to be. Maybe Deirdre’s genuine warmth isn’t naivety but a kind of courage Caoimhe lost somewhere between Dublin and her corner office, the ability to care about people without constantly calculating the return on investment.
Brendan nurses his second pint and accepts what the evening has been trying to tell him since he arrived: that fifteen years is geological time in human terms, long enough for memories to erode and reform around the empty space he left. The few who recognize him at all do that squinting thing, like they’re trying to place an actor from a show they watched once, and their surprise feels less like “oh, Brendan!” and more like “oh, there was a Brendan, wasn’t there?” He mentions Boston and watches eyes glaze over mid-nod, because his American exile is less interesting than whoever’s getting divorced or whose mother-in-law moved in or which couple everyone knew would implode eventually.
The realization settles in his chest like badly-poured Guinness: you can’t abandon a community and expect it to hold your place like you’re just returning from holiday. He left too thoroughly, stayed away too long, and the Dublin he remembers doesn’t exist anymore. Or worse, it does exist, but he’s no longer part of the story it tells about itself.
Caoimhe watches Roisin work the room and recognizes a fellow performer, though their acts serve different purposes: where Caoimhe’s charm is armor designed to keep people at arm’s length, Roisin’s warmth is a net cast wide, pulling everyone close without discrimination or depth. She’s touching Killian’s forearm now while laughing at something he’s said, her copper curls catching the firelight, and there’s genuine affection in the gesture, which somehow makes it worse. Then she’s pivoting to Brendan, complimenting his glasses with identical enthusiasm, and Caoimhe sees both men straighten slightly, reading significance into attention that Roisin distributes like a particularly generous bartender. It’s not malicious, Caoimhe realizes with something almost like pity, Roisin simply hasn’t learned that you can’t collect people without eventually having to choose, that affection isn’t actually a renewable resource, that those small moments of connection she’s handing out so freely are being built into foundations that won’t hold weight.
Niamh’s cataloging faces with the systematic precision of someone whose survival depends on not being recognized. She’s already identified two people from Clare who might know the Fitzgerald family, calculated three exit routes, and positioned herself where the firelight doesn’t quite reach her face. But her hands betray her, paint-stained fingers drumming against her glass in rhythms that match the traditional tune playing. When someone mentions an art exhibition in Temple Bar, she goes completely still, a hare frozen in headlights. Her landscapes are gaining attention in exactly the circles where someone might recognize Doonbeg’s cliffs, Kilkee’s particular light. Success and exposure are the same thing now.
Killian stands with his shoulders against the stone wall like it’s the only thing holding him upright. His phone’s in his jacket pocket, volume turned to maximum in case the care facility rings, and he’s already checked it twice in ten minutes though he felt no vibration. The pint’s gone warm in his hand. When Roisin’s fingers brush his forearm, asking about his carpentry with what seems like genuine interest, he feels himself lean slightly toward the contact before catching himself, remembering that wanting anything beyond his mother’s comfort feels like betrayal.
Caoimhe watches the fracturing from her strategic position near the bar, cataloging the micro-expressions that betray everyone’s carefully maintained facades. The Pogues blare their beautiful, bitter duet and she sees Deirdre’s smile falter for half a second at “you’re a bum, you’re a punk”, interesting, that, while Brendan’s hand tightens around his pint glass at “the boys of the NYPD choir,” and she files that away too, evidence that his American adventure wasn’t the triumph his LinkedIn profile suggests.
The property talk grates like fingernails on slate. “We got in just before the market turned,” someone’s saying, and “the rental income covers the mortgage,” and Brendan’s nodding along but his eyes have gone flat, the particular deadness of someone doing arithmetic in their head and coming up short. He’s the only one, Caoimhe realizes with a jolt of unwelcome recognition, who’s actually moved backward on the ladder they all spent their twenties climbing. She should feel superior but instead she feels something uncomfortably close to kinship.
Across the room, that woman from the corner, Niamh something, she’d introduced herself with a firm handshake and immediate eye contact that lasted exactly two seconds, is checking her watch with the studied casualness of someone counting down to parole. Caoimhe knows that particular brand of exit planning. She’s been doing it herself since she walked in.
Then Roisin laughs, bright and carrying, and touches Killian’s arm, and Caoimhe watches him not pull away despite everything in his body language screaming exhaustion. She recognizes that too. The desperate mathematics of the touch-starved, weighing whether any human contact is worth the complications it brings. His shoulders stay against the wall but he’s leaning slightly toward Roisin’s warmth like a plant toward light, and Caoimhe has to look away from the naked need of it.
The whiskey loosens tongues and tightens grievances in equal measure. Caoimhe hears herself telling a story about a disastrous pitch in Frankfurt, the kind of calculated vulnerability she usually deploys in negotiations, except this time she’s not sure what she’s negotiating for. Across the room, Brendan’s Boston anecdotes are acquiring sharper edges (“the commute was brilliant, only ninety minutes each way if the T wasn’t fucked”) and someone laughs but it’s the wrong kind of laughter, pitying rather than sympathetic.
Niamh accepts a second glass of wine, which is one and a half glasses more than her usual limit, and finds herself studying the faces around her with less paranoia and more genuine curiosity. That’s dangerous. Curiosity leads to questions, questions lead to conversations, conversations lead to slips.
Meanwhile Killian’s forgotten to check his phone for the third time in an hour, and the guilt hits him like a wave, his mother, what if she’s wandered, what if the night nurse can’t find her, but Roisin’s hand is warm on his forearm and for just this moment he lets himself pretend he’s a man who’s allowed to stay.
The whiskey works its alchemy on carefully constructed defenses. Caoimhe hears her own laugh, the real one, not the boardroom version, escape when someone mentions their old economics lecturer’s toupee, and she’s horrified by how good it feels. Brendan’s anecdotes about Boston acquire a bitter edge he doesn’t intend, his “brilliant opportunities” sounding increasingly like justifications for a marriage that dissolved in a Cambridge apartment while his daughter learned to say “mom’s friend” instead of asking why daddy slept on the couch. Niamh accepts more wine, her usual hypervigilance softening dangerously as someone compliments her bracelet and she nearly mentions Clare before catching herself. Killian laughs at Roisin’s story and immediately checks his phone, joy feeling like theft from his mother’s diminishing present.
The fiddle’s first notes slice through the chatter like a summons. Caoimhe’s chest tightens. Around her, faces soften into dangerous vulnerability, eyes going distant with memory. She watches Niamh across the room go absolutely rigid, knuckles white on her wine glass, and thinks: we’re all haunted by different ghosts wearing the same song.
The whiskey amber catches firelight as he navigates the emotional wreckage between them. Caoimhe’s exit strategy dissolves with each step he takes. Too slow to be eager, too deliberate to be casual. She catalogues his approach: the carpenter’s economy of movement, the way grief has carved him into something solid rather than brittle, how he’s offering her a drink instead of asking if she wants one, understanding somehow that questions give her room to deflect while gestures demand response.
Caoimhe’s instinct is to take the exit, to deploy the arsenal of deflections she’s spent twelve years perfecting, but something in the dark-haired woman’s absolute stillness holds her attention like watching someone balance on a ledge. The woman’s face has gone carefully blank in a way Caoimhe recognizes from her own mirror. The expression of someone who’s learned to hide in plain sight, who’s made an art of being unremarkable. It’s the paint-stained fingers that don’t match the careful neutrality, the way they’re gripping that wine glass like it’s the only thing tethering her to the ground.
“Though I suppose,” Killian continues, his voice pitched low enough that only Caoimhe can hear, “everyone’s entitled to their secrets at a reunion. Wouldn’t be half as interesting otherwise.”
Before Caoimhe can parse whether that’s absolution or observation, Deirdre’s voice cuts through the ambient noise with the particular clarity of someone accustomed to being heard. “I know you’re busy, Caoimhe, but this project is exactly the sort of thing that needs someone who understands both worlds. Commerce and community.” She’s holding what appears to be a professionally printed folder, because of course she is, because Deirdre O’Malley-Ashford doesn’t do anything by halves, not even ambushing people at reunions.
The dark-haired woman uses the distraction to slip toward the far corner, moving with the practiced invisibility of someone who’s learned to navigate rooms without leaving impressions. Caoimhe tracks the movement peripherally while Deirdre continues her pitch, something about sustainable employment and local artisans, words that probably mean well but land like obligations Caoimhe’s spent her entire adult life avoiding.
“I’m not really the community type,” Caoimhe says, aiming for light dismissal, but Killian’s still standing there with that quiet attention, and somehow the deflection sounds hollow even to her own ears.
The Fitzgerald name hangs in the air like smoke, and Caoimhe watches the dark-haired woman’s face perform a masterclass in controlled panic. Her knuckles bleach white around the wine glass stem, and there’s a fractional movement toward the door: so slight most people would miss it, but Caoimhe’s spent years reading tells across negotiation tables.
“Tragic, really,” the oblivious speaker continues, warming to the gossip. “Drove straight off that cliff road near Doolin. They never even recovered the car properly. Just bits of metal and her handbag washed up weeks later.”
The woman’s eyes map the room with mechanical precision: three steps to the corridor, fifteen to the main stairs, the kitchen exit blocked by a cluster of former rugby players comparing their expanding waistlines. Caoimhe recognizes that mathematics of escape, has done it herself at countless corporate events when conversations turned too personal, when someone asked about family or roots or why she never came home.
Killian shifts his weight, a subtle movement that places his broad shoulders between the frozen woman and the gossip’s sightline. His voice drops to that low register again. “People talk too much at these things.”
But Deirdre has already descended, materializing in a cloud of Jo Malone and unshakeable optimism, her smile so genuine it makes Caoimhe’s teeth ache. “I know you’re only in Dublin briefly,” she says, arranging glossy brochures on the high-top table like a particularly well-meaning card sharp, “but I’ve followed your career, that piece in the Irish Times about digital transformation was brilliant, and what we’re building needs someone who understands systems, who can see past the sentiment to what actually creates change.”
The brochures multiply: smiling children, community gardens, buzzwords like “sustainable impact” and “grassroots empowerment.” Caoimhe recognizes the trap immediately: say yes and drown in someone else’s vision of redemption, say no and confirm every suspicion that she’s become precisely the soulless corporate mercenary who forgot where she came from.
Killian hasn’t moved away, and his presence beside her feels like ballast she didn’t ask for but can’t quite reject. “You don’t have to answer now,” he murmurs, his voice low enough to create intimacy she doesn’t want, but Deirdre’s already pivoting toward the small crowd gathering like seagulls around dropped chips: drawn by the scent of drama, of witnessing someone pinned. “Caoimhe’s considering partnering with the foundation,” Deirdre announces with the radiant certainty of someone who’s never learned that visibility feels like exposure to those who’ve spent years perfecting invisibility, and Caoimhe feels a dozen pairs of eyes land on her like accusations, measuring the distance between the girl who left and the woman who returned.
The whiskey scorches her throat, good, she needs the burn to anchor her, but Killian’s watching her with those sea-grey eyes that see too much, past the Burberry and the practiced indifference to something she thought she’d buried in Dublin soil twelve years ago. Across the room, paint-stained fingers release a wine glass that doesn’t shatter, just wobbles on the table, and the woman attached to them moves like smoke toward the exit. Caoimhe knows that particular species of flight: the kind where you calculate angles and crowd density, where every face becomes a potential witness. But Deirdre’s still waiting, luminous with expectation, and Brendan’s hovering at the periphery with his hopeful-lost-dog expression, and then Roisin materializes beside Killian, her hand landing on his forearm with the casual possession of prior claim, and Caoimhe sees the whole tableau suddenly: herself at the center, visible, pinned like a butterfly under glass while everyone watches to see if she’ll struggle.
Caoimhe’s mouth opens: she has the perfect dismissal ready, something cutting about how charity is just guilt with a tax deduction, how Deirdre’s social enterprise is probably just another way to feel good about inherited wealth. But then Killian shifts closer, ostensibly to let someone pass behind him, and his sleeve brushes her bare arm.
The words dissolve. Just: gone. Replaced by static and the sudden, mortifying awareness of every nerve ending in her skin.
She shivers. Actually shivers, like some Victorian heroine in a draft, and there’s no hiding it, not with him standing this close, not with those sea-grey eyes tracking the movement with something that looks dangerously like recognition.
Christ. Her body has apparently decided to stage a coup, to betray twelve years of careful control over one accidental touch from a man who smells like wood shavings and something clean, something honest that makes her London life feel like a costume she’s been wearing too long.
All she wants, and this is the terrifying part, the part that makes her want to bolt like that dark-haired artist currently calculating escape routes, is to lean into that warmth. To let those calloused carpenter’s hands carry some of the weight she’s been hauling alone since she left Dublin with nothing but rage and determination.
To stop performing competence for just one goddamn minute.
Which is exactly the kind of weakness that got her trapped in the first place. The kind that made her think she needed anyone, that belonging was worth the cost of being known.
Roisin’s hand is still on Killian’s arm, proprietary and bright with claim, and Deirdre’s waiting with that patient, maddening smile, and Caoimhe realizes she’s been silent too long, that her careful armor has cracked just enough for everyone to see the wanting underneath.
Brendan notices the dark-haired artist’s white knuckles around her wine glass and thinks about Aoife’s art teacher, how she gets that same intense focus when a student is struggling. He’s learned to approach scared things carefully, his daughter after nightmares, stray cats in their Boston apartment, his own reflection some mornings, and he moves toward her with that same gentle concern.
He’s already composing something kind to say about the tragedy of young death, about how Clare roads are treacherous in winter, about how grief ambushes us in crowded rooms. Something that will let her know she’s not alone in feeling overwhelmed, that he understands what it’s like to be drowning while everyone else seems to breathe just fine.
Completely missing the way her eyes track the exits like a cornered animal calculating odds.
Completely missing that her stillness isn’t shock but strategy, that her trembling isn’t sorrow but fury barely contained, that she’s not remembering someone dead but rather desperately trying to keep that death convincing enough to stay buried.
He’s three steps away when her gaze finally locks on his, and something in those blue eyes makes him falter.
Not grief. Something sharper. Something that looks almost like warning.
Niamh watches the tall American with glasses heading toward her and knows she should feel relief that someone’s misread her terror as grief, should lean into this cover story he’s handing her like a gift. But instead she feels the old rage rising. That familiar fire that burned down her first life. Even her panic gets rewritten into something more palatable, more feminine, more acceptable than the truth. That she burned her whole life down deliberately. That she’d strike the match again without hesitation. That Niamh Fitzgerald deserved to die, needed to die, and this room full of well-meaning strangers would never understand the mathematics of survival, the cold calculus that sometimes requires you to kill yourself to finally live.
Roisin’s fingers press into Killian’s bicep and she’s already spinning the narrative where she’s the heroine, protecting this lovely damaged man from a woman who’ll chew him up like London chewed her up. It’s practically a public service, really, steering him toward someone who actually knows how to stay, how to care, how to be grateful for a good man’s attention instead of treating it like an inconvenience.
Deirdre’s voice penetrates her spiral (something about “leveraging resources” and “community-centered design”) and Caoimhe realizes with horror that she’s expected to respond, that everyone’s watching this little performance, waiting to see if the prodigal daughter will deign to help the peasants now that she’s made it. The words taste like ash before she even speaks them: “It sounds fascinating, Deirdre. Really. Can we discuss specifics later?”
The calculation happens in microseconds, the way it always does when she’s cornered in a negotiation: Killian knows something, or thinks he does, and the way he’s looking at her, not with pity, which she could weaponize, but with that infuriating gentleness, suggests he’s already decided she needs saving. Her sister Siobhan must have said something, probably framed it as concern, the way she always does when she’s really just gathering ammunition for the next family guilt trip. Or worse, it’s that bloody Times profile where the journalist kept pushing about “work-life balance” until Caoimhe had snapped something about sleep being for people without ambition, a quote that had seemed fierce in the moment and looked increasingly unhinged in print.
She forces herself to hold his gaze for exactly three seconds, long enough to seem confident, not long enough to invite further conversation, and catalogs her exit strategies with the same precision she’d use for extracting herself from a failing pitch meeting. The toilets are past the bar, which means navigating the crowd but also a legitimate excuse to disappear. The smoking area requires going downstairs, more witnesses, but the cold might shock some sense back into her. Or she could just brazen it out, deploy the armor of competence she’s spent twelve years polishing to a mirror shine, make some cutting remark about how Dublin never changes and neither do the men who think women need their understanding.
But Deirdre’s still talking, something about “impact metrics” and “stakeholder engagement,” and the weight of expectation presses down like the low ceiling beams, and Killian’s still standing there with those carpenter’s hands loose at his sides like he’s got all the time in the world, like he hasn’t already decided she’s the girl who ran away playing dress-up in expensive clothes.
Across the room, Brendan’s thumb hovers over his phone screen, already pulling up search results for “Niamh Fitzgerald Clare car accident,” his software architect’s brain organizing information into patterns (dates, locations, surviving family members) the same way he’d map dependencies in a codebase. He’s aware he’s doing the thing Maeve used to criticize, retreating into research when he should be present, but information feels safer than improvisation. The dark-haired artist’s shoulders have gone rigid, her knuckles white around the wine glass stem, and he catalogs these details with the observational skills he’s honed from fifteen years of reading Aoife’s unspoken distress signals, the way his daughter’s silence before a meltdown has its own texture.
But he’s mapping the wrong data set entirely, mistaking paralysis for the contemplative stillness of someone processing grief, already composing his sympathetic opening line about loss and how art helps us metabolize tragedy. He doesn’t notice how her eyes aren’t distant but calculating, measuring exits, or how she’s positioned herself with her back to the corner like someone expecting ambush rather than conversation.
Deirdre’s hands paint architecture in the air, solar panels catching Dublin light, commercial kitchens where dignity gets served alongside employment, and she’s riding the energy she mistakes for engagement rather than the room holding its breath before detonation. She’s never had a good idea dismissed, not really, not when O’Malley-Ashford backing turns suggestions into inevitabilities, so she doesn’t recognize how Caoimhe’s spine has gone rigid, how her smile has sharpened into something her Trinity debating opponents used to call “the guillotine face,” the expression that preceded her most surgical rhetorical evisceration. Deirdre leans forward, warming to her theme about leveraging privilege for systemic change, completely missing how Caoimhe’s fingers have curled into her palms, nails pressing crescents into expensive moisturizer.
His hand lifts slightly, an aborted gesture toward her elbow, and Caoimhe’s entire nervous system screams trap: this kindness that assumes she needs steadying, this recognition that strips away her London veneer, this man who remembers who she was before she learned to be someone else. She should step back. She doesn’t. The paralysis feels like choice until she realizes it’s terror.
Roisin’s teacher-trained eye catalogues the entire scene in one practiced sweep. And she moves with the fluid certainty of someone who’s defused a hundred playground standoffs, already smiling her warmest smile, already angling toward Killian because complicated women are exhausting but lonely carpenters are manageable, already positioning herself as the easy answer to whatever messy question is forming in the charged air between him and the woman who looks ready to shatter.
The phone’s blue light catches Niamh’s peripheral vision like a warning flare, and her fingers contract around the wine glass stem. Not enough to break it, she’s too controlled for that, but enough that the crystal protests with a sound only she can hear. Brendan’s thumb moves across the screen with the purposeful scrolling of someone who’s found what he’s looking for, and she knows exactly what he’s reading: Clare woman, 28, killed in single-vehicle collision on the coast road. Niamh Fitzgerald, daughter of prominent local family, pronounced dead at scene. Funeral private.
She’d written half of it herself, fed the details to a journalist she’d slept with twice and manipulated perfectly. The photograph they’d used was from her cousin’s wedding, her hair longer then, falling past her shoulders instead of the severe bob she wears now. Her smile in that image had been genuine because she hadn’t yet understood what her family expected her to become.
The response forms in her mind like a painting she’s sketched a hundred times: distant sympathy, the kind everyone performs for tragedies that don’t touch them personally. Terrible thing, that. I think I might have seen her work at a gallery opening once? Vague enough to explain any resemblance someone might notice, specific enough to sound authentic. She’ll furrow her brow in that universal expression of trying to remember, shake her head, take a sip of wine to punctuate the moment’s passing.
But Brendan is turning toward her now, phone extended like an offering or an accusation, and the nearest exit is blocked by a cluster of former classmates comparing mortgage rates. The second exit requires passing directly through Deirdre’s circle, and she can’t risk the attention. Her escape routes are closing like gallery doors at closing time, and she hasn’t even begun her performance yet.
Caoimhe feels Deirdre’s expectant gaze like a spotlight trained on a defendant, and the silence stretches long enough that she can hear the fire crackling in the grate behind her. Everyone is waiting for her response: she can sense it in the way conversations have quieted, the way even the bartender has paused mid-pour. Accepting would mean admitting Dublin still has a claim on her, that her London success isn’t sufficient armor against the girl she used to be, the one who wore secondhand clothes and scholarship desperation like a uniform.
So she reaches for the cruelty that’s always protected her, the sharp tongue that’s gotten her through boardroom negotiations and investor meetings, already forming the words that will reestablish the distance she needs. Something about charity projects and playing at purpose, about how some people have to actually work for their accomplishments. The syllables are arranging themselves with surgical precision, designed to cut clean and deep.
She’s unaware that Killian is still standing close enough to hear every word, his sea-grey eyes already beginning to shutter closed, and that Roisin is already moving to capitalize on whatever damage she’s about to inflict.
Roisin’s teaching instincts fire before conscious thought: that particular quality of silence that precedes a child’s meltdown or a staff meeting explosion. She clocks Caoimhe’s white-knuckled grip on her wine glass, the way Killian’s gone very still beside her like a man bracing for impact, and thinks: someone needs to defuse this before it detonates.
Her trajectory shifts mid-step, angling toward Killian with the practiced grace of someone who’s made an art of being exactly where she’s needed. The smile comes first followed by the light touch to his forearm that says I see you, you’re not alone here. She’s the buffer, the circuit-breaker, the soft place to land after whatever sharp-edged disaster that corporate woman is about to unleash.
Brendan’s thumb hovers over the search result for “Niamh Fitzgerald death County Clare,” thinking this is his opening. Shared knowledge, a conversation starter with the intriguing artist who seems so carefully alone. His American optimism about fresh starts blinds him to her rigid shoulders, the way her eyes measure the distance to the door. He doesn’t recognize the architecture of escape when he sees it, doesn’t understand that some people aren’t moving toward futures but fleeing pasts that refuse to stay buried.
Killian’s hand is already moving toward her elbow when Roisin materializes between them with her bright scarves and brighter smile. “Caoimhe O’Sullivan, as sharp as ever!” she laughs, defusing and claiming space simultaneously. “Killian, love, didn’t you promise to show me that photo of your mother’s new chair?” Her hand finds his arm with practiced ease.
Caoimhe’s laugh cuts through the conversational hum like breaking glass, and she feels everyone’s attention snap to her even as she’s already regretting the impulse: but she’s committed now, isn’t she? Always committed once she’s started, never learned to pull back, so she leans into it instead, gesturing with her wine glass in a way that’s just theatrical enough to seem careless, just controlled enough to avoid spilling. “That’s very generous, Deirdre, truly,” she says, and her Dublin accent flattens into the mid-Atlantic professional voice she uses to intimidate London executives, the one that cost her three years and considerable effort to perfect. “But I’m not really in the charity business. The word ‘charity’ lands with exactly the condescension she intended, drops into the space between them like a stone into still water, and she watches Deirdre’s perpetual smile freeze at the edges, watches the light dim slightly in those earnest blue eyes. There’s a collective intake of breath from the people near enough to hear, that particular silence that means someone’s crossed a line, and Caoimhe feels a hot rush of something that’s equal parts triumph and self-loathing. She’s good at this at finding the precise words that will wound while maintaining plausible deniability, at weaponizing her intelligence in ways that make her feel powerful and hollow simultaneously.
Deirdre’s smile doesn’t quite falter, which somehow makes it worse. “Of course,” she says, her voice still warm despite everything, still trying. “I just thought (well, your skills in negotiation and strategy would be invaluable for)”
“I’m sure you’ll find someone,” Caoimhe interrupts, already turning away, already scanning for an exit.
Roisin has been tracking Killian all evening with the instinct of someone who recognizes emotional availability at fifty paces, the way he stands slightly apart from groups, the careful way he nurses his whiskey, the flicker of longing when he watches others laugh, and she sees her opening the moment Caoimhe turns away from him. Poor man looks like he’s been slapped, standing there with his shoulders slightly hunched, that particular stillness of someone absorbing a blow they should have expected, and Roisin knows that posture intimately, knows the particular vulnerability of someone who’s just been rejected without quite being approached in the first place.
She glides over with practiced ease, her copper curls bouncing with deliberate vitality, and touches his arm with exactly the right pressure, friendly, warm, but with possibility underneath, the kind of touch that says I see you without demanding anything in return. “You look like you need saving from the corporate types,” she says, her voice pitched low and conspiratorial, her laugh like bells, deliberately positioning herself as his ally against Caoimhe’s sharp edges and expensive armor. She feels him respond to her warmth the way cold hands respond to a fire, unconscious and grateful, not seeing how Caoimhe’s eyes flick back toward them for just a fraction of a second (sharp, assessing, something that might be regret) before she forces her attention elsewhere with visible effort.
Brendan has been nursing his pint in the corner, trying to work up courage to join conversations, and when he overhears someone mention the Fitzgerald family, he seizes on it like a drowning man grabbing a rope. He approaches the woman with paint-stained fingers who’d reacted so strangely, his software engineer’s brain already pulling up the news articles he’d skimmed months ago about the accident in Clare. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Did you know the Fitzgerald family?” he asks, genuinely curious, his tone carefully neutral the way he’d learned to be in client meetings. He watches her face cycle through expressions too quickly to catalog, surprise, fear, calculation, forced neutrality, and he thinks maybe she’s just emotional about the tragedy, not realizing he’s just activated every alarm system in her carefully constructed defenses, not seeing how her knuckles have gone white around her wine glass.
The words land like a slap disguised as a caress. Caoimhe’s throat tightens. She recognizes this particular poison, the kind that lets the speaker claim innocence while everyone else hears the blade. She could laugh it off, could turn it into a joke, but Deirdre’s expression has shifted into something worse than anger: compassion. That look says I see you, I see how much this hurts, and Caoimhe would rather be despised than understood.
The room’s geometry has shifted like a kaleidoscope settling into a new pattern. The general din has dropped to a murmur, conversations suspended mid-sentence as attention redistributes itself toward the more compelling dramas, and then Michael O’Brien, always the peacemaker, always missing the room, hoists his pint skyward and bellows, “A toast! To old friends and new beginnings!” The sentiment lands with all the grace of a dropped plate, and Caoimhe watches her own hand lift her glass in automatic compliance, muscle memory from a thousand corporate dinners overriding her desire to flee, while her mind catalogs the exquisite irony: every person here is drinking to precisely the connections they’ve spent years trying to escape.
Deirdre’s smile (that perpetual, maddening smile that suggests the world is simply a series of delightful misunderstandings waiting to be cleared up) finally wavers at the edges. “I didn’t mean to offend,” she says, and the genuine hurt in her voice is somehow worse than anger would be, because it’s real, because Deirdre actually believes that good intentions should count for something, that privilege wielded gently is somehow not still privilege. “I thought, well, I’d heard you were brilliant at what you do, and I genuinely think we could accomplish something meaningful together.”
Caoimhe feels the victory curdle in her mouth, tastes the specific bitterness of having wounded someone who didn’t deserve it, not really, not beyond the crime of being born lucky and staying that way. She’s done this before, used her sharp edges to cut down people whose only real offense was trying to connect with her, and the pattern is so familiar it’s almost comforting, except it isn’t, not anymore, not when she can see herself from the outside like this, can recognize the defense mechanism for what it is.
“I’m sure you would,” Caoimhe hears herself say, the words emerging in that particular tone she’s perfected over years of corporate negotiations, the one that sounds almost agreeable while meaning absolutely nothing, a verbal escape hatch that commits to nothing while offending no one further. “Perhaps we could discuss it another time, when it’s less…” She gestures vaguely at the room, the noise, the chaos, offering the excuse of circumstances rather than her own carefully maintained walls.
Deirdre’s smile rebuilds itself, brick by determined brick, and Caoimhe feels simultaneously relieved and monstrous, which is, she supposes, becoming the theme of the evening.
Brendan, emboldened by what he mistakes for Niamh’s encouragement and the two whiskeys warming his blood, launches into the story with the enthusiasm of someone who’s finally found a conversational foothold. “I just read about it actually, terrible thing: the car went off the road near the Cliffs of Moher, burned completely, they could barely identify…” He trails off, realizing he’s describing a death at a reunion, but the damage is done.
Niamh’s wine glass trembles, just slightly, the Merlot catching the candlelight as it shivers against the rim. She’s nodding, making appropriate sympathetic noises, but her free hand has found the edge of the table and her knuckles are white. “These things happen,” she manages, and her accent is perfect now, carefully neutral, but there’s a sheen of sweat at her hairline that wasn’t there a moment ago.
Someone (Caoimhe can’t see who) raises a glass and calls out “To old friends and new beginnings!” and the room erupts in agreement, everyone grateful for the interruption, for the excuse to drink and move and not think too hard about the various small tragedies unfolding in the corners.
Caoimhe watches Deirdre’s face crumple, just for a second, just enough, and feels something ugly and victorious surge in her chest. There it is. Proof she’s human after all. But the triumph curdles immediately because now everyone’s staring, and Deirdre’s eyes are actually glistening, and Christ, she’s made a scene by refusing to make a scene.
“I just thought,” Deirdre tries again, voice smaller now, “that you’d understand what I’m trying to do. You always saw through the bullshit at university.”
The compliment lands like a slap. Caoimhe opens her mouth, to apologize, to deflect, she doesn’t even know, but nothing comes out. The silence stretches, damning, and she realizes with horror that she’s become exactly what she always accused Deirdre of being: someone who wields privilege as a weapon.
Brendan’s thumb hovers over the screen, about to enlarge a photograph of a young woman with paint-stained hands at an Ennis gallery opening. Niamh’s vision tunnels. The bathroom is twelve steps away, but moving now would be admission. She could fake a coughing fit, spill her wine: but the three others are already leaning in with that distinctly Irish hunger for tragedy-as-connection, and she realizes with crystalline horror that she’s about to be confronted with her own memorial photograph.
Declan Murphy, drunk, sentimental, and oblivious, thrust his glass skyward. “To old friends and new beginnings!” The toast rippled outward like a stone dropped in still water, glasses rising in automatic choreography. Niamh lifted hers to the girl she’d buried. Killian, to the mother vanishing by degrees. Caoimhe, to the promotion that felt like a noose. Brendan, to people who’d already forgotten him. Deirdre, to affection perpetually withheld. The irony hung thick as turf smoke, unacknowledged. Because naming it would demand the honesty they’d all left at the door.
The whiskey burns down Caoimhe’s throat like penance, like permission. Across the room, Killian’s head is bent toward Roisin’s copper curls, and his laugh carries over the traditional music bleeding from the speakers. Roisin’s hand touches his forearm, casual as breathing, and something hot and ugly twists in Caoimhe’s chest.
She sets the glass down too hard. The crack of crystal on wood satisfies something mean in her.
“Caoimhe. Deirdre is there, materializing like a cashmere-clad conscience, and that expression on her face (that gentle, understanding, pitying expression) makes Caoimhe’s teeth ache.
“I don’t need your family’s money or your guilt.”
The words come out louder than intended, sharp enough to slice through the fiddle music and the rumble of conversation. She watches heads turn, watches the ripple of attention spread outward like blood in water. Good. Let them look. Let them see she’s not the one who needs saving.
Deirdre stops mid-step, and for the first time tonight, her smile actually falters. Something real flickers across her face. “I was actually coming to apologize for earlier,” Deirdre says, her voice dropping to something private, something that makes the public nature of Caoimhe’s attack suddenly, sickeningly obvious. “I didn’t mean to,”
“Save the charity for your foundation galas.” Caoimhe hears herself talking over Deirdre, hears the cruelty in her own voice like she’s listening to a stranger. “I’m sure there’s a tax deduction in it somewhere.”
Three distinct gasps punctuate the silence that follows. Conversations die mid-sentence. Someone’s pint glass stops halfway to their mouth.
Across the room, Brendan is staring at her with an expression she can’t quite parse, confusion, certainly, but something else underneath. Disappointment, maybe.
She doesn’t look to see if Killian noticed.
Deirdre’s hand, which had been reaching out (not in pity, Caoimhe realizes with sickening clarity, but in genuine human connection) drops to her side. The smile doesn’t just falter; it crumbles, revealing something raw underneath. Hurt. Real, uncomplicated hurt.
“I wasn’t. She straightens her shoulders, and Caoimhe watches her rebuild that armor of graciousness in real time, brick by painful brick.”Of course. I apologize for bothering you.”
The words are perfectly polite. They’re also a door closing.
Around them, the silence has texture. Mrs. Brennan from the reunion committee has her hand pressed to her mouth. Two men Caoimhe vaguely recognizes from school have stopped mid-conversation, pints frozen in mid-air like some grotesque tableau. Even the fiddle player seems to have lost his place in the tune.
Deirdre turns away with the kind of dignity that makes Caoimhe feel about three inches tall, and suddenly the whiskey in her stomach feels less like courage and more like poison.
She’d wanted to wound someone. She’d succeeded.
The victory tastes like ash.
Across the room, Killian’s attention snaps toward the disturbance, his sea-grey eyes tracking the scene with an expression that shifts from puzzlement to something harder to read. Concern, perhaps. Or disappointment. Before Caoimhe can parse which cuts deeper, Roisin’s hand finds his forearm (a touch so practiced it might as well be choreographed) and murmurs something that draws his gaze back down to her upturned face.
The redirect is seamless. Efficient.
Near the bar, Brendan stands with a fresh pint halfway to his lips, forgotten. His brow furrows behind those wire-rimmed glasses as he watches the aftermath, clearly attempting to construct a narrative that makes sense of what he’s just witnessed. Why would someone eviscerate a woman who’d approached with open hands? His confusion is visible, earnest, and somehow makes everything worse.
The flush spreads from Deirdre’s cheeks to her throat, blotchy and unmistakable against the cream cashmere. Her mouth opens, closes. When she finally speaks, her voice carries that particular steadiness of someone refusing to break in public: “I hope whatever’s hurting you gets better, Caoimhe.”
She turns before the last syllable fades, spine straight as a riding crop, heading toward the ladies’ room through a crowd that parts instinctively. The dignity of her exit somehow makes Caoimhe’s victory taste like ash.
Niamh’s fingers tighten around her glass. The observation was meant as comfort, but it lands like interrogation. Outsider. The word echoes with implications. She calculates distances. Three steps to the door, five people blocking the path. Her prepared biography rises automatically to her lips, but Brendan’s earnest face makes lying feel heavier than usual. “Boston,” she manages, deflecting. “That must have been quite the adjustment, coming back.”
He’s still watching her with those kind eyes, waiting for her to continue the conversation like a normal person. Niamh forces herself to elaborate, the words tumbling out with practiced fluidity. “The teaching was grand, really, but I needed to be somewhere with more gallery opportunities, you know? Dublin’s where the serious collectors are.”
She takes a sip of wine to pause, to let the lie settle between them like sediment. Her mind catalogs the details even as she speaks them. Five years in Galway, secondary school art teacher, left last spring. She’ll need to remember this version if he mentions it later, if anyone mentions it later. The invented past is already calcifying into something she’ll have to defend.
“I had a few pieces in a group show at the Town Hall Theatre two years ago,” she continues, because stopping now would seem suspicious, wouldn’t it? “Landscapes, mostly. The west coast has such dramatic light.” That part, at least, rings true. She knows those cliffs, that light. She painted them from memory in this very flat, homesick for a place she can never safely return to.
Brendan nods, his expression unchanged. Still friendly, still open. “That’s grand,” he says simply. “I just meant I understand new beginnings. Starting over when you’re not twenty-two anymore, when everyone else seems settled.” He gestures vaguely at the room, at their former classmates deep in conversation about mortgages and school catchment areas. “It’s a bit daunting, isn’t it?”
The sincerity in his voice makes something twist in her chest. He wasn’t interrogating her. He was commiserating. She’s just buried herself under another layer of lies for no reason at all, and now she’ll have to maintain this Galway fiction indefinitely.
“Daunting,” she echoes, the word tasting like ash. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”
The panic has its own momentum now, carrying her past the point of plausibility. She describes the secondary school, “St. Brendan’s, out in Salthill”. And invents a colleague named Máire who taught history, a detail so specific it feels like it must be true even as she speaks it. Her wine glass is empty but she gestures with it anyway, painting pictures of students and staff rooms and parent-teacher meetings she never attended.
“The commute to the galleries in the city center was brutal,” she hears herself say, “especially in winter. I’d be cycling in sideways rain just to drop off pieces for consideration.” She’s created a whole life now, complete with weather patterns and transportation logistics. The fictional Niamh who taught in Galway is becoming more real than the actual woman who grew up in Clare, who legally died three years ago.
Brendan’s expression hasn’t changed. He’s not taking notes, not narrowing his eyes suspiciously, not doing anything except listening the way people do at reunions when someone explains where they’ve been. But Niamh can feel the weight of every invented detail, each one another thing she’ll need to remember, another potential contradiction waiting to expose her.
Brendan listens with the patient attention of someone genuinely interested, nodding at appropriate moments, not scribbling mental notes or narrowing his eyes in suspicion. Just the ordinary engagement of reunion small talk. Yet Niamh cannot stop the words tumbling out. She names specific streets in Galway, describes the view from her “old flat” near the Spanish Arch with its grey stone and tourist crowds, invents a favorite café called The Lighthouse where she’d supposedly mark homework over terrible coffee. Her hands gesture more wildly than usual, painting scenes in the air between them. The performance escalates even as some distant part of her consciousness screams that she’s overplaying it, that less would be more convincing, that she sounds like someone with something to hide.
Brendan’s smile carries the warmth of someone who’s been there himself, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the firelight. “That’s grand, I just meant I understand new beginnings. It’s nerve-wracking, isn’t it, walking back into a room full of people who knew you before.” His voice holds genuine sympathy, completely oblivious to the panic attack he’s inadvertently triggered. His own insecurity about being judged for his failed American dream makes him reach out in solidarity to someone he perceives as equally uncertain, two strangers finding common ground.
The lies she’d spun, galleries that didn’t exist, exhibitions she’d never mounted, five years in a city she’d visited twice, hung in the air between them like smoke. Niamh’s hands trembled as she set down her glass, the adrenaline crash making her vision swim. She’d built an entire false history for a man who’d only offered kindness, and now every word was a thread someone could pull. “Sorry, I need,” She fled toward the toilets, leaving Brendan bewildered, already replaying the conversation for his mistake.
Across the room, Caoimhe saw the touch. Saw Roisin’s fingers linger on Killian’s forearm, saw the way she leaned in, all sympathy and availability. Saw Killian not pull away.
Of course. Of course he was exactly like every other man: take one sharp word and they’d fall straight into the arms of the nearest soft landing. She’d known it the moment she’d seen them together at the bar, the way Roisin had materialized beside him like she’d been waiting for precisely this opening. And Killian, with his sad eyes and his calloused hands and his whole wounded-but-noble act, had probably been angling for this all along. The caring son, the struggling artist, the sensitive soul who just needed someone to appreciate him.
Christ, she was tired of this script.
Caoimhe turned away, reaching for her wine with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. The glass was empty. When had that happened? She caught the bartender’s eye, gestured for another, and absolutely did not look back toward the corner where Killian and Roisin were having what appeared to be an increasingly intimate conversation.
“You alright there?” Deirdre appeared at her elbow, because apparently this evening wasn’t sufficiently excruciating.
“Grand.” The word came out sharper than intended.
“Only you’ve been staring at that corner for the past five minutes like you’re trying to set it on fire with your mind.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“Right.” Deirdre’s tone was infuriatingly gentle. “And I wasn’t watching you not-stare. Look, I don’t know what history you have with Killian O’Rourke. Caoimhe accepted her wine from the bartender, took a long swallow.”There’s nothing. He’s nothing to me.”
“Grand so,” Deirdre said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t believe a word of it.
Roisin’s eyes widened, sympathy, certainly, but something sharper beneath it. Recognition. She’d been watching the tension between Killian and Caoimhe all evening, the way they orbited and avoided each other with the precision of celestial bodies locked in some ancient gravitational dance. She didn’t understand the history, but she understood opportunity when it presented itself with a wounded look and broad shoulders.
She shifted closer, copper curls catching the firelight in a way she knew was flattering. Her fingers found his forearm, warm against the rolled-up sleeve, the touch practiced in its gentleness. “You deserve someone who appreciates you, Killian,” she said softly, pitching her voice for intimacy. “Someone who sees how good you are.”
The words were true enough. He was good, she could see that. But they were also strategic, filling the space his hurt had opened. She felt him respond to the kindness like a man dying of thirst, saw the way his shoulders dropped slightly, the tension easing. It was almost too easy. She felt a flicker of something (guilt, perhaps, or its distant cousin) but pushed it aside. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. Just being kind.
Killian felt the warmth of her hand like sunlight through fog. Something real and present when everything else had become obligation and exhaustion. He’d been holding his breath for so long (three years of watching his mother forget him in increments, of cancelled plans and apologetic phone calls, of eating dinner standing at the counter because sitting down felt like admitting defeat) that he’d forgotten what simple kindness felt like when it wasn’t about care rotas or business invoices.
His hand covered hers briefly, the gesture automatic. Grateful. The smile he offered was tired, worn thin at the edges, not quite reaching the sea-grey eyes that had seen too many sleepless nights. He didn’t notice how practiced her touch was, how her sympathy had calculation beneath its softness. He was too starved for this (for someone seeing him as something other than dutiful son or reliable tradesman) to recognize the difference between genuine connection and someone simply filling a role that happened to be empty.
Caoimhe stood near the fireplace, whiskey untouched in her grip, and watched Killian’s scarred hand cover Roisin’s manicured fingers. There. Vindication sharp as glass lodged beneath ribs. Of course. The wounded-hero act, the quiet competence, the tired smile that suggested depth: all preamble to this predictable ending. Every man the same, really, just different costumes over identical wants.
She told herself the constriction in her throat was fury, not something more pathetic. That she didn’t care. That this proved everything: why she’d left Ireland, why she’d been right to leave, why attachment was always a liability dressed as comfort.
Her knuckles whitened around the glass.
Deirdre’s smile wavered as she tracked the room’s geometry of pain. Caoimhe’s rigid shoulders. Killian’s hand still covering Roisin’s, though his gaze had drifted elsewhere. The performance of connection where actual connection should be.
Perhaps her social enterprise proposal had been monumentally stupid. You couldn’t architect community from the outside, couldn’t blueprint belonging for people who’d learned to mistake every offered hand for a trap.
Niamh’s laugh emerged brittle and unconvincing, the sound of glass about to shatter. She heard it herself: too high, too quick, the desperate mirth of someone caught in a lie. The Trinity acquaintance’s expression shifted like clouds before rain, friendly nostalgia curdling into something sharper. Confusion, yes, but worse: the focused attention of someone who’d spotted an inconsistency and couldn’t let it rest.
“You even had that distinctive way of pronouncing ‘Aran Islands,’” the woman continued, her head tilting with the intensity of someone solving a particularly vexing puzzle. “Like you’d actually lived there.”
The ice that shot through Niamh’s chest had nothing to do with the Guinness. She had lived there. As Niamh Fitzgerald, before the careful construction of Niamh Byrne, before the forged documents in her locked filing cabinet, before she’d learned to flatten her accent into something that could have come from anywhere.
“Did I?” Her voice came out strangled. She tried for casual and landed somewhere near panic. “Sure, everyone from the west has opinions about the islands.”
But the woman was leaning closer now, squinting as though Niamh’s face might rearrange itself into someone recognizable. “No, it was specific. You talked about the light there, how it changes the stone. You were so passionate about it.”
Of course she had been. The Aran light had been in her blood before she’d tried to drain it all out and start again. Every painting in her studio carried that particular quality of illumination, the way Atlantic weather moved across limestone. Her art was a confession she couldn’t stop making, even as she buried every other truth about herself.
“I really don’t,” Niamh started, but the woman’s eyes had gone wide with the terrible satisfaction of memory clicking into place.
“Wait. Your name wasn’t Byrne then. It was something else.”
Across the room, Caoimhe had been half-listening to Deirdre’s earnest pitch about social enterprise, something about leveraging synergies, Christ, when her attention snagged on the tableau unfolding near the bar. Years of reading boardroom poker faces had taught her to spot the hairline fractures in people’s composure, and Niamh Byrne was fracturing in real time.
The too-bright laugh. The hand flying to her throat like it might hold words in. The microscopic flinch when the Trinity woman leaned closer, all terrier-like determination. Everyone at this bloody reunion was performing some version of themselves (Caoimhe included, pretending her third whiskey wasn’t medicinal) but this was different. This was someone with something to lose.
“Now that’s interesting,” Caoimhe murmured, filing the observation away with the instinct of someone who’d built a career on knowing which threads to pull. Information was currency, and she’d just watched Niamh’s exchange rate plummet.
She didn’t yet realize she was cataloguing ammunition for a war she hadn’t chosen, that Niamh’s unraveling would detonate close enough to leave them both bleeding.
Niamh moved through the crowd with the deliberate grace of someone fleeing a burning building while pretending to admire the architecture. Her hand on the Trinity woman’s arm lasted exactly long enough to seem polite, her smile calibrated to suggest regret rather than panic.
“I’m so sorry, I’ve just spotted someone I absolutely must catch before they leave.”
The lie tasted practiced. She’d told so many versions of herself tonight that one more hardly registered.
Brendan stood by the fireplace like a man waiting for permission to exist, and Niamh made herself into a woman who’d been searching for him all evening. The performance required walking straight toward him, not glancing back, projecting certainty her racing pulse contradicted.
When he straightened, surprised, almost pleased, she knew she’d chosen correctly.
“You’ve got a daughter?” Niamh angled her body so the Trinity woman disappeared from her peripheral vision. “That must be. Brendan’s face opened like a book she hadn’t asked to read.”Aoife. She’s eight. It’s. Niamh asked another question before he could return one. Behind her, footsteps approached, then mercifully retreated.
The Trinity woman materialized beside Deirdre, frown deepening. “That was odd, I could have sworn that was Sarah Fitzgerald from my Irish Lit seminar, but she’s insisting we barely knew each other.” She gestured toward Niamh’s retreating form. “Do you know her?”
Deirdre, who’d been cataloguing the evening’s failures like pressed flowers, felt something click into place. The woman who called herself Niamh Byrne had just fled recognition.
Deirdre moved toward the bar through a gauntlet of sympathetic glances and carefully averted eyes: the social choreography of witnessed humiliation. Her practiced smile, that weapon of good breeding and charitable luncheons, finally crumbled like sugar work left too long in Dublin’s damp air. She was aware of each person who’d seen Caoimhe’s rejection, could feel their pity like static electricity raising the fine hairs on her arms, but she kept her chin level and her pace unhurried. O’Malley-Ashfords didn’t flee. They withdrew strategically.
The polished wood counter felt blessedly solid under her palms when she reached it, the only fixed point in a room that had started tilting the moment Caoimhe’s words had landed. She leaned against it harder than was strictly elegant, her cashmere cardigan catching slightly on the bar’s worn edge.
The bartender, a man in his sixties who’d likely witnessed a thousand small tragedies play out across this counter, continued wiping glasses with methodical care. He didn’t look up, offering her the dignity of privacy in a public space.
“I just wanted to help.” The words emerged quietly, carrying more bewilderment than self-pity. She wasn’t performing grief or fishing for comfort. She was genuinely trying to solve an equation that kept producing impossible answers. How did offering resources become an insult? When had privilege made sincerity suspect? She’d spent years trying to use her advantages for good, and somehow that was worse than doing nothing at all.
The bartender set down his glass, met her eyes briefly with something like understanding, then reached for another. The simple gesture steadied her more than any words could have. At least someone in this bloody pub didn’t think her kindness was a character flaw.
She straightened slightly, fishing in her clutch for a tissue she wouldn’t actually use. O’Malley-Ashfords didn’t cry in public either.
Brendan emerged from the narrow corridor that led to the toilets, his phone still warm in his hand from checking messages (Aoife was fine, the babysitter reported, already asleep with her stuffed rabbit) when he caught the tail end of something that made him pause. “I just wanted to help.” A woman’s voice, quiet but clear in the momentary lull between songs.
His exhausted brain, operating on too little sleep and too much anxiety about tonight, seized on those words like a lifeline. She must have overheard someone. Must have been defending him. The returned emigrant, the divorced American, the single father who didn’t quite fit anywhere anymore. Dublin’s parent networks had been politely brutal: sympathetic smiles that never quite translated to playdates, questions about Aoife’s mother that felt like judgments wrapped in concern.
He moved toward the bar before he’d fully decided to, gratitude warming his chest. Finally, someone who understood. Someone who saw past the failure narrative to the simple truth: he was just trying to build a life for his daughter.
The blonde woman at the bar looked up as he approached, and something about her reddened eyes made him gentle his voice instinctively.
“Thank you,” he said, touching her elbow with the careful gentleness of someone who’d learned not to presume. “For understanding about single parents needing community. It means more than you know to have someone from here actually get it.”
Deirdre blinked up at him, her prepared smile wobbling back into place before she’d fully processed his words. His eyes were kind behind those wire-rimmed glasses, tired but genuinely warm, and something in her chest unclenched at being seen as helpful rather than condescending: even though she hadn’t the faintest idea what he was on about.
But God, it felt good to be thanked instead of tolerated. To have someone look at her like she’d done something right.
“Of course,” she heard herself say, the words arriving before thought. “It must be so difficult, starting over.”
Brendan’s face transformed: relief and gratitude flooding features she’d barely registered before. “Exactly. You understand the isolation of it, having to rebuild everything from scratch.”
She nodded, not correcting him, not admitting she’d never had to build anything, that her networks arrived pre-assembled with her surname. Within minutes they were deep in conversation about schools and neighborhoods, each statement reinforcing assumptions neither had actually made, but the warmth between them felt real enough to matter.
From her calculated distance by the fire escape, Niamh’s trained observation captures the scene like a composition study: Deirdre’s spine straightening from its wounded curve, Brendan’s defensive shoulders finally dropping, their bodies angling toward each other with the unconscious geometry of relief. Her chest tightens with something acidic, envy, perhaps, or contempt, that they can simply fall into rapport while she must architect every syllable, every gesture. She doesn’t recognize the irony: she’s watching two people construct connection from complete misunderstanding, as artificial as her own carefully curated existence, yet somehow it looks like grace.
Roisin had been watching the room with the practiced attention of someone who’d spent years reading eight-year-olds for signs of trouble. She caught Caoimhe’s white-knuckled grip on her coat, the rigid set of her shoulders that spoke of flight rather than a casual departure. More interesting was Killian’s expression. That unguarded moment when his sea-grey eyes tracked Caoimhe’s movement toward the door with something that looked dangerously like longing.
The opportunity presented itself with the clarity of a lesson plan falling into place.
She shifted closer to Killian, close enough that her copper curls brushed his shoulder, close enough that he’d have to lean away to create distance. The scent of her perfume, something light and approachable, mingled with the pub’s peat smoke.
“She’s always been like that,” Roisin murmured, her voice pitched for intimacy, for confidence-sharing. “Running away when things get real.”
The statement assembled itself from fragments: something overheard in the girls’ toilets at school, a rumor about Caoimhe leaving for London without saying goodbye to someone, the general impression of a girl who’d thought herself too good for the rest of them. Roisin didn’t examine these pieces too closely, didn’t question whether they formed a complete or accurate picture. She delivered the assessment with the warm certainty of someone who’d known Caoimhe intimately, who understood her patterns and could predict her movements.
She watched Killian’s face as the words landed. Saw something shift behind his eyes. Not quite closing, but recalibrating. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. That flicker of interest she’d noticed, the way he’d leaned forward slightly when Caoimhe had spoken earlier, seemed to dim like a candle in a draft.
“Right,” he said quietly, his calloused fingers tightening around his pint glass. “Right, of course.”
Roisin smiled, sympathetic and understanding, and rested her hand briefly on his forearm.
Killian knew nothing of Caoimhe’s actual history beyond fragments: a half-remembered summer when she’d been home from university, all fierce opinions and restless energy even then. The sharp intelligence in her eyes tonight that had cut through the reunion’s forced nostalgia like a blade through cobwebs. The way she’d deflected Deirdre’s offer with surgical precision, protecting something he’d recognized because he protected things too.
But Roisin’s words settled over those observations like sediment clouding clear water.
His brief flicker of interest: that dangerous hope that perhaps someone else understood bone-deep exhaustion, the weight of responsibility that never lifted, the loneliness of being needed rather than wanted. Curdled into something familiar and bitter. Recognition. His ex-wife had run too, hadn’t she? Packed her life into suitcases and chosen California’s sunshine over Dublin’s rain, over him, over the marriage that had felt like drowning to her and safety to him.
He couldn’t afford to invite that pattern into his carefully balanced life again. His mother needed consistency. He needed… well, what he needed didn’t matter, did it? That was the point he kept forgetting.
“She always did think she was better than the rest of us,” Roisin added softly.
Roisin’s fingers landed on his forearm, warm through the fabric of his shirt: a touch calibrated perfectly between comfort and promise. She’d practiced this, though the sympathy threading through it was real enough. Some part of her was already filing this moment away: confirmation that she’d read the room correctly, that Killian’s quiet solidity was the better bet tonight over Brendan’s earnest single-father energy and those wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his nose.
She couldn’t have verified the gossip if pressed. Didn’t matter. She’d redirected two lives with a whisper, and she’d sleep soundly after, dreaming of nothing in particular, unburdened by consequence she’d never think to imagine.
Caoimhe navigates the stairs with practiced efficiency, one hand trailing the wall for balance, the other already fishing for her phone: anything to anchor her attention outside that room. She’s unaware her exit is being narrated upstairs, her history invented by someone who barely remembers her, her future with Killian foreclosed before it began. She knows only the immediate: escape, cold air, the reliable indifference of the Liffey’s dark water.
Niamh’s fingers curl against her wine glass as she catalogues the scene: Roisin’s calculated lean, Killian’s shoulders drawing inward like shutters closing. She’s painted this composition before: trust offered, door slammed, safety confirmed. Her own isolation hardens from choice into doctrine. She doesn’t see the particularity of this moment, this woman, this lie. Only pattern. Only proof. She turns away satisfied, missing entirely how Roisin’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes, how even poison sometimes advertises itself.
The cold hit Caoimhe’s face like a slap, sharp enough to cut through the whiskey warmth and the suffocating press of bodies. She’d slipped out while someone was giving a speech about “the good old days”: as if any of their days had been particularly good, as if nostalgia wasn’t just selective amnesia with better lighting.
The Liffey stretched black and silver beneath the amber streetlamps, the city’s lights fragmenting on its surface like broken promises. She gripped the iron railing, the metal cold enough to hurt, and closed her eyes against the wind.
Footsteps on the boardwalk. Measured, unhurried. She didn’t turn.
“The noise was getting to be a bit much.”
Killian’s voice, low and careful. Not an intrusion, just a statement of fact. She opened her eyes but kept them on the water.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Her laugh came out sharper than intended. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘unbearable performance of enforced nostalgia,’ but yours is more concise.”
He moved to the railing, three feet to her left. Close enough for conversation, far enough to preserve the fiction that they weren’t really talking. Just two people who happened to be escaping the same party, standing near the same stretch of river.
“How long before someone notices we’re gone?” he asked.
“Depends. Are you important enough to be missed?”
“Not remotely.”
“Same.” She glanced at him sideways. His profile was all angles in the lamplight, jaw tight with something that looked like exhaustion. “Though I suspect my absence will be interpreted as rudeness rather than self-preservation.”
“Probably both, if we’re being honest.”
The river moved beneath them, indifferent to their small human dramas. A night bus rumbled across O’Connell Bridge, its lit windows full of people going somewhere else.
“My mother doesn’t remember my name anymore,” Killian said suddenly, still watching the water. “Some days. Most days now, actually.”
Deirdre’s laugh arrived first, crystalline, carrying across the water like wind chimes in a storm. “Caoimhe! We were worried you’d left entirely.”
The warmth in her voice was genuine, which somehow made it exponentially worse. Caoimhe felt Killian shift beside her, a subtle withdrawal that spoke volumes. The moment, whatever fragile thing had been building between them, cracked like ice underfoot.
“Just needed air,” Caoimhe said, her tone reconstructing itself into something bright and impenetrable. Professional. The voice she used for clients she didn’t particularly like but needed to charm.
Brendan appeared behind Deirdre, pint in hand, looking vaguely apologetic for existing. They’d clearly grabbed drinks as props for this performance of spontaneous concern.
“It is rather stuffy in there,” Deirdre agreed, positioning herself at the railing between Caoimhe and Killian with the unconscious authority of someone who’d never had to calculate whether her presence was welcome. “Brendan was just telling me about Boston. Killian, you’ve been to the States, haven’t you?”
A question designed to create conversation, to pull them all into the warm circle of her attention. Killian’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
The four arranged themselves with the precision of a chess opening, Deirdre and Brendan near the bench, angled toward the pub as if ready to return to the party, their body language open and inviting. Caoimhe and Killian remained at the railing, facing the dark water, their shoulders nearly touching but not quite, their silence transforming from intimacy into shared defense.
Brendan noticed the configuration, recognized he’d been cast as Deirdre’s ally without consenting to the role. The realization brought equal parts flattery and unease: when had he become someone worth recruiting?
The space between the pairs stretched: ten feet of wooden boardwalk that might as well be a national border. Neither side had claimed the territory, yet both now occupied it, staking positions in a conflict nobody had officially declared.
The window framed Roisin like a portrait: wine glass catching lamplight, copper curls haloed against the warm interior glow. She’d positioned herself perfectly: visible enough to remind Killian of her presence, distant enough to seem undemanding. A teacher’s instinct for staging, Caoimhe thought bitterly, watching Roisin’s smile sharpen as Killian glanced up. The performance was flawless: concern without clinginess, interest without pressure. Caoimhe recognized the technique because she’d perfected similar ones in boardrooms, that careful calibration of availability and indifference. But Roisin’s reflection in the glass betrayed something rawer. The tight grip on the stem, the rigid set of her shoulders. Not quite the effortless warmth she projected. The observation should have felt like victory. Instead, it lodged somewhere uncomfortable, a reminder that everyone here was performing, protecting something fragile beneath the polish.
The river’s cold had seeped through her jacket, into her bones, but Caoimhe stayed planted at the railing until Deirdre’s laugh floated down, bright, musical, entirely at ease. Of course she was. Deirdre probably didn’t know how to feel awkward, how to ruin things by wanting them too much or not enough. Caoimhe pushed off the iron rail, fingers numb. The steps back up felt steeper than they’d been an hour ago.
The laptop screen cast blue light across their faces, making the moment feel more clandestine than it probably was. Brendan had claimed the corner table with the good wifi, old habits from too many coffee shop coding sessions, and now Deirdre occupied the chair beside him rather than across, close enough that he could smell her perfume. Something floral and expensive that made his head feel pleasantly light.
“O’Sullivan Tech Consulting,” he read aloud, angling the screen. “Founded eight years ago. Specializes in digital transformation for mid-sized enterprises transitioning to cloud infrastructure.” He was showing off a bit, he realized, translating the corporate speak into something clearer. “Basically, she helps companies that are still running on systems from 2005 figure out how to join the modern world without everything collapsing.”
“From nothing?” Deirdre’s hand landed on his shoulder as she leaned in, her nail polish the color of sea glass. “She started this herself?”
“Looks like it. No venture capital, no co-founders listed.” Brendan clicked through to a trade publication profile, two years old. “Just her and apparently a lot of very satisfied clients who pay extremely well for her time.”
“God.” Deirdre’s admiration sounded genuine, and Brendan glanced sideways to find her expression matched. Something almost wistful crossing her face. “That’s remarkable. Building something real, something that’s entirely yours.”
He found himself warming to the task, to having someone actually interested in what he understood. “Here. She gave a keynote at WebSummit last year.” The video thumbnail showed Caoimhe mid-gesture, caught in that particular intensity she’d always had. “Want to watch?”
“Please.” Deirdre settled more comfortably beside him, and Brendan told himself this was networking, professional curiosity, two people discussing a mutual acquaintance’s impressive career. He didn’t ask himself why Deirdre was taking notes.
“She’s brilliant,” Brendan said, scrolling through a presentation Caoimhe had given at some tech conference in Amsterdam. The slides were sharp, minimal, the kind of design that suggested confidence rather than compensating for its absence. “But Christ, look at her schedule.” He clicked through to a cached calendar someone had screenshotted for a profile piece. “Keynotes in three countries in two weeks, board meetings, client emergencies. When does she sleep?”
“She doesn’t, probably.” Deirdre’s concern sounded authentic, her brow creasing in that way that made her look younger, more vulnerable. She was taking notes in a leather-bound journal, her handwriting surprisingly messy for someone so polished. “That’s not sustainable. No one can maintain that pace without something breaking.”
Brendan found himself nodding, grateful for adult conversation that wasn’t about custody arrangements or job applications, someone actually interested in the work itself rather than just the salary it commanded. He didn’t ask why they were doing this, didn’t question whether Caoimhe would want them analyzing her life like a case study. Deirdre’s attention felt too good, her curiosity too flattering.
She was mapping vulnerabilities, though she’d have been horrified to hear it phrased that way. Finding the cracks where her proposal might slip through.
He’s explaining the difference between boutique consulting and enterprise contracts when he realizes he’s been talking for ten minutes straight, and Deirdre’s still listening, still taking notes, still looking at him like what he’s saying matters. When was the last time someone looked at him like that? Not his ex-wife, certainly. Not in the last three years of their marriage.
“The key is she’s positioned herself as indispensable,” he says, pulling up another article. “See? She doesn’t just deliver solutions, she makes herself the solution. That’s why they want her in London permanently.”
“Clever,” Deirdre murmurs, and Brendan feels a small, shameful flush of pride, as if he’s accomplished something himself.
He’s pulling up organizational charts now, explaining reporting structures, the way consultants leverage relationships into permanent positions. “She’s built herself a network where she’s the hub,” he says, sketching connections on Deirdre’s notepad. “That’s power. That’s why they can’t let her go.”
Deirdre leans closer, her perfume expensive and subtle. “You understand this world so well.”
And God help him, he does. He’s explaining things he learned the hard way, failures repackaged as expertise.
Caoimhe materializes at the bar’s edge, and Brendan’s fingers twitch toward the laptop lid (some animal instinct sensing exposure) but Deirdre’s already angling the screen away with her knee, her voice lifting seamlessly: “And Aoife’s settling into school well?” The transition so fluid Brendan’s half-formed guilt evaporates. Caoimhe orders without glancing their way. Deirdre’s hand finds his forearm, conspiratorial warmth radiating through cashmere, and he’s smiling back before remembering why he shouldn’t be, already complicit in something he hasn’t named.
The phone’s owner. Brigid’s: waves away the apologies with wine-loosened generosity. “Ah, sure it’s only a phone, these things are waterproof now anyway.” But the screen’s already dark, the image of seventeen-year-old Niamh Fitzgerald in her sailing club jacket safely obscured beneath a film of red wine and smeared pixels.
“Still, let me get you another drink,” Niamh insists, her accent perfectly neutral, betraying nothing of Clare’s coastal lilt. “It’s the least I can do.” She’s already moving, one hand on Sinead’s elbow, the other on her friend’s shoulder, shepherding them toward the bar with the practiced ease of someone who’s learned to redirect attention like water around stones.
Behind them, the phone lies abandoned on the table, face-down now, and Niamh doesn’t look back though every instinct screams to verify it’s truly obscured. Her pulse thrums in her throat but her smile remains apologetic and warm, the perfect balance of mortified and eager to make amends.
“I’m always doing that,” she confides as they reach the bar, signaling the bartender. “My studio’s covered in wine stains: hazard of working with a glass in hand.” The lie comes easily, building her cover as the slightly chaotic artist, the kind of person who spills things, who’s present but not quite careful, memorable for clumsiness rather than evasion.
Sinead’s already forgiven her, already moving on to other topics (someone’s engagement, someone else’s divorce) and Niamh nods along, contributes appropriately, while her mind catalogs the danger. They’d been comparing photos, matching faces to names. How many other phones hold images of Niamh Fitzgerald? How many other conversations are happening in this room’s dark corners, memories sharpening against each other like knives on whetstones?
She orders three glasses of Merlot and doesn’t let her hands shake.
Killian lets himself be led because resistance feels churlish, and because Roisin’s warmth is uncomplicated in a way that’s seductive after years of complicated everything. Her hand finds his with easy confidence, and she spins under his arm before he’s quite decided to lift it, laughing at his surprise.
“See? You remember how this works,” she says, though he doesn’t, not really. He’s moving on instinct and her guidance, following her lead while she makes it seem like he’s the one leading.
The music’s loud enough that conversation requires closeness. She leans in, says something about the DJ’s questionable taste, her breath warm against his ear. He catches the scent of her perfume, something floral and deliberate, and realizes he can’t remember the last time someone touched him casually, affectionately, without it being about caregiving or obligation.
Across the room, he thinks he sees auburn hair, green eyes tracking movement, but Roisin’s already turning him, her hand on his shoulder blade, and the moment passes, might not have existed at all.
The dance floor becomes a stage, and Roisin choreographs their performance with practiced ease. She positions them where the light catches best, where Caoimhe (still talking to Brendan but not really listening) can’t help but see. Each laugh Roisin produces is pitched to carry, each touch lingers a beat longer than necessary. Her hand slides from Killian’s shoulder to his bicep, measuring, claiming.
Killian stumbles through a turn, self-conscious, but Roisin recovers seamlessly, making his awkwardness seem endearing rather than incompetent. “You’re doing grand,” she murmurs, close enough that it looks like intimacy, sounds like encouragement. He doesn’t notice how she’s angled them, doesn’t realize the dance is for an audience of one.
Brendan watched Killian vanish into the dancing crowd and caught something in Caoimhe’s expression: a tightening around her eyes, there and gone. He thought of Deirdre’s laptop, still open somewhere with its damning research, and felt suddenly like he’d wandered into a play mid-performance, everyone knowing their cues except him. His daughter’s drawing crinkled as he shifted, a reminder that not everything required strategy. When had connection become this complicated? Or had he simply forgotten, insulated by fifteen years of American directness, that Dublin ran on subtext?
Niamh’s hands trembled as she gripped the sink, and she hated them for it: these paint-stained traitors that marked her as herself. The mirror showed someone who’d almost been caught, and the bathroom’s single lock felt pathetically inadequate against a room full of people armed with camera phones and long memories. She could leave now, claim a headache, but twelve years of careful construction couldn’t end with her running from a pub toilet like a guilty thing. She forced her breathing steady, scrubbed at the paint with hand soap that wouldn’t shift it, and practiced her smile until it looked effortless again.
The whiskey glass felt slippery in Caoimhe’s hand, or perhaps her palm had gone damp. She set it down harder than intended, the crack of glass on wood punctuating the dying laughter. Across the room, she hadn’t meant to look, but her eyes betrayed her like everything else tonight, Killian’s face held an expression she couldn’t quite parse. Not anger, which she could’ve deflected. Not amusement, which would’ve validated the performance. Just a quiet sadness, the kind you’d wear watching a bird fly repeatedly into a window, too frantic to notice the door standing open beside it.
She turned away, lifting the glass again because her hands needed occupation. The whiskey scorched down her throat, and she welcomed the burn, willing it to cauterize something. But the heat faded too quickly, leaving only the aftertaste and Deirdre’s face imprinted on her retinas: that serene, understanding smile that said I see you’re frightened and you’re making it everyone else’s problem.
Christ, but that was worse than anger. Anger she could’ve matched, escalated, won. Understanding left her nowhere to go but inward.
Her chest constricted, ribs suddenly too small for her lungs. The room pressed closer: all these people who’d watched her perform, who’d laughed on cue like a studio audience. She’d given them exactly what they expected: Caoimhe O’Sullivan, sharp as a blade, cutting down anyone who dared approach with sincerity.
When had she become this? The woman who punched down because looking up required acknowledging how far she might fall? She’d spent twelve years building armor against Dublin, against expectations, against the girl who’d left here desperate and hungry. And now she stood in the ruins of that armor, realizing she’d become precisely what she’d sworn to escape: someone small and mean and terrified, disguising cowardice as strength.
Brendan caught Deirdre’s elbow as she turned from where Caoimhe had left her standing, a fixed point in the swirling crowd. “Don’t take it personally,” he offered, the words inadequate even as he spoke them.
But Deirdre’s smile had sharpened into something with edges. “Oh, I don’t.” She studied him with those clear blue eyes that suddenly reminded him less of summer skies and more of surgical steel. “She takes it personally, though: that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
The observation landed with uncomfortable accuracy. Brendan shifted his weight, aware of Aoife’s drawing crinkling in his pocket like a talisman.
“You knew her before,” Deirdre continued. Not a question. “At university?”
He nodded, uncertain where this was heading.
“Then help me understand her world.” Deirdre’s voice dropped, losing its social register for something more direct. “Not to win, God, I’m not interested in winning whatever game she thinks we’re playing. But I have resources she needs, and she has vision I genuinely lack. I need to speak her language first, though. The real one, not the performance.”
Brendan found himself reassessing the woman before him, realizing he’d made the same mistake as Caoimhe: mistaking polish for shallowness.
The pub’s warmth clings to her skin even as the November wind tries to strip it away. Caoimhe walks fast, heels clicking an angry rhythm on the cobblestones, past the late-night chipper where students queue for chips and curry sauce, past the closed solicitor’s offices with their brass plaques catching streetlight. She’s not running away. She’s strategically repositioning. There’s a difference, though the distinction feels thinner with each step.
The Liffey pulls her like it always did. That dark ribbon cutting through the city’s heart, indifferent to the dramas playing out along its banks. The boardwalk materializes through a gap between buildings, and she descends the steps two at a time, desperate for the river’s honest company. At least water doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.
The streets narrow and widen unpredictably, Georgian elegance giving way to medieval chaos and back again. Her phone buzzes and she silences it without looking. The Liffey’s smell reaches her before she sees it: that particular Dublin cocktail of river water, old stone, and possibility. The boardwalk’s wooden planks feel solid under her feet, more honest than the pub’s worn floorboards where everyone performed their best selves.
The care facility excuse tastes like ash even as he speaks it. Not entirely false, which makes it worse. Roisin’s hand falls away from his arm, her expression understanding in that practiced way that makes him suddenly, uncomfortably aware of performance. He mutters something about needing air, already moving toward the door before she can offer to join him. The night hits his face like absolution.
The thing about patterns is they’re only visible with sufficient data points. Brendan shifts his weight, pretending deep interest in a sepia photograph of the pub circa 1920, while his peripheral vision tracks Roisin’s performance with the clinical detachment he usually reserves for system architecture reviews.
There. The laugh: that particular cascade of notes that sounds spontaneous but hits the exact same beats it did when he’d mentioned Aoife’s adjustment to her new school. The hand on Killian’s forearm, fingers splayed just so, thumb moving in what appears to be an unconscious caress but maintains precisely the same rhythm it had on his own sleeve earlier. Even the tilt of her head, copper curls falling across one shoulder at an angle that seems artless but is somehow identical to the gesture she’d deployed when he’d been the one standing in Killian’s position.
He takes a long pull from his pint, the bitter taste grounding him. It’s not damning evidence. People have mannerisms, habits, ways of being in the world that repeat. He’s got his own: the way he pushes his glasses up his nose when thinking, the slight stoop he falls into when tired. But there’s something about the precision of it, the reproducibility, that triggers his debugging instincts.
Roisin’s phone buzzes against the bar where she’d set it down. Once, twice, three times in quick succession. Her eyes flick toward it mid-sentence, and for just a moment, half a second, no more, something crosses her face. Irritation? Anxiety? The expression vanishes so quickly he might have imagined it, replaced by that radiant smile as she silences the phone without looking at the screen and returns her full attention to Killian.
The gesture is smooth, practiced. Too practiced, maybe. Or maybe he’s just tired and cynical, seeing problems where there’s only a warm woman being friendly.
But he files the observation away regardless, another data point in an emerging pattern he hopes he’s wrong about.
The thing about debugging is you learn to trust your instincts before you can articulate the problem. Brendan’s watching the phone buzz and something in his chest tightens. Not jealousy, exactly. More like the feeling when you’re three hours into tracing a bug and realize the elegant solution you’ve been admiring is built on a fundamental architectural flaw.
She’s still smiling at Killian, asking about his mother’s care routine with what sounds like genuine concern, and maybe it is genuine. People are more complicated than code. They can be kind and careless simultaneously, warm and withholding, present and performing.
But he’s seen enough now. The repeated gestures, the identical laugh, the phone she won’t answer, the way her attention feels like a spotlight that could swing away at any moment. She’s not malicious, he thinks. Just… scattered. Keeping her options open. Playing multiple scenarios simultaneously to see which one compiles.
He should probably warn Killian. But what would he say? Your data suggests she’s not fully available? That sounds insane even in his own head.
So he watches, and catalogs, and waits.
The phone buzzes once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession, rattling against the scarred wood table like an insect trying to escape.
Caoimhe notices from across the room, she’s always been good at spotting tells, and watches Roisin’s face do something complicated. The smile stays fixed, professional, but her eyes go flat for half a second. Not irritation, exactly. Something sharper. More like panic wearing a pleasant mask.
Roisin glances down, and her hand moves with the kind of practiced efficiency that speaks to repetition. Muscle memory. She flips the phone face-down in one smooth motion, then immediately pivots back to Killian, asking about his mother’s medication schedule with such convincing tenderness that anyone not paying attention would miss the transition entirely.
But Caoimhe’s always paying attention. And she saw the name on the screen before it disappeared: Sean.
Killian tries to focus on Roisin’s question about his mother, but Brendan’s observation has lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable. “She’s grand today, thanks for asking.” Roisin’s hand squeezes his arm, the gesture so perfectly sympathetic it suddenly feels rehearsed. When did concern start looking like performance? The fireplace heat presses against his back, the room shrinking around them. He catches sight of his reflection in the darkened window (a man playing the role of grateful recipient) and something in him recoils. “I should check for messages from the facility,” he says, already standing. “Just to be sure.”
Roisin watches Killian retreat with a flicker of calculation quickly smoothed into radiant concern. She turns to the remaining circle, pulling them closer with a question about the old school building, and within seconds has them laughing again, the group reformed around her like iron filings to a magnet. But she tracks Killian’s exit peripherally, notes which door, files it away for later use. When Brendan excuses himself for another drink, she almost calls him back, backup is always wise, but decides to let him go. There’s time. There’s always time when you’re the one everyone gravitates toward. Her phone buzzes again, insistent against her hip, and this time she doesn’t even glance down.
The bathroom mirror reflects someone who looks like Niamh Byrne. Paint-stained fingers, carefully neutral accent, the artist who materialized in Dublin two years ago with no past worth mentioning. But Caoimhe sees the cracks forming. The question about the Fitzgerald girl had come from Máire Collins, whose cousin married into a Clare family, who’d been watching Niamh with that particular intensity of someone assembling a puzzle.
She pulls out her phone with shaking hands. Three messages from Gerald at the gallery, each more enthusiastic than the last. Critics from London confirmed. Irish Times wants an interview. We should discuss expanding the show: those Clare pieces are extraordinary.
Clare pieces. Of course they are. She painted them from memory, from a childhood spent on land her family had held for six generations, from the particular angle of light that only comes from standing on Fitzgerald cliffs at dawn. Every brushstroke is a confession she can’t help making.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard. Need to postpone. Family emergency. Delete. Too suspicious. Reconsidering the Clare series. Might substitute urban landscapes. Delete. He’ll ask why, push back, sense the fear.
The door handle rattles. Someone waiting. Caoimhe flushes the toilet she hasn’t used, buys herself another minute.
The coastal pieces need more work. Can we push the opening to spring?
Send before she can reconsider. Her art dealer will be furious. The momentum she’s built will stall. But momentum means visibility, and visibility means someone from Clare will eventually stand before her paintings and recognize not just the landscape but the love in every detail, the kind of intimate knowledge that only comes from belonging to a place.
She washes her hands, reapplies lipstick, reconstructs Niamh Byrne’s careful mask. When she emerges, her laugh is ready, her misdirection prepared, her exit strategy already forming.
Gerald’s response arrives before she can pocket the phone: Niamh, the Times interview is TOMORROW. Critics flying in from London. This is your moment.
Her moment. Her exposure. She stares at the screen, watching three dots pulse as he types more. The bathroom’s fluorescent light makes her paint-stained fingers look corpse-pale against the phone’s glow.
Those Clare pieces are what sold them. The intimacy, the knowledge of place. Don’t do this.
That knowledge. That’s precisely the problem. She’d painted Fanore at dawn because she couldn’t help herself, because muscle memory guided her brush to capture light she’d watched every morning for eighteen years. She’d painted the Cliffs from the Fitzgerald family’s private path, the angle tourists never see, the view that says I belonged here.
Food poisoning, she types. Terrible timing but can’t risk it. More believable than family emergency. Artists are allowed to be delicate, temperamental.
She flushes again for authenticity, steadies her breathing. When she emerges, her smile will be bright, her misdirection flawless, her escape route already mapped.
Niamh stares at the sent message, watching the screen until it dims. Family emergency. The irony would be funny if her hands weren’t trembling. Her actual family (the Fitzgeralds with their search firms and their grief) they’re the emergency she’s been running from.
She opens the camera app, checks her reflection. The woman looking back is Niamh Byrne, artist, nobody from nowhere. Not Niamh Fitzgerald, whose disappearance made the Clare Champion for weeks, whose mother still posts anniversary appeals on Facebook that Niamh monitors from burner accounts in internet cafés.
Three years of careful construction, threatened by her own talent. The paintings that were supposed to free her might expose her instead.
She deletes the message thread entirely, muscle memory from years of covering tracks.
The return performance: Niamh emerges from the bathroom, lipstick reapplied like war paint, scanning the room with an artist’s cataloguing eye. She gravitates to a different cluster (safer faces, less dangerous questions) and laughs at someone’s Tenerife disaster story. But she’s shifted closer to the back exit now, coat within grabbing distance. The paranoia that’s preserved her hums beneath her skin: she’s lingered too long, revealed too much. Whiskey and nostalgia are luxuries fugitives can’t afford.
Someone mentions they have a cousin in Brisbane. Could look up that Fitzgerald girl if anyone remembers her married name. The net tightens. Niamh’s already mentally packing her flat, the essentials she’d grab, which paintings she’d have to abandon. Then she catches Deirdre watching her with an expression that’s too thoughtful, too lingering. Not suspicious exactly, but interested. The room contracts. Every face becomes a potential witness. She takes a long drink, forces her shoulders to relax. Running now would be confession. So she stays, smiling, drowning.
The photograph reaches Caoimhe’s circle through a circuitous route: passed from someone’s aunt to a former classmate to Deirdre, who holds it delicately by its edges as though it might disintegrate. Caoimhe isn’t particularly interested in wedding photos of people she doesn’t know, but the whiskey has made her sociable in a way she’ll regret tomorrow, and Killian is standing close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating from him, which makes everything seem worth engaging with.
“Let’s see then,” she says, leaning in, and Deirdre angles the photograph toward the candlelight.
The woman in the pale blue dress stands slightly apart from the main wedding party, caught mid-laugh, her hand raised to tuck hair behind her ear. The image is faded, colors leaching toward sepia, but the bone structure is unmistakable. Those sharp cheekbones, the particular angle of her jaw, the way her shoulders curve inward as if she’s perpetually bracing against cold wind.
Caoimhe’s brain, pleasantly fogged by Jameson, takes a moment to process. Then everything sharpens with uncomfortable clarity.
Her head snaps up, eyes scanning the room with the same predatory focus she uses in boardroom negotiations. There. By the far wall, wine glass suspended in mid-air, face suddenly bloodless in the firelight.
“Jesus Christ,” Caoimhe breathes, and she’s pointing before her executive function can suggest this might not be the tactful approach. “That’s you.” Her voice carries, louder than intended, cutting through the comfortable buzz of conversation like a knife through butter. “That’s literally you.”
Three separate conversations stutter and die. Heads swivel. First to Caoimhe, then following her pointing finger to Niamh, then back to the photograph now being passed with renewed urgency.
Niamh’s face drains of color so rapidly it’s almost gray, her lips parting on words that don’t come.
The photograph trembles slightly in Deirdre’s manicured fingers, and Caoimhe watches her face transform. That perpetual sunny openness shuttering into something sharper, more calculating. The expression lasts only a heartbeat before the warmth returns, but Caoimhe catches it, recognizes it. She’s worn that exact look in negotiations when someone’s lie becomes obvious.
“Niamh Fitzgerald,” Deirdre says quietly, testing the name like a key in a lock. “From County Clare. Your family has that estate near the Cliffs of Moher, don’t they?”
The room’s energy shifts, curiosity curdling into something hungrier. Phones emerge from pockets. Someone’s already typing, searching. The modern instinct: verify, document, share.
Niamh’s wine glass slips from nerveless fingers, red spreading across the wooden floor like blood. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes dart toward the door (calculating distance, obstacles, witnesses) and Caoimhe recognizes that look too. She’s worn it herself, in rooms where she suddenly realized she’d revealed too much.
“I need,” Niamh’s voice cracks. “Excuse me, I need,”
But she’s surrounded now, a tightening circle of faces both familiar and strange, all demanding explanation.
The voices crash over her like waves, each one pulling her under. A woman in pearls, someone’s mother, aunt, friend, leans in so close Niamh can smell her perfume. “But why would you pretend to be dead, love?” The endearment makes it worse somehow, that casual intimacy with a stranger who thinks she knows her now.
“The Fitzgeralds have been looking everywhere,” someone else adds, and Niamh’s stomach drops. Of course they have. Her brother. Her father. The family solicitor who’d made her childhood miserable with expectations.
“Was it the money?” A man’s voice, speculative. “Inheritance dispute?”
“Maybe a man,” another woman suggests, almost gleefully.
They’re writing her story without her, filling in blanks with their own assumptions, and Niamh realizes with sick clarity that the truth would be worse than any of their theories.
Niamh’s throat closes. “I can explain,” she tries, but the words dissolve like sugar in rain. The room tilts: faces multiplying, questions crystallizing on every tongue, three years of meticulous reinvention crumbling to dust. She stumbles backward into someone’s shoulder. “Sorry, I need. The entire reunion has pivoted toward her unraveling. She thinks of her flat: the locked cabinet, the burner phone, the packed rucksack she’s maintained since Brisbane. Her gallery opening next week. Everything disintegrating because of one bloody photograph.
Killian’s phone shatters the moment: The ringtone, shrill, insistent, cleaves through the thickening tension. Killian’s hand jerks to his pocket, frowning at the screen. Meadowbrook Care never rings unless. “Mr. O’Rourke?” The manager’s voice carries that careful calm that means catastrophe. “Your mother’s wandered off. Shift change, about an hour ago,”
The pub dissolves. Niamh’s unraveling, the photograph, the whiskey-warm proximity to Caoimhe: all of it whites out. His mother. Confused, frightened, alone in Dublin’s November dark.
He’s moving before conscious thought, shouldering through bodies that seem suddenly made of treacle.
Caoimhe’s heels clatter on the worn stairs as she catches Killian at the landing, her fingers closing around his forearm with surprising strength. The muscle beneath his sleeve is rigid, trembling.
“You’re not driving like this.” Not a suggestion. Her voice carries the same steel she uses with clients who won’t see reason, but there’s something else beneath it: something that sounds almost like care.
“I have to.”You have to find her, yes. You don’t have to wrap your truck around a lamppost doing it.” Her phone is already out, thumb moving with practiced efficiency across the screen. “Taxi’s two minutes away. Where would she go?”
The question penetrates his panic like cold water. He blinks at her, this woman who’s spent the entire evening constructing elaborate escape routes from every conversation, now stepping directly into the wreckage of his life.
“I don’t, she gets confused,”
“Does she have patterns?” Caoimhe’s questions are surgical, precise. “Places from before? Muscle memory?”
His mind stutters, catches. “The sea. She keeps talking about Howth, where she grew up. Before,” Before the dementia. Before everything.
“Right.” Caoimhe’s already moving again, but this time pulling him with her toward the door. “We’ll start there. The taxi can take the coast road, we’ll watch for her.”
“You don’t have to,”
“I know I don’t have to.” Something flashes across her face, too quick to name. “I’m doing it anyway. Save your breath for directions.”
Behind them, the pub erupts in fresh speculation but Caoimhe doesn’t look back. For once, she’s not calculating exits. She’s already through the door, dragging him toward headlights that cut through November’s wet darkness.
The folder’s corners dig into Deirdre’s palms: glossy paper, expensive binding, the kind of presentation that usually opens doors. Financial projections for a social enterprise that would transform three Dublin neighborhoods. Partnership structures carefully designed to leverage her family’s capital with Caoimhe’s strategic brilliance. Six weeks of work, meetings with solicitors and accountants, all built on the assumption that Caoimhe O’Sullivan would be in Ireland to see it through.
The London numbers had been buried on page forty-seven. Compensation package. Relocation allowance. Start date: January fifteenth.
Deirdre’s perpetual smile feels like it’s cracking at the edges. Around her, voices rise about the photograph, about Niamh’s obvious panic, but she can only watch Caoimhe’s auburn hair disappear down the stairwell. Following Killian into his crisis without hesitation, offering the kind of immediate, uncomplicated help she’d never accept for herself.
It wasn’t contempt, Deirdre realizes with a sick clarity. It was goodbye. Every deflection, every charming non-answer. The folder suddenly weighs nothing at all. Just paper and wishes, neither of which can hold someone who’s already gone.
The photograph makes its circuit with gathering momentum: hand to hand, whispers multiplying. Someone found it online, an archived article about emerging artists in County Clare. Three years old. The woman in the image stands beside her landscape paintings, paint-stained fingers gesturing toward canvas. The caption reads “Niamh Fitzgerald discusses her work at the opening.”
The resemblance isn’t merely striking. It’s absolute.
Niamh. Fitzgerald? (has backed against the fireplace’s stone mantle, her carefully neutral accent fracturing. “That’s not) I don’t know who,” But her body betrays her, angled toward the nearest exit, muscles coiled for flight.
The room fragments into factions: those leaning forward, hungry for explanation, and those retreating, recognizing something too raw, too desperate to witness. Someone mentions the car accident. Someone else whispers about the family still searching.
Brendan’s voice emerges steady, though his hands betray him. “How long?”
Roisin’s gaze skitters sideways. “Eighteen months separated, papers filed, it’s just the courts. How he’d dared imagine foundations.”You knew I have a daughter. That I needed something real.”
Michael’s name illuminates her screen again. She answers, turning away with murmured apologies, abandoning him amid the ruins of his careful reconstruction.
The folder slips from Deirdre’s fingers, scattering printouts across sticky floorboards, Caoimhe’s LinkedIn updates, the London office announcement, relocation packages. She’d prepared a pitch about using privilege for good, about partnership transcending class resentment. Now the research feels invasive, desperate. Around her, conversations fracture into urgent whispers. Someone laughs too loudly. The bartender collects abandoned glasses with practiced efficiency, having witnessed countless reunions collapse under the weight of who people actually became.
Brendan’s hands find his pockets because otherwise they might shake, and he’s spent fifteen years in meetings learning to project calm when systems crash. But this isn’t a system failure. This is his daughter’s face lighting up when “Miss Roisin” texted about the zoo, this is him buying new shirts, this is three a.m. conversations where he’d confessed his fears about failing at marriage, at fatherhood, at coming home. She’d listened with those sympathetic eyes, touched his hand across cafe tables, made him feel like maybe he wasn’t irreparably broken.
“Eight months,” he repeats, and his voice sounds distant to his own ears. “You’ve been separated eight months and you’re still Gallagher.” The surname sits bitter on his tongue. He thinks of his own divorce, how he’d changed his emergency contacts immediately, how he’d told everyone, perhaps too honestly, about the failure. The transparency had felt like penance.
“Brendan, please,” Roisin’s reaching for him again, and he sees now how her brightness had been strategic, how she’d deflected every question about her living situation with a laugh and a subject change. The teacher’s trick of making everyone feel heard while revealing nothing.
“Does he know?” Brendan asks. “About me? About whoever else?” He sees the answer in her flinch. “Christ, Roisin.”
Someone jostles past them. The photograph that caused the earlier commotion lies abandoned on a table, a younger woman’s face circled in someone’s hasty pen. The whole room feels like it’s tilting, everyone’s careful constructions collapsing at once.
“I have to go,” Brendan says, though he’s nowhere to be. Just away from her, from this, from the fantasy he’d built of soft landings and second chances. “Don’t call me. Don’t text. And stay away from Aoife.”
“It’s complicated,” Roisin tries again, her voice taking on a pleading edge that makes Brendan’s jaw tighten.
Something in him snaps: not loudly, not dramatically, but with the quiet finality of a door closing. “It’s not complicated. You’re married. I’m a single father who can’t afford complicated.” His voice stays level through sheer force of will, though his hands betray him with their trembling. He shoves them deeper into his pockets. “I came back to Ireland for simplicity, for honesty, for,”
He stops abruptly, suddenly aware of the eyes on them, of becoming another exhibit in tonight’s gallery of human wreckage. The heat crawls up his neck. Fifteen years in Boston and he’d forgotten how Irish rooms have ears, how private shame becomes public currency.
Across the room, Killian grabs his coat with jerky, panicked movements, phone still pressed to his ear, and Caoimhe, surprising, sharp-edged Caoimhe, follows him without hesitation. At least their crisis is real, urgent, not this sordid little deception dressed up in freckles and primary school teacher charm.
“Brendan,” Roisin starts.
“Don’t.” He’s already turning away.
“I really liked you,” Brendan says finally, and the admission tastes like failure. Around them, the party fractures into urgent conversations, Niamh’s name hissed between teeth, speculation about Killian’s mother, Deirdre’s shocked face, but he’s trapped in this smaller humiliation. “I thought (after Boston, after the divorce) that I’d learned to read people better.”
Roisin reaches for his arm. He steps back.
“I introduced you to Aoife.” His voice cracks on his daughter’s name. “Last Tuesday, after school. She drew you a picture of her new classroom.”
“Brendan. Your husband?” The word feels obscene in his mouth. “Or am I just practice for when you’re actually available?”
Her tears don’t move him. He’s too tired to be anyone’s rehearsal.
The phone’s silence feels accusatory. “I really liked you,” Brendan says, each word a small defeat. “After Boston, after the divorce, I thought I’d learned to read people.” Her tears streak mascara down her cheeks, but he’s immune to the performance now. His ex-wife cried too, when he’d discovered her California plans. Desperation had made him blind to every warning. “Aoife’s with the sitter,” he says, turning. “At least she doesn’t lie about needing me.”
He shoulders through the crowd gathering around that damned photograph, past voices rising in recognition, “That’s Niamh Fitzgerald from Clare, I’d swear it”, past the wreckage of an evening that had promised belonging and delivered only brutal exposure. Roisin calls his name, voice breaking, but he’s done with beautiful liars. At the doorway he nearly collides with Deirdre, her perfect composure finally fractured, that folder trembling in her manicured hands. They exchange a glance, fellow casualties navigating the same battlefield, before he takes the narrow stairs two at a time. Behind him, someone cranks the music louder, as if volume could drown the truths that have surfaced like bodies in a river. Outside, Dublin’s night air slaps his face like absolution.
Deirdre’s face flushes, two spots of color high on her cheekbones that make her look almost human, almost real. “That’s not fair. You don’t know. Caoimhe’s voice drops to something dangerous, intimate. The coat rack digs into her back as she leans away from Killian’s concerned presence behind her.”You’ve never had to claw for anything in your life. Never had to prove you belonged somewhere, that you earned your place. Everything’s been handed to you on a silver platter: probably literally silver, knowing your family.”
“So I should apologize for that?” Deirdre’s spine straightens, and there’s steel beneath the cashmere after all. “I can’t help what I was born into any more than you can. But at least I’m trying to use it for something beyond myself.”
The implication lands like a slap. Caoimhe feels Killian shift behind her, probably wanting to intervene, to smooth this over with his carpenter’s hands that know how to fix broken things. But she’s too far gone, whiskey and panic and that photograph of Niamh upstairs all swirling together into something combustible.
“Unlike me, you mean? The selfish bitch running away to London?” She bends down, snatches up one of the scattered pages: a glossy property listing, a Kensington flat with crown molding and original features. “At least I’m honest about what I want. I don’t dress up ambition in charity work and call it virtue.”
“Caoimhe. She straightens, crumpling the listing in her fist.”I have to go. Killian needs. Deirdre’s expression shifts, softens. “Then go. But this conversation isn’t finished.”
“Yes,” Caoimhe says, already turning. “It is.”
The papers fan across the worn floorboards like accusations, each one a piece of the life she hasn’t decided to claim yet. Caoimhe watches them settle. The estate agent’s letterhead, the salary figures that made her stomach twist, the timeline that assumes she’s already gone.
“I researched you because I admired you,” Deirdre says, and Christ, she sounds sincere. That’s what makes it worse. “Your trajectory, what you’ve built from nothing. I thought,”
“You thought you could buy me.” Caoimhe’s laugh scrapes her throat raw. “Dress it up however you like, but that’s what this is. Your family’s money, my rough edges, and we’d make such a heartwarming story for the foundation’s annual report.”
“That’s not. She kicks at the scattered papers, sends the Kensington listing skittering toward the door.”The girl from the council estate, saved by the heiress’s largesse. What a fucking narrative.”
Deirdre’s composure cracks completely. “You’re being deliberately cruel.”
“I’m being honest.” But her hands are shaking, and Killian’s still waiting, and upstairs someone’s saying Niamh’s real name.
“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to be your redemption arc?” The words slice through the pub’s din, sharper than she intends. Whiskey courage, or cowardice. Hard to tell which. Deirdre flinches like she’s been slapped, and Caoimhe feels something ugly twist in her chest. Behind them, the crowd around Niamh swells but she can’t stop now. Won’t stop. “Some of us built ourselves without family money to fall back on.” Her voice rises, carrying. “Some of us don’t need saving by bored heiresses looking for purpose.” The cruelty tastes like ash, but she’s already turning toward the door, toward Killian, toward anything but Deirdre’s stricken face.
“I never thought you needed saving.” Deirdre’s voice fractures, losing its honeyed polish. “I thought you were brilliant and fierce and exactly the kind of person who could actually change things instead of just,” She gestures helplessly at the chaos swirling around them, at the performance of reunion, at her own exposed naiveté. “But you’re right. I don’t understand. I never will.” She crouches to gather the scattered papers, her perfect waves tumbling forward like a curtain, hiding whatever expression might betray her completely.
The words land like stones dropped in still water. Caoimhe doesn’t look back, can’t look back, because if she does, she’ll see what she’s doing, and she can’t afford that particular clarity right now. Killian’s already halfway down the stairs, his phone pressed to his ear, and she follows the solid shape of him into the cold, into movement, into anything that isn’t standing still long enough to feel.
The photograph makes its circuit with the inevitability of contagion. Niamh watches it pass from hand to hand: actual hands first, the physical thing with its bent corner and faded colors, then digitally, phones tilting to capture it, fingers spreading on screens to zoom in on a face that’s unmistakably hers. Younger, yes. Hair longer, styled with the kind of expensive carelessness money buys. But the same sharp cheekbones, the same watchful eyes.
“I knew I recognized you.” The voice comes from somewhere to her left. Male, pleased with himself for solving the puzzle.
Another voice, female, excited: “Didn’t her family offer a reward?”
The circle tightens. Not physically (they’re all still at a respectful Irish distance, nobody actually touching) but the space contracts nonetheless. Curious faces shading into something else. The warm, whiskey-fueled nostalgia of the evening curdling into something predatory, or perhaps just human. People love a mystery solved. They love it even more when the solution is standing right there, cornered.
Niamh backs toward the wall, her artist’s hands now trembling visibly. She should say something. Laugh it off. Claim mistaken identity. She’s spent three years constructing lies, and they’ve all been effortless until this moment.
But her mouth won’t cooperate. The words that usually come so easily, the carefully neutral accent that betrays no origins, the deflections and misdirections: all of it has deserted her. She can only watch as phones emerge from pockets like weapons, as the crowd shifts from reunion attendees to witnesses, as her carefully anonymous life begins its very public unraveling.
Someone’s already typing. She can see it. The glow of screens, the quick thumbs. How long until it’s everywhere?
The woman holding her phone begins reading, her voice carrying that particular Irish lilt that turns even tragedy into performance: “Concerns grow for Niamh Fitzgerald, 34, missing since Tuesday. Her car was found abandoned at the Cliffs of Moher.” She pauses for effect, glancing up at Niamh like she’s narrating a documentary and has just reached the dramatic reveal.
The murmurs start immediately, that low ripple of recognition and scandal that sounds almost like the sea.
“Jesus,” someone breathes.
Another phone appears, thrust forward by eager hands. This image is worse: Niamh in an emerald evening gown at some charity gala, all teeth and pearls and misery disguised as elegance. Her father’s hand rests on her shoulder, fingers curved possessively. She remembers that grip. Remembers how it tightened whenever she tried to step away.
“That’s definitely her,” a man confirms with the satisfaction of someone who’s just won a bet.
Niamh watches her two lives collide in real-time, the carefully constructed Niamh Byrne dissolving like watercolor in rain, revealing the ghost of Niamh Fitzgerald underneath. Both versions feel equally false now, equally impossible to inhabit.
“Why would you do that to your family?” a woman asks, and there’s genuine bewilderment in her voice, as though the only possible reason to disappear is cruelty.
“The search costs,” someone else adds, pulling up another article. “Says here they hired private investigators. Dragged the waters.”
Niamh’s throat closes. She wants to say: The woman in that photograph was drowning already. Wants to explain that her father’s hand on her shoulder wasn’t affection but ownership, that the emerald gown was a costume for a role she couldn’t play anymore without losing whatever remained of herself.
But these are strangers who see only scandal, not survival. Who measure tragedy in search costs, not slow suffocation.
The words lodge behind her teeth, too raw and too true to speak.
The phones emerge like a synchronized swarm, screens illuminating faces with cold blue light. “Holy shit,” someone murmurs, already composing a message. Niamh watches her anonymity dissolve: each notification a nail in the coffin she’d built for her old self. Her gallery will see this before midnight. Her art dealer will call, apologetic but firm. And her father, God, her father will finally know exactly where she’s been hiding. The walls contract. Breathing becomes theoretical. Her legs move before thought catches up.
She crashes through the pub’s main room. A blur of black fabric and wild eyes past startled pints and half-raised hands. The heavy door slams behind her, releasing her into November’s bite. No coat. No plan. Just the animal imperative of flight. Her boots strike cobblestones in arrhythmic panic, carrying her toward the Liffey’s indifferent darkness. Behind her, the pub door opens again, spilling light and voices, but she’s already disappearing into Dublin’s medieval warren, choosing any direction that isn’t back.
The crowd parts without conscious decision, creating a corridor of stares and suspended judgment. Caoimhe’s fingers close around Killian’s forearm. Wool jacket, solid muscle beneath, the tremor he’s trying to suppress. His phone is still clutched in his other hand, the care facility’s number glowing on the screen.
“I’m coming with you.” Not a question. Not an offer he can gracefully decline.
He should refuse. This is the life he’s kept carefully partitioned, the reality he doesn’t parade at reunions or mention in casual conversation. His mother wandering Drumcondra in her nightdress, confused and calling for his dead father, is not something you share with a woman you haven’t properly spoken to in twelve years.
But Caoimhe’s eyes have that look: the one he remembers from school, from the summer before she left. Fierce and determined and carrying something that might be desperation if you looked close enough. Like she needs to do this more than he needs the help.
“Right,” he says, because what else is there?
They move toward the door together, and the room’s attention follows them like a spotlight. Someone giggles and Caoimhe’s jaw tightens. They think this is romance. They think they’re watching the beginning of some reunion love story, not two people using each other as life rafts in separate storms.
Deirdre’s voice rises above the murmur: “Caoimhe, wait. The November air hits them like a slap. Killian’s van is parked on a double yellow line three streets away. Caoimhe keeps pace beside him, her heels clicking against cobblestones, and doesn’t ask the questions he can see forming behind her eyes.
Behind them, the pub door swings shut, sealing them out of the warmth and into something colder, more honest.
The whiskey sits untouched, amber liquid catching the firelight. Brendan traces the rim of the glass with one finger, a careful circuit that requires no thought. Around him, the reunion has fractured into competing dramas, Niamh’s exposure, Killian’s crisis, the general dissolution of pretense, but his own small catastrophe feels oddly distant, like it’s happening to someone else.
He’d known, really. Some part of him had registered the evasions, the way Roisin’s stories never quite connected, how she’d change the subject whenever he mentioned meeting her family. But he’d wanted so badly to believe in the easy warmth she offered, the possibility of starting over with someone uncomplicated and kind.
“Brendan.” Roisin’s voice, tentative. She’s standing beside his bar stool now, close enough that he can smell her perfume. Something floral and expensive. “Can we talk?”
“I don’t think so.” He’s surprised by how steady he sounds. “I need to collect Aoife in the morning. Early start.”
She flinches. The mention of his daughter, the reality she’d never quite made room for, lands like the rejection it is.
He doesn’t confront Roisin when she emerges from the bathroom, mascara-smudged and still beautiful in that effortless way that had first drawn him. He simply looks at her (really looks) and sees what he’d been too desperate to notice before: the pale band of skin on her left ring finger where a wedding ring had recently lived, the practiced way she’d deflected every question about her family, how she’d always been available for drinks but never for Sunday lunch, never for meeting Aoife.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and the worst part is he believes her. She probably is sorry, in the same way you’re sorry when you break something that wasn’t particularly valuable to you but clearly mattered to someone else.
He turns back to his whiskey, still untouched. He’s thinking about his daughter asleep at his sister’s house, about how close he’d come to introducing Aoife to another person who would inevitably leave.
She stacks the glossy pages with their carefully researched statistics, their projected social impact metrics, their photographs of communities she’d visited but never truly belonged to. Each sheet feels heavier than the last. Her family’s crest watermarks every page. She’d thought sincerity could transcend circumstance, that wanting to help was enough. But Caoimhe had looked at her proposal the way you’d look at charity: necessary perhaps, but fundamentally humiliating.
Sean collects another abandoned glass, this one still half-full of expensive whiskey someone stopped pretending to enjoy. Twenty-three years behind this bar, and he’s developed a taxonomy of disasters: the slow-motion kind that unfold over hours, the explosive rows that clear rooms in minutes, the quiet implosions where someone simply stands and walks out mid-sentence.
Tonight’s been all three simultaneously.
He wipes down a table sticky with spilled cider, gathering the detritus of revelation: a crumpled photograph, someone’s business card torn precisely in half, a phone left behind in panicked flight. The upstairs room still echoes with the particular silence that follows spectacular drama: not peaceful, just exhausted.
Through the window, he watches the scattered reunion attendees disappear into Dublin’s night. Some cluster in urgent conversation on the pavement, backlit by streetlamps, their breath visible in the October cold. Others flee alone, collars turned up against more than weather. A blonde woman in cashmere stands motionless by the door, staring after someone who’s already gone. A dark-haired woman slips past like smoke, face averted, moving with the practiced invisibility of someone who’s made an art of disappearing.
Sean’s seen this pattern before: Dublin pretends to be cosmopolitan, European, modern. But it’s still a village wearing a city’s architecture. You can’t reinvent yourself here, not really. The past doesn’t stay buried when everyone’s cousin knows your cousin, when the same families have been circling each other for generations, when the Liffey flows through but never washes anything clean.
He picks up a napkin someone’s used to blot tears or lipstick, hard to tell which, and thinks about rivers. How they follow the same path year after year, wearing the channel deeper. How you can’t step in the same river twice, but the river doesn’t care; it just keeps flowing, carrying everything downstream to the sea.
The till needs counting, the floor needs mopping, and there’s broken glass somewhere near the fireplace. But Sean pauses, surveying the wreckage with something almost like affection. This is what reunions are for, really. Not nostalgia, but reckoning. Not celebrating who you were, but confronting who you’ve become.
He’s already composing the story he’ll tell the morning staff, editing it for maximum impact. By tomorrow afternoon, three different versions will be circulating through Dublin’s pubs. By next week, it’ll be legend, the details sharpened or softened depending on who’s telling it.
The past never stays buried here. But then again, maybe it shouldn’t.
The booth’s leather was cracked and sticky beneath Brendan’s palms. He’d chosen this corner deliberately. Far enough from the main crowd that Aoife’s drawing wouldn’t become public spectacle, close enough to the exit that Roisin could leave if she needed to. Though part of him hoped she’d stay, prove him wrong about the conclusions he’d spent three sleepless nights reaching.
“She drew this last Tuesday,” he said, sliding the paper across the scarred wood. “Asked if the pretty lady was coming to her birthday party.”
Roisin’s face did something complicated. Pleasure at being called pretty warring with something that looked almost like shame. Her fingers, paint-stained from the art project she’d done with her class, didn’t quite touch the drawing’s edges.
“Brendan, I. His voice came out steadier than his hands, which he pressed flat against his thighs.”I can’t be someone’s maybe. Not anymore. Not when Aoife’s watching me to learn what… what caring about someone is supposed to look like.”
The tears started before he’d finished, which somehow made it worse. Roisin cried prettily, he noticed with detached clarity. No red blotches or ugly sobbing, just crystalline drops that made her eyes brighter.
“I’m still married.” The words tumbled out between gasps. “Technically. Séan’s in Cork and we’re figuring things out, we have been for two years, and I just: you made me feel wanted, and that felt so much better than being honest about the mess I’m in.”
“I don’t think you’re cruel,” Brendan said quietly, though his chest felt hollowed out. “But you are careless. And my daughter can’t afford for me to be careless about who I let into our lives.”
Roisin reached for his hand. He pulled back, not unkindly, but finally.
The restroom door was heavy oak, muffling the laughter from the main room. Caoimhe emerged to find Deirdre leaning against the opposite wall, holding a glass of water like it was a peace offering. Which, apparently, it was.
“You don’t have to,”
“I know.” Deirdre’s smile was smaller than usual, less reflexive. “But I wanted to.”
Caoimhe took the glass because refusing felt churlish. The water was cold enough to hurt her teeth.
“You’ve been dismissing me for twelve years.” Deirdre’s voice stayed light, but something underneath it wasn’t. “University, that conference in Cork, tonight. Every time I suggest we work together, you look at me like I’ve offered you a particularly insulting bribe.”
“Deirdre,”
“It stings because you’re everything I wish I could be.” The words came faster now, like she’d been rehearsing them. “Self-made. Sharp. Unburdened by ancestors whose portraits judge you from every wall. The social enterprise isn’t charity work. It’s my desperate attempt to build something that’s mine, not theirs. And I chose you because I wanted a partner who’d challenge me, not defer to my surname.”
Her voice dropped. “You think I have everything. But you earned your place. I can’t buy that.”
The wood stove’s door creaked as Killian fed it another handful of shavings. They caught immediately, flaring bright before settling into steady heat. He didn’t look at Caoimhe when he spoke.
“Three years since I built something just because I wanted to.” His voice was rough. “Everything’s commissioned or practical. A chair for the care home. Railings so Mam won’t fall.”
He closed the stove door carefully, precisely. “Dad made me promise to keep the family together. Noble, yeah? Except my brothers are in Boston and Cork, and I’m the eejit who stayed.”
Finally, he met her eyes. “You’re running from being trapped. I’m trapped from never running.”
The parallel hung between them, sharp as a saw blade.
The silence stretches, thick as the peat smoke curling from the dying fire. Caoimhe’s fingers trace patterns on a damp beer mat. Niamh’s paint-stained hands are finally still. Killian sits solid as oak, his shoulders finally dropped from their perpetual defensive hunch. Deirdre’s perfect posture has softened into something more human. Even the pub’s ancient walls seem to lean in, bearing witness.
Brendan’s question hangs unanswered because the answer isn’t words: it’s this: staying when leaving would be easier.
Sean collects their glasses, noting the lipstick stains and fingerprints like evidence. The auburn-haired one, Caoimhe, he’d heard, arrived looking like she owned every room she entered. Now her expensive blouse is wrinkled, her careful composure dismantled. He’s tended bar long enough to recognize the difference between people who’ve had too much to drink and people who’ve finally said too much truth. This lot has done both. The Brazen Head has seen centuries of confessions. These will be forgotten by morning, except by the ones who made them.
The wood stove ticked as it cooled, the only sound besides the kettle’s rising whistle. Caoimhe wrapped her arms around herself, though the workshop was warm enough. She’d positioned herself by the stove like it was a barrier, something solid between her and Killian as he moved through the ritual of tea-making with the careful attention of someone who needed his hands occupied.
“My mother had a list,” she said finally, her voice rougher than she’d intended. “Places she wanted to see. Paris, Rome, the Greek islands. She’d cut pictures from magazines, this was before everyone had the internet in their pockets, and pinned them to the kitchen wall beside the calendar. Every month she’d look at them while she did the washing up.”
Killian said nothing, just poured water over tea bags in mismatched mugs.
“She died when I was nineteen. Heart attack, sudden, while she was hanging laundry in the garden. The list was still there on the wall. I took it down after the funeral and found the paper had faded where the sun hit it through the window. Fifteen years she’d looked at those places every day.”
The tea was ready. Killian brought her a mug, their fingers not quite touching in the transfer.
“Everyone kept saying what a good wife she’d been, what a devoted mother. And she was, I suppose. But Christ, Killian, she’d been brilliant at university. Had offers to do postgraduate work in Dublin. She chose my father, chose the town, chose us. And I watched her fold herself smaller and smaller until she fit the space everyone expected her to occupy.”
Caoimhe’s hands tightened around the mug’s warmth. “So when anyone says ‘stay,’ all I hear is that kitchen wall closing in. London’s not an opportunity. It’s just another place to run to before I start cutting pictures out of magazines.”
The lamplight caught the paint under Niamh’s nails: cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, the particular blue-grey of Clare skies before rain. Deirdre reached for her hands without thinking, a gesture meant to steady, and Niamh jerked back as if scalded.
“Don’t.” The word came out strangled. Then, quieter: “I’m not, Christ, I’m not who you think.”
The story spilled like turpentine, acrid and unstoppable. Not Byrne. Fitzgerald. The drowning staged with her clothes left on the rocks at Spanish Point, her car abandoned at the cliff edge. The Fitzgeralds who’d needed their inconvenient daughter gone as desperately as she’d needed to vanish.
“Every painting,” Niamh said, her voice hollow. “The limestone pavements. The hawthorn hedges. My grandmother’s fuchsia bleeding against whitewashed walls. Anyone from Clare would know those places. I’ve been confessing in public for three years, hanging my past on gallery walls for two hundred euros a canvas.”
She laughed, the sound catching wrong in her throat. “I thought if I painted them, I could keep them without being kept by them. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.”
The gallery wanted everything. Biography, artist statement, photographs for the catalogue. They’d mentioned The Irish Times, maybe even RTÉ if the opening went well. “Emerging Irish Talent from County,” and she’d have to fill in that blank with truth or another lie that would eventually unravel.
“My aunt Siobhan,” Niamh said, “she never misses the arts coverage. Reads it with her morning tea like it’s scripture. And my cousin Fiachra, he works in bloody Merrion Square, probably walks past that gallery twice a week.”
She pressed her palms against her eyes. “I finally painted something true. Something that matters. And it’s going to be what destroys me. Isn’t that perfect? Isn’t that just.”I found my voice and it’s screaming my real name.”
Deirdre settled onto the cold stone step, arranging her cashmere coat with unconscious grace, and patted the space beside her. “Sit down before you collapse. You look like you’re about to shatter.”
Niamh sat, keeping distance between them.
“I’m Deirdre O’Malley-Ashford,” Deirdre said, pronouncing the hyphen like a prison sentence. “That name walks into rooms before I do. People see the estate, the foundation, the bloody portraits in the National Gallery. They don’t see me trying to prove I’m more than expensive DNA.”
She pulled her coat tighter. “You faked your death. I’m trying to resurrect myself inside my own name. Different methods, same exhaustion.”
Deirdre’s fingers moved across her phone screen with boardroom efficiency, but her voice stayed gentle. “My solicitor handled my cousin’s restraining order. Very discreet.” She pulled up a contact. “And this journalist. She writes about families who weaponize love. No names unless you want them published.”
Niamh’s throat tightened. This woman was offering escape routes like they were simple logistics, and perhaps (for someone with Deirdre’s resources) they were. Sometimes privilege meant having actual tools, not just pretty cages.
Roisin’s hand freezes halfway to the water glass. The noise of the pub, laughter from the main room, the clink of glasses, someone murdering “The Auld Triangle” on the karaoke machine, all of it seems to recede, leaving just Brendan’s words hanging in the air between them like smoke.
“That’s not,” she starts, but her voice catches. The automatic deflection dies on her tongue because he’s not wrong, is he? She thinks of Killian’s hopeful texts, of the secondary school teacher from Rathmines who keeps asking about next weekend, of her estranged husband’s solicitor’s letters sitting unopened in her flat. All those futures, shimmering and possible, none of them quite real.
“I did it for two years,” Brendan continues, still not looking at her directly, which somehow makes it easier to hear. “Kept telling myself I was being flexible, being mature about a difficult situation. Sarah wanted California, I wanted Dublin, we’d figure it out. Except we wouldn’t, because figuring it out meant one of us had to lose, and neither of us wanted to be the one who forced that loss.” He finally meets her eyes, and there’s no judgment there, just exhaustion. “So we both lost. And Aoife lost most of all, because children need parents who can actually commit to a location, a school, a life.”
Roisin sinks onto the barstool, her colorful scarf suddenly feeling like it’s strangling her. “I’m not hurting anyone. We’re all adults, we all know. Brendan’s voice stays gentle, which is worse than anger would be.”Does Killian know you’re still married? Does anyone know you’re not actually available, just… performing availability?”
The water glass sweats condensation onto the bar between them. Roisin stares at it, watching droplets slide down the sides like tiny failures of surface tension.
“You’re doing what my wife did,” Brendan says quietly, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the pub’s amber light. “Keeping three or four futures spinning in the air because committing to one means the others die. Feels like freedom, doesn’t it? Like you’re choosing abundance instead of scarcity.”
He rotates his own glass, watching the whiskey catch the light, and Roisin recognizes the gesture: she does the same thing when she’s working up to something difficult with parents at school. The careful preparation of hard truths.
“But you’re not choosing anything. You’re just… hovering. And everyone around you is waiting for you to land, getting hurt when you don’t, and you get to tell yourself it’s their fault for expecting too much.” His voice stays level, almost clinical, which somehow makes it cut deeper than anger would. “The really clever bit is how you’ve convinced yourself that being honest about keeping things casual absolves you. As if saying ‘I’m not ready for commitment’ upfront makes it fine to collect people who are hoping you’ll change your mind.”
Roisin’s throat tightens. Her colorful scarf feels suddenly garish, costume jewelry on a woman playing dress-up.
Brendan sets down his glass with the deliberate care of someone who’s made too many decisions while drinking. “My ex-wife kept three different versions of our future running simultaneously, Boston, California, maybe London if the right opportunity came up. She’d talk about them like they were all equally real, equally possible. I’d try to plan around any of them, bend myself into shapes that might fit.”
He pauses, and Roisin sees the cost of that flexibility written in the lines around his eyes. “Took me two years to realize she wasn’t choosing between futures. She was choosing not to choose me. The options were the point. They meant she never had to commit to the life we actually had.”
“I came here hoping to find community,” Brendan says, and his voice carries the weight of transatlantic flights and failed promises. “Thought the old connections might still hold. That I could slip back into Dublin like the fifteen years hadn’t happened.”
Aoife’s drawing presses against his ribs through his jacket pocket: her careful crayon house with its oversized door, the kind a child draws when she needs to believe home is a place you can always enter.
“But you can’t build anything real on nostalgia and performance. I’m forty-two, starting over, raising a daughter who needs to see me create something solid, even if it’s smaller than what I had in Boston.” He meets Roisin’s eyes with something like compassion, but firmer. “I need people who’ll show up honestly. Not people keeping me as an option while they sort themselves out.”
Her copper curls seem less vibrant under the pub lights, just hair instead of a statement. “I’m not.”You’re right. About all of it.” The admission costs her something visible; her shoulders curve inward, the effervescence draining like someone’s pulled a plug. “I don’t know how to be anything except charming.” It’s not an excuse, just a fact she’s finally said aloud.
The stillness in her face is worse than tears would be. Caoimhe watches from across the table, recognizing something she’s spent twelve years avoiding in her own mirror. The moment when the performance costs more than continuing it is worth.
“Because I’m thirty-six,” Roisin continues, her voice barely carrying over the traditional music bleeding up from the bar below, “and I don’t know who I am when I’m not making someone smile. When I’m not the warm one, the available one, the one who makes everything feel possible.” She finally looks at Brendan, and her eyes are dry but devastated. “My mam was like this. Collected men like seashells and wondered why none of them stayed. I swore I’d be different and here I am, same script, different decade.”
Her hands are shaking now, fingers still tracing that water ring like it’s a prayer circle. “The worst part is I know what I’m doing while I’m doing it. I can feel myself turning on the charm, angling for the validation, planning my exit even as I’m suggesting we get coffee. It’s like watching myself from outside my body, and I can’t, I don’t know how to stop.”
Brendan hasn’t moved, but something in his posture has shifted. Not softening exactly, but no longer braced for impact.
“Killian’s mother doesn’t remember him some days,” Roisin says, and now the tears come, quiet and ugly, nothing performed about them. “He told me that, and I smiled and touched his arm and said something comforting, and the whole time I was thinking about how to keep him interested without actually committing. What kind of person does that? What kind of person uses someone’s grief as. As foreplay?”
The word lands between them like a stone in still water.
“I thought if I stayed charming enough, warm enough, if I kept things breezy and fun, I could have connection without the drowning.” Roisin’s laugh is bitter, nothing like the musical sound that usually draws people to her. “But you can’t have it both ways, can you? You can’t be intimate and untouchable at the same time.”
She wipes her face with the back of her hand, smearing mascara. The gesture is so uncharacteristically graceless that Caoimhe feels something crack in her chest.
“The thing is, I don’t even know what I’m afraid of anymore. My father’s been dead eight years. My mother moved to Cork and married a lovely man who actually sees her. The threat’s gone but I’m still running the same patterns, still performing the same escape routes.” She looks at Brendan properly now, no charm in it, just exhaustion. “I’ve hurt you. I’ve hurt Killian. I’ve hurt people whose names I’ve already forgotten. And for what? To prove I’m not my mother? To prove I’m free?” Her voice drops to barely a whisper. “I’m not free. I’m just alone.”
She meets Brendan’s eyes and sees the recognition there. He knows about running, about building walls and calling them freedom. “You asked me once why I became a teacher. I said it was because I loved children, and that’s true, but it’s also because they leave. Every June they move on to the next class, the next teacher, and I get to start fresh with new ones who don’t know me well enough to expect anything.” Her laugh is hollow. “Even my career is designed around people leaving me before I have to leave them. How fucked up is that? I’ve built my entire life around the fear of drowning, and all I’ve done is drown myself in loneliness instead.”
“The worst part is I know I’m doing it.” Her voice cracks slightly, the performance finally fracturing. “I watch myself flirt and charm and keep three different men thinking they might have a chance, and I hate myself for it, but stopping feels like.”Like if I stop being delightful, if I just sit still and let someone actually see me, they’ll realize I’m empty. That I’ve nothing to offer except this performance of warmth, and underneath there’s just fear and selfishness dressed up in colorful scarves.”
The tears come finally, not the dramatic kind she’s performed before, but something quieter, more defeated. They slide down her freckled cheeks while she sits motionless, hands folded in her lap like a child awaiting judgment. “I’m exhausted, Brendan. Exhausted from being perpetually delightful and available and never once real with anyone, least of all myself.”
She wipes her face with her palm, smearing mascara across her temple. “You’re right to leave. Everyone should.” Her voice drops to barely a whisper. “I just needed you to understand it’s not about you. It’s never been about any of you. It’s about me being too cowardly to stop performing long enough to discover if there’s anything genuine underneath all this charm.”
She doesn’t reach for him, doesn’t deploy the smile that’s saved her before. Just sits with her confession settling around them both.
The words tumble out in the dim workshop light, each one stripped of the careful construction she’s maintained for years. Caoimhe wraps her arms around herself, suddenly cold despite the warmth from Killian’s wood stove.
“My mother used to be brilliant, you know. Really brilliant.” Her voice catches on the past tense. “She had a place at Trinity. Wanted to study literature, maybe teach. Then she met my father, and suddenly there was a wedding, then me, then my sister, and somewhere in all that she just… disappeared into someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone who used to be.”
She picks up a wood shaving from Killian’s workbench, rolling it between her fingers until it crumbles. “I watched her fade year by year in that town. Watched her sharp edges get worn down by grocery shopping and school runs and parish council meetings. She’d look at me sometimes with this expression. Not resentment, which would’ve been easier. Just this quiet warning. Like she was showing me my future if I wasn’t careful.”
The confession tastes like failure. “So I left. Got the scholarship, got the job, got the promotions. Built this whole identity around being untouchable, uncommitted, always moving. I thought I was so fucking clever, choosing freedom.” She laughs, bitter and small. “But I’m thirty-five and I’ve never let anyone close enough to matter. The London job? It’s just another city where no one knows me well enough to expect anything.”
She finally looks at Killian, her green eyes raw. “Everyone thinks I’m brave for leaving, for building this life. But I’m just terrified. Terrified that if I stop running, if I let myself need anything or anyone, I’ll wake up one day and realize I’ve become her: brilliant and bitter and wondering where my life went.”
The words come out fractured, her carefully neutral accent cracking like old paint. “I’m not.”I’m not Niamh Byrne. That’s just a name I found on a headstone in Glasnevin.”
She can’t look at them, these people who’ve somehow become witnesses to her unraveling. “Niamh Fitzgerald. From Clare. Three years ago I left my shoes on the beach at Spanish Point and walked away from everything.” Her voice drops to something raw and Clare-inflected. “My family wasn’t devastated. They were relieved. One less disappointment at Sunday dinner.”
She gestures helplessly at the canvases lining her studio walls, landscapes that bleed with intimate knowledge. “These are the only honest things I’ve made since. Every cliff, every field, every stone wall, I’m painting my way back to a place I can never actually return to.” A bitter laugh escapes. “The art world loves them. They don’t know they’re buying evidence. Every signature is a lie, but every brushstroke is the truest thing I know how to say.”
Brendan doesn’t stand when Roisin’s tears finally come. He stays on the workshop stool, solid and still, one hand resting near hers on the scarred workbench without quite touching. His daughter’s drawing, a house with an oversized door, because Aoife believes everyone should be able to get in easily, presses against his chest through his jacket pocket.
“I came back because I’d rather be honestly uncertain than successfully miserable,” he says finally, his voice carrying the exhaustion of someone who’s already done the hard work of self-examination. “You’re not a bad person, Roisin. You’re just performing a version of yourself you think people want.” He offers a sad half-smile. “I know. I did it for fifteen years in Boston.”
He stands then, but gently. “Figure out who you are when nobody’s watching. That’s the person worth knowing.”
The text arrives while Caoimhe’s still on the boardwalk, her phone illuminating Killian’s profile beside her. Three paragraphs, littered with autocorrect casualties, “pubic” hastily corrected to “public,” “cashmere” initially “cash mere.” The vulnerability in those digital stumbles hits harder than polish would have.
Deirdre confesses she’s been studying Caoimhe since their university economics seminar, memorizing the way she dismantled arguments without apology. The admission feels uncomfortably like devotion, but there’s steel underneath: I need someone who won’t let me be decorative.
His hands grip the iron railing, knuckles whitening. “I’ve been telling myself wanting anything beyond Mam’s comfort would be selfish.” The words come rough, unpracticed. “But that’s shite, isn’t it? I’ve been hiding behind duty because it’s safer than risking,” He stops, jaw working. “You. All evening. That restless energy, like you’re ready to bolt any second. It’s everything I’ve buried. The wanting to be seen, not just useful. And I’m terrified there’s nothing underneath worth keeping if I stop fixing things for everyone else.”
The silence between them feels different from the pub’s chaos. Not empty, but full of things neither knows how to say. Caoimhe watches Killian’s profile against the city lights, the way his jaw tightens and releases like he’s rehearsing words he’ll never speak. She’s spent twelve years perfecting the art of leaving conversations before they get difficult, but something about the cold air and the river’s indifference makes her stay.
“You don’t have to,” she starts, but he shakes his head.
“I do, actually.” His laugh is bitter, self-aware. “Because if I don’t say it now, I’ll convince myself it doesn’t matter by morning.”
She shifts her weight, close enough now that their sleeves brush. The contact feels deliberate, though neither acknowledges it. A gust of wind sends her hair across her face and she doesn’t bother pushing it back, using it as a shield.
“The thing about caregiving,” Killian says, staring at the water, “is that everyone tells you you’re noble. Self-sacrificing. And Christ, it feels good to be needed that completely.” He turns to look at her then, and his eyes are storm-grey and tired. “But somewhere along the way, I stopped being a person who wanted things. I became a person who provided them.”
Caoimhe’s throat tightens. She recognizes this. The way you can hollow yourself out in service of an identity that feels safer than authenticity.
“You came to the reunion,” she says quietly. “That’s wanting something.”
“My cousin dragged me.” But his mouth quirks. “Though I didn’t fight very hard.”
“No,” she agrees, and the word hangs between them like a question neither is ready to answer. The river keeps moving, indifferent to their hesitation, and the city hums around them with the promise of complications neither has agreed to yet.
His mother’s decline taught him that people slip away in increments, not all at once. “She’ll remember how to make soda bread but not my name,” he says, voice cracking slightly. “She’ll tell me stories about her childhood like they happened yesterday, then ask when her husband’s coming home. He’s been dead six years.”
Caoimhe feels something shift in her chest, a recognition she doesn’t want to name.
“And I realized I’ve been doing the same thing she is. Living in a version of the past that feels safer than the present.” He finally looks at her, really looks, and there’s something raw in his expression that makes her want to both move closer and run. “I tell myself I’m staying for her, that I’m being responsible, that someone has to.”But Christ, Caoimhe, I’ve been using duty as an excuse not to risk anything. Not to want anything. Because wanting means you might not get it, and I’ve had enough loss.”
The admission hangs between them like breath made visible in cold air.
The confession spills out rougher now, stripped of the careful control he usually maintains. “I haven’t been on a proper date in three years,” Killian says, and there’s something almost defiant in his tone. “Not because there’s no time, though Christ knows there isn’t much, but because I convinced myself it would be selfish. Cruel, even, to ask someone to sign up for this.” He gestures vaguely back toward the city, toward responsibilities waiting. “But that’s shite, isn’t it? The truth is I’m terrified. Terrified someone will see all of this,” his voice catches, “, and decide I’m not worth the trouble. That I’m already too broken, too buried in obligation. So I just… stopped trying. Told myself it was noble.” His laugh is bitter, self-lacerating. “Turns out cowardice looks a lot like duty if you frame it right.”
“You’re after doing the same calculation I do,” he says, and there’s recognition in his eyes that makes her chest tight. “Every time something good appears, you’re already working out the angles, planning the exit strategy. I see you doing it. Saw it the moment you walked into the Brazen Head, clocking the doors.” His hand moves closer to hers on the railing. “The difference is you’ve perfected the leaving, and I’ve perfected the staying until I’ve vanished entirely. But we’re both avoiding the same risk: actually being present for someone who might stay and leave, who might choose us anyway despite knowing exactly how difficult we are.”
His voice drops to barely audible. “I need to learn that asking for help isn’t abandoning her. That she’d want me to have something beyond her care.” His fingers brush Caoimhe’s knuckles. “Maybe you could teach me about choosing to leave when it’s right, and I could show you that staying can be brave.” He’s not asking for promises. Just permission to want again. Her. This. Terrified and honest together.
The cursor blinks accusingly in the pre-dawn darkness of her hotel room. Caoimhe has rewritten the opening paragraph four times, each version more corporate than the last, before she forces herself to stop performing and just write what she means.
Dear Richard,
Thank you for the London opportunity. I’m proposing something better.
She deletes “better,” types “different,” deletes that too. Settles on “more strategic.”
The proposal unfolds across three pages: market analysis of Dublin’s tech sector, the untapped potential in purpose-driven partnerships, projected revenue streams that satisfy the board’s obsession with growth metrics. She buries the personal motivation deep in the business case, camouflaging her desire to stay with language about “regional market penetration” and “authentic stakeholder engagement.”
When she mentions Deirdre’s foundation, she’s careful to frame it as exploratory, one potential pilot among several options. No need to admit she’s already imagining their arguments, the productive friction of Deirdre’s optimism grinding against her skepticism until something genuinely useful emerges.
Her finger hovers over the send button for a full minute. This is the moment. London means safety, distance, the life she’s already proven she can navigate. Dublin means staying put, building something from scratch, admitting she wants roots.
Killian’s voice surfaces through her exhaustion: What if you stopped running?
She hits send before the fear can stop her.
The whoosh of the email departing feels like jumping off a cliff. Her stomach drops. She immediately opens her messages, types to Killian: Did something terrifying. Coffee later?
His reply arrives before she can set the phone down: Proud of you. Yes.
Two words, and somehow her hands stop shaking. She closes the laptop, watches dawn paint the Liffey gold, and lets herself imagine staying.
The café meeting looms like a negotiation she hasn’t properly prepared for. Caoimhe arrives fifteen minutes early: a tactical choice, claiming the psychological advantage of being settled when Deirdre arrives. She orders black coffee, opens her laptop to project busyness, then closes it again because that’s exactly the kind of performance she’s supposedly done with.
Deirdre sweeps in precisely on time, cashmere coat and that infuriating smile, but there’s something different. Nervousness, maybe. She’s carrying a leather portfolio that looks expensive but well-used, not just for show.
“I won’t pretend we’re suddenly friends,” Caoimhe says before Deirdre can sit. “But I looked at your foundation’s work. The housing initiative in Ballymun? That’s actually clever.”
Deirdre’s smile shifts, becomes real. “I won’t pretend your reputation doesn’t intimidate me. But I need someone who’ll tell me when I’m being naïve.” She sets down the portfolio. “So. Shall we fight productively?”
Caoimhe finds herself almost smiling back. “That’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me.”
“Then we’re already making progress.”
The phone call comes while Caoimhe’s still staring at her unsent email, finger hovering over the button that will redirect her entire career. Deirdre’s name on the screen makes her stomach tighten: some combination of irritation and something uncomfortably like hope.
“I’ve been thinking,” Deirdre says, no preamble, the brightness in her voice undercut by something rawer. “About what you said. About partnership.”
Caoimhe’s deflection rises automatically: I was drunk, you were optimistic, let’s forget it. But Killian’s words echo: choosing courage over comfort.
“Dawson Street café,” she hears herself say. “Tomorrow, two o’clock.”
After hanging up, she opens a new browser tab. Deirdre’s foundation work fills the screen. Housing initiatives, microfinance programs, actual impact metrics. Substantive. Damn it.
The resentment doesn’t vanish. But it shifts into something sharper, more useful. Competition, maybe. Or possibility.
They claim facing tables by the window, neither willing to cede the tactical advantage of choosing seats. Caoimhe’s folder hits the table with deliberate weight; Deirdre’s leather portfolio follows, softer but equally intentional.
“So,” Caoimhe begins, then stops. The script she’d rehearsed (sharp, controlling, defensive) suddenly feels exhausting.
Deirdre saves her. “I’ve actual questions. Not polite ones.”
“Thank Christ,” Caoimhe breathes, and they begin.
The napkins multiply. Decision-making protocols. Conflict resolution frameworks. Revenue splits that acknowledge Deirdre’s capital but protect Caoimhe’s autonomy.
“We put everything in writing,” Caoimhe insists. “No assumptions about what friendship or goodwill covers.”
“Agreed. I want a partner, not a charity case who resents me.” Deirdre’s directness surprises them both.
When their hands meet across scattered napkins, Caoimhe’s grip is firm, almost challenging. The hope that flickers catches her off-guard: she’d forgotten what building toward something felt like.
Her text to Killian is brief: Learning to stay. Terrifying. Worth it?
His reply arrives before she’s pocketed the phone: Terrifying usually is.
The interview at the fintech startup happens because of a message from Liam Brennan, who Brendan vaguely remembers from football matches fifteen years ago. “My cousin’s hiring,” the message read. “Mentioned you know distributed systems. Interested?”
Brendan sits across from the CTO, a woman younger than him with purple-streaked hair and a directness he’d forgotten was normal here, and finds himself explaining Boston not as achievement but as context. “I built scalable architecture for a company that treated engineers like machines. I’m looking for somewhere that remembers we’re human.”
She doesn’t blink. “We close at six. No weekend emails. Your daughter’s school play trumps product launches.”
He gets the offer that afternoon.
The Returned Yanks Support Group meets in a pub basement in Phibsborough, twelve people nursing pints and admitting what they can’t tell their families. Brendan recognizes the particular exhaustion in their faces: the bone-deep tiredness of translating yourself constantly, of being too Irish abroad and too foreign at home.
“I thought I’d be triumphant,” he admits when it’s his turn. “Successful emigrant returns in glory. Instead I’m forty-two, divorced, living in my sister’s spare room, and my daughter asks why Daddy’s accent sounds funny.”
A woman across the circle, Siobhan, back from Melbourne, laughs without cruelty. “At least you have the accent. I came back sounding like I’m doing a bad Steve Irwin impression.”
The laughter is recognition. They’re all performing return, pretending the years away didn’t change them, that slipping back into Ireland is seamless rather than daily negotiation.
When someone mentions the childcare swap network, Brendan takes notes. When another talks about the solicitor who helped navigate credential recognition, he photographs the business card. This isn’t networking. It’s triage.
Walking home, he texts Niamh: Know a good solicitor? Might have a lead for your situation.
Her reply is immediate: You’re serious about helping?
We take care of our own, he types, meaning it.
The café in Rathmines has mismatched furniture and excellent coffee, the kind of place that didn’t exist before Brendan left. He sits with four others from the WhatsApp group, all of them carrying the particular tension of people who left Ireland when leaving meant something and returned when returning meant something else entirely.
Siobhan from Melbourne goes first, her accent caught between continents. “My marriage lasted six months after we moved back. Turns out we only worked when we were both foreigners together.”
Nods around the table. No one offers platitudes.
Marcus, back from Toronto, stirs his Americano. “I’m forty-three, sleeping on my brother’s couch, and my mother keeps asking when I’m getting my own place. Like I didn’t own a house in Canada.”
When it’s Brendan’s turn, the words come easier than expected. “My wife chose California over us. Over Aoife.” He pauses. “I keep wondering if I failed by leaving or by coming back.”
“Yes,” Siobhan says simply, and somehow that helps.
Someone orders more scones. They exchange numbers not for professional networking but for three a.m. panic texts, for people who understand that home is more complicated than geography.
The technical work takes three hours, Brendan’s fingers moving across keys with the confidence of someone who understands that systems are just stories told in data. Niamh watches him build her digital existence back from nothing, occasionally supplying dates and details she’s kept locked in her head for three years.
“You’re not going to ask why,” she says finally.
He glances up, adjusting his glasses. “I came back from Boston with an eight-year-old and no wife. People who need to know will ask. Everyone else can mind their own business.”
She laughs, surprising herself. “That’s very Dublin of you.”
“I’m relearning.” He saves the file, encrypts it. “We’re all rebuilding something, aren’t we?”
The café hums with mid-morning noise, providing cover. Brendan opens his laptop between their coffee cups, angling the screen away from passing waiters. “The trick is making the timeline coherent without raising flags,” he explains, voice low. “Three years isn’t long enough to forget you existed, but it’s long enough that people assume their records are incomplete.”
Niamh watches his hands move across the keyboard. “You’ve done this before.”
“Different context. Same principle.” He doesn’t elaborate. “I’ll need your real details. Just between us.”
She hesitates, then begins to speak.
The week becomes a rhythm of coffee shops and careful documentation. Brendan navigates bureaucratic labyrinths with patient competence while Niamh provides fragments of her previous life. He never asks why she ran. She notices this absence of judgment, how he treats reinvention as practical problem rather than moral failure.
“You’re not just hiding from something,” he says during their third session, surrounded by forms and digital files. “You’re building toward something too.”
She looks up sharply, recognizing the observation as earned rather than assumed. “And you?”
He shows her Aoife’s drawing: a house with “HOME” written above it in wobbly letters. “She drew it the day we moved back. I’m still figuring out if I believe it.”
Niamh touches the photo gently, her paint-stained fingers careful against the screen. “Maybe we both get to decide what home means now.”
The signature sits on the page like an accusation and an absolution simultaneously. Niamh Fitzgerald. The letters look foreign despite being shaped by her own hand, as though someone else has borrowed her fingers for this particular act of reclamation.
“That’s the hardest one,” the solicitor says, not unkindly. She slides another form across the mahogany desk. “The rest get easier.”
They don’t, not really. Each signature requires the same small act of courage, the same decision to exist again under a name she’d buried three years ago. The solicitor’s office smells of paper and furniture polish and something else, possibility, perhaps, or simply the accumulated weight of other people’s fresh starts documented in filing cabinets lining the walls.
“How many people do this?” Niamh asks, halfway through the stack.
The solicitor removes her reading glasses, lets them hang against her cardigan. “More than you’d think. Ireland’s small enough that sometimes you need to become someone else just to breathe.” She taps the form. “Though most don’t have your particular flair for documentation.”
Niamh had arrived with a folder of carefully preserved evidence: her birth certificate, her old passport, photographs that proved continuity of existence. The detritus of a life she’d meant to leave behind but couldn’t quite destroy.
“The affidavit needs a witness,” the solicitor continues. “Someone who knew you before and can confirm you’re the same person.”
Niamh’s pen freezes. She hadn’t considered this requirement: that reclaiming herself would require someone else’s testimony, that she couldn’t simply declare her own existence valid.
“I might know someone,” she says slowly, thinking of Brendan’s patient competence, his refusal to judge. “Someone who understands about starting over.”
The solicitor nods, making a note. “Bring them next week. We’ll make it official.”
Official. The word tastes strange, like something she’d forgotten she was allowed to want.
The café smells of coffee and rain-damp wool, the afternoon crowd providing enough ambient noise that their conversation disappears into the general hum. Brendan’s laptop screen reflects in his glasses as he navigates through backend systems with the casual fluency of someone who’s spent decades making digital infrastructure bend to his will.
“The trick,” he says, creating a backdated blog post, “is that nobody actually checks timestamps closely. They just want the shape of a life to make sense.” He shows her a travel blog he’s constructing, posts about artist residencies in Portugal, a studio share in Berlin. All vague enough to be unverifiable, specific enough to feel real.
Niamh watches him fabricate her recent history with the precision of someone solving a particularly elegant puzzle. “Isn’t this dishonest?”
“It’s curation.” He looks up, his expression gentle. “You existed during those years. You just existed quietly. We’re not inventing a person: we’re giving the person who already exists a story that doesn’t require explaining the parts you’re not ready to share.”
“Is that what you did? Coming back from Boston?”
His smile is rueful. “Still doing it.”
The first canvas feels heavier than it should, or perhaps her arms have forgotten how to bear the weight of exposure. Niamh grips the ornate frame, salvaged from a skip in Rathmines, gilded edges flaking, and pivots it outward. The Cliffs of Moher stare back at her, rendered in the golden light of an August morning she remembers with painful clarity.
She moves to the next. The Burren’s limestone, grey and ancient. Then the Atlantic, furious against rocks she’d climbed barefoot at seventeen.
Each rotation feels like confession. By the time she reaches the final canvas, a small study of her family’s cottage, painted from memory, the studio has transformed entirely. No longer a cell. A gallery of evidence, yes, but also of survival.
Her phone feels foreign in paint-stained hands as she photographs each piece, the camera clicking like a heartbeat returning to normal rhythm.
The gallery smells of fresh paint and possibility. Caoimhe arrives unannounced, having seen the announcement on Instagram: she’d been following “Niamh Byrne” for months without knowing. She studies the Cliffs piece, recognizing something in the brushwork: longing rendered visible. “You’re braver than I am,” she tells Niamh quietly. “Running toward something instead of just away.” They stand together, two women who’ve spent years fleeing, finally learning to stand still.
The studio transforms as she works: not the physical space, but its meaning. She props the window open despite the October chill, letting Dublin’s sounds drift in: traffic, laughter, a busker’s fiddle from the canal. The paintings watch her like old friends finally acknowledged. She brews proper tea instead of instant, sits at her easel rather than perching on the bed. When footsteps pass her door, she doesn’t freeze. The flat breathes differently now: less hiding place, more home.
Caoimhe sits cross-legged on the hotel bed, laptop balanced on her knees, the London offer glowing accusingly from the screen. The salary figure still makes her breath catch. Enough to never worry, never need, never have to ask anyone for anything. Which is precisely the problem, she realizes with the clarity that comes after too much honesty and not enough sleep.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard. She’s drafted seventeen versions of the email to Deirdre, each one more elaborately casual than the last, each one a performance of someone who doesn’t care. This time she types: “Coffee Monday? Serious conversation about your project. I’m listening now.” She hits send before she can workshop it into oblivion.
The phone feels heavy in her hand. Her sister’s name sits in her contacts like a small accusation. Twelve years of avoided calls, of Christmas cards with no return address, of building a life so self-sufficient it required no one. The phone rings twice before Siobhan answers, wary.
“I’m thinking about staying,” Caoimhe says, and the words taste strange. “In Dublin. Not just visiting. I need to tell you why I left.”
The silence stretches. Then: “I’ve been waiting twelve years for this conversation.”
It pours out. The suffocation of everyone’s expectations, the terror of becoming predictable, the shame of wanting more than the life mapped out for her. Siobhan’s anger comes sharp and clean, no longer festering. They cry. They argue. They laugh at something their mother said fifteen years ago. When Siobhan finally says, “You could have just told us you were scared,” Caoimhe realizes how much energy she’s spent running from people who would have simply held the door open.
Killian’s text arrives as she’s wiping her eyes: “Workshop tour Saturday? No pressure.”
She types and deletes six responses before settling on honesty. “Yes. Fair warning: I’m terrible at workshops and feelings, but I’d like to try both.”
Brendan sat at the kitchen table, laptop open, Aoife’s crayons scattered between his coffee mug and the toast crumbs. She was drawing what appeared to be a purple horse or possibly a dragon. With Aoife, you never quite knew until she explained the elaborate backstory.
His LinkedIn profile stared back at him, full of careful euphemisms. “Pursuing new opportunities.” “Exploring options in the Irish market.” Corporate-speak for “came home because everything fell apart.”
He deleted it all and typed the truth: “Returned to Dublin to build a stable life for my daughter. Fifteen years in Boston tech, now looking for work that lets me be the parent she needs.”
His finger hovered over “Save.” This was professional suicide, surely. Admitting weakness, admitting failure, admitting he’d chosen his child over his career trajectory.
He clicked it anyway.
Three notifications arrived within the hour. Former colleagues from Boston: not condolences but contract offers, introductions to Dublin firms, remote opportunities. One wrote: “About time someone was honest about this stuff. Let’s talk.”
When Niamh’s text about the gallery opening arrived, Aoife peered over his shoulder. “Will there be fancy biscuits?”
Brendan laughed, something loosening in his chest. “Probably. Should we get you a fancy dress?”
“Obviously,” she said, returning to her purple dragon-horse with renewed focus.
Deirdre’s fountain pen moved across cream-colored paper, her handwriting as elegant as everything else about her, but the words were different this time. Not aspirational corporate-speak but questions: “What barriers am I not seeing? Who gets excluded by default?” She’d spent Tuesday evening in a community center in Ballymun, listening to women who’d built support networks from nothing while she’d been writing checks to feel useful.
When she emailed Caoimhe the shared document, she resisted the urge to polish it first. The rough edges were the point. Three coffee shops listed. None in Ballsbridge, all in neighborhoods where Caoimhe might feel less like she was entering enemy territory.
The cursor blinked in the empty reply field for two days before Caoimhe’s response arrived: “Thursday. The place on Camden Street. I’ll bring my own questions.”
The workshop smelled of cedar and possibility. Killian had swept twice, then stopped himself, Caoimhe would see through performance. He left the half-finished chair visible, its joints exposed like honesty. The coffee maker gurgled as his phone lit up: respite care approved. His cousin’s reply made him laugh aloud. When Caoimhe’s text arrived (“Ten minutes away”) he didn’t second-guess the invitation. He simply opened the door wider.
The messages arrive in bursts throughout Sunday evening. Caoimhe watches her phone light up from the bath, whiskey glass balanced on the tub’s edge. Brendan’s daughter has drawn them all with eyebrows like angry caterpillars. Niamh’s sketch captures something true: the masks they’d worn slipping just enough to reveal actual faces underneath. When Caoimhe types her joke about running, she means it and doesn’t, simultaneously. Killian’s wood grain photo makes her smile at something she can’t quite name.
The autumn sun felt like an accusation against her eyelids. Caoimhe arrived at half-nine, which was ridiculous, she was never early for anything, and immediately regretted it. The park was full of joggers and tourists and people whose lives weren’t quietly imploding, all of them moving with purpose while she stood by the bridge like someone waiting to be stood up.
She forced herself onto a bench, crossing her legs, uncrossing them, checking her phone. The group chat had gone quiet after midnight, after the confessions and sketches and her own stupid joke about running away. In daylight, vulnerability felt like a mistake she couldn’t unsend.
Brendan materialized beside her with two paper cups, the expensive kind from the place near Grafton Street. “You look like you need this more than I do.”
She took the coffee without the deflection she’d normally deploy. “Cheers.”
They sat in silence that wasn’t quite companionable but wasn’t awful either. Niamh appeared on the opposite side of the lake, settling cross-legged on the grass with her sketchbook, putting distance between herself and the group even while showing up. Smart.
Caoimhe’s phone buzzed. *Respite care running behind. 20 mins?. No rush.”
Deirdre arrived in cashmere and apologetic energy, carrying a wicker basket like she’d wandered out of a period drama. Caoimhe felt the familiar irritation rise but caught herself before the comment formed.
“Thanks,” she said instead, taking a croissant that probably cost more than her breakfast usually did.
Deirdre’s surprise was visible, quickly masked. “They’re from that place on Drury Street. The almond ones are brilliant.”
The silence that followed wasn’t comfortable. But it wasn’t hostile either, and that felt like progress neither of them had expected to make.
They walked the perimeter path in careful parallel, maintaining a meter of space that felt like negotiated territory. Caoimhe kept her hands in her jacket pockets, resisting the urge to check her phone.
“I’ve been treating you like a symbol,” she said finally, watching a swan glide past with infuriating serenity. “Old money, effortless privilege, everything I was supposed to want to become or destroy. Wasn’t actually about you.”
Deirdre’s laugh was unexpected, almost bitter. “And I’ve been performing at you. Look how useful I can be with my family’s money, look how I care about the right things. Like if I tried hard enough, you’d validate that I’m not just decorative.”
“Christ, we’re both exhausting.”
“Monumentally.”
They rounded the corner by the fountain. Caoimhe pulled out her phone, opened her notes app. “Right. Actual business discussion. Your capital and connections, my expertise in scaling operations. But I need decision-making authority on implementation, and you need your name on the work, not hidden in the acknowledgments.”
Deirdre stopped walking. “You mean that.”
“I’m tired of performing too,” Caoimhe said. “Your estate needs tech infrastructure consulting. Brendan’s brilliant. I’ll send his details, but you talk to him directly. No puppet strings.”
On the bench by the lake, Brendan’s voice went quiet enough that Niamh and Killian had to lean closer. “Aoife asked me last week if we came home because she was bad.” He stared at his hands. “Eight years old and she thinks she’s the reason everything fell apart.”
Killian exhaled slowly. “Mam didn’t know me yesterday. Called me by my da’s name, asked when he was coming home from the boats.” His jaw worked. “He’s been dead six years.”
Niamh’s fingers twisted together. “I’ve been so afraid of being found I forgot what it felt like to be seen.” She looked between them. “This, talking like this, I haven’t done this in three years.”
Brendan felt something unknot in his chest. Not fixed. Just less alone.
Killian arrived breathless, sawdust clinging to his collar like evidence. “Sorry, Mam’s carer was late,”
“I’ve been researching respite programs,” Brendan interrupted, pulling out his phone. “Boston contacts, but the models translate.”
Deirdre leaned forward. “Our foundation funds dementia support. I could connect you with the director, no obligations.”
Killian blinked, visibly recalibrating his reflexive refusal. Caoimhe watched him consider accepting help, something shifting in her chest. When he sat, their shoulders pressed together. Neither moved away.
The grass dampened their clothes but nobody suggested moving. Caoimhe found herself lying back, staring through willow branches at clouds, Killian’s presence warm beside her without touching. Deirdre’s laugh (genuine, not performative) startled them all. When Niamh’s phone buzzed with a call from a Clare number, she silenced it but didn’t flee. Progress, Caoimhe thought, came in increments: staying instead of running, maybe instead of no, three hours instead of thirty minutes.
The collection happens organically, without Deirdre orchestrating it. Someone mentions car trouble and mounting repair bills, and Killian offers to look at it, then Caoimhe cuts through the polite deflection with “How much do you actually need?” The directness startles everyone into honesty. A figure gets named, wallets emerge, and within minutes there’s enough cash on the table to cover it plus a bit extra. Deirdre adds her contribution last, matching rather than exceeding the others, learning something about solidarity versus charity.
Aoife looks up from her coloring, announces she’s hungry, and the adults realize it’s past eight. They order food. Too much of it, sharing plates like they’ve done this before instead of for the first time. The conversation fragments into smaller clusters: Brendan and two others comparing notes on Dublin’s school system, Niamh listening more than speaking but not fleeing when someone asks about her art, Killian showing photos of a commission piece on his phone.
Caoimhe watches it unfold with her usual wariness, waiting for the performance to reassert itself, for someone to start curating the experience into something Instagram-worthy. But the room stays messy. Arguments about politics, someone’s terrible joke landing flat, Aoife spilling juice and three people moving simultaneously to help. Real, she thinks. Uncomfortably, inconveniently real.
When they finally stand to leave, there’s an awkward moment where no one knows the proper goodbye for whatever this is. Not quite friends, not exactly a support group, something without a name yet. Deirdre suggests same time next month with uncharacteristic tentativeness, and the murmured agreements sound more like questions than commitments.
Outside, Killian walks Caoimhe toward the Liffey, their shoulders bumping in the narrow street. “Think they’ll actually come back?” he asks.
“Some will.” She surprises herself by adding, “I will.”
The debate starts civil but turns fractious when someone suggests mandatory attendance. Caoimhe bristles immediately (“We’re not children needing roll call”) while Deirdre counters that without structure, good intentions dissolve into nothing. Niamh’s voice cuts through, quiet but firm: “I need to know I can disappear without twelve people asking why.”
The room goes silent. It’s the most she’s said all evening.
Killian shifts in his chair. “My mother has good days and bad days. I can’t promise anything weeks ahead.” Others murmur agreement, childcare, work travel, the unpredictable architecture of adult lives.
Brendan, surprisingly, offers the solution: rotating responsibility means no single person carries the burden, and absence becomes logistical rather than personal failure. Someone suggests keeping the group text strictly functional. No forced intimacy through screens.
When they finally settle on first Thursdays, eight o’clock, The Brazen Head, the agreement feels almost accidental. Yet something shifts in the room’s atmosphere, a collective recognition that they’ve just committed to something neither friendship nor obligation, but perhaps more sustainable than either.
Caoimhe watches the efficiency with genuine surprise, Deirdre’s fingers flying across her phone screen while simultaneously fielding questions, Brendan already sketching website wireframes on a beer mat, Killian texting his guild contacts. The coordination happens without hierarchy, each person contributing what they actually have rather than performing concern.
When Deirdre mentions the foundation match, she catches Caoimhe’s eye, almost apologetic. “Only if it doesn’t feel like I’m,”
“It doesn’t,” Caoimhe interrupts, and means it. There’s no performance in Deirdre’s competence, no savior complex. Just someone using tools she happened to inherit.
Within twenty minutes, the total hits three thousand euros. Someone’s phone chimes with a confirmation, and the room exhales collectively. They’ve actually done something. Built something real from this fragile, accidental gathering.
Aoife becomes the room’s gravitational center without trying, drifting between conversations with her sketchpad like a small ambassador. She presents Niamh with a careful duck, all orange feet and concentration. For Killian, a tree with branches reaching the page’s edge. Caoimhe receives a house sprouting windows like flowers. Too many, architecturally impossible, perfect.
“Are you a princess?” Aoife asks Deirdre, studying the cashmere coat with scientific interest.
Deirdre’s laugh comes unguarded, genuine. “Just someone who’s always freezing, love.”
When Aoife finally surrenders to sleep against Brendan’s shoulder, the adults instinctively soften their voices, creating a protective quiet around her. Someone (Caoimhe thinks it’s Killian) murmurs that they’re building something worth not disturbing, and the observation lands with unexpected weight.
Brendan’s eyes glisten. Before he can deflect or minimize, three people offer babysitting, understanding what he hasn’t said: his presence here requires help he’s been too proud to request.
The photograph catches them mid-arrangement. Aoife’s drowsy face pressed against her father’s collar. Niamh at the edge, present but ready to bolt, her fingers paint-stained even in the dim pub light.
When it appears in the group chat, nobody comments immediately. The silence feels like agreement: they’re documenting something fragile, a beginning that might not survive scrutiny but deserves acknowledgment anyway.
The workshop settles into a different quality of silence after Killian speaks. Outside, a Dublin rain begins. The soft, persistent kind that sounds like static against the high windows. Caoimhe keeps her fingers on his palm, feeling the ridge of scar tissue near his thumb, the roughness earned through years of honest work. Her own hands are smooth by comparison, manicured for boardrooms and client dinners, and she’s suddenly ashamed of them.
“I don’t know how to want things without an exit strategy,” she says finally, withdrawing her hand but not looking away. “Every relationship, every job, every city. The London offer had an end date built in. Two years, then reassess. But staying in Dublin? That’s open-ended. That’s terrifying.”
Killian picks up a piece of cherry wood, turns it in his hands. The grain catches the light from the bare bulb overhead. “This is from a tree that fell in the storm three winters back,” he says, seemingly off topic. “Owner was going to burn it for firewood. I asked if I could have it instead.” He runs his thumb along the smooth surface. “It’ll be a headboard for someone’s bed. Something they’ll touch every night for decades, if I do it right. The tree doesn’t get to choose what it becomes, but I get to choose whether I honor what it was.”
She understands he’s not really talking about wood.
“You think I’m honoring something by staying?” Her voice is barely audible over the rain.
“I think you’re letting yourself become something instead of always being about to leave.” He sets the wood down carefully. “That’s not the same as being trapped. That’s just… being.”
The stove ticks as it cools. Caoimhe’s laptop has gone dark from inactivity. Neither of them moves to change it.
She reaches across the scarred workbench and traces the callus on his palm, feeling the raised ridge where a chisel slipped years ago. His hand stills under hers, warm and solid and real in a way that makes her chest tighten.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispers. “Be still. Stay. Want something without measuring the cost of leaving it.”
His fingers curl slightly, not quite holding her hand but not pulling away. “You’re doing it now.”
“For how long, though?” The question escapes before she can stop it, raw and honest in a way that would mortify her tomorrow. “How long before I panic and book a flight somewhere?”
“Maybe that’s not the question.” His thumb moves across her knuckles, tentative. “Maybe it’s just: do you want to be here tonight?”
The rain intensifies against the windows. The workshop smells of linseed oil and possibility.
“Yes,” she says, and feels the word settle into her bones like something she might, eventually, learn to trust. “I want to be here tonight.”
His smile is small, careful, devastating. “Then that’s enough.”
She brings him coffee in the mornings she can manage it. Flat whites from the place on Manor Street that opens at seven. He teaches her to read wood grain, guiding her fingers along oak’s cathedral patterns, ash’s cleaner lines. “Close your eyes,” he says, and she does, learning timber the way he knows it: by touch, by weight, by the whisper it makes under a blade.
She perches on a stool near the door those first weeks, laptop balanced, explaining cloud architecture while he cuts mortises. He listens like her work matters, asks questions that prove he’s followed her logic.
The evening she moves closer without announcing it, he glances up and says nothing, but his smile catches in the corner of his mouth.
She notices everything: how his shoulders tense until the night nurse texts, how he measures twice but cuts with absolute conviction, how he’s teaching her that staying isn’t surrender.
The kiss tastes of linseed and longing. His calloused thumbs catch her tears while rain hammers overhead, and she thinks: this is what breaking open feels like. Not the shattering she’s spent years avoiding, but something worse and better. The careful dismantling of every lie she’s told herself about not needing this. His breath shakes against her mouth. She grips his shirt like drowning, like salvation, like maybe they’re the same thing.
They establish boundaries like carpenters measure twice: his mother’s care schedule non-negotiable, her Thursday calls with her sister sacred. When panic tightens her chest, this is a trap, you’re being pinned, he simply hands her his plane, guides her hands along the grain until her breathing steadies. She learns that commitment isn’t confinement when built by two people who’ve both survived drowning. Some nights they just sit, his hand on her ankle, her laptop glowing, the silence more honest than any promise.
The estate office smelled of beeswax and old money, which Caoimhe had expected. What she hadn’t expected was Deirdre O’Malley-Ashford in faded jeans and a sweater with paint stains on the cuffs, her perfect hair twisted up with what looked like a pencil.
“You came,” Deirdre said, and there was genuine surprise in it that made Caoimhe’s prepared dismissals catch in her throat.
“I said I would.” She’d nearly cancelled three times.
The mahogany desk was buried under spreadsheets, community surveys, and what appeared to be hand-drawn maps of Dublin’s working-class neighborhoods. Deirdre didn’t offer tea or small talk, just launched straight into it. Employment statistics, skills gaps, the tech sector’s hiring practices, the way entire communities were being left behind while Dublin boomed around them.
Caoimhe found herself leaning forward despite her intentions. This wasn’t charity-ball thinking. This was research. Real research.
“The companies want diverse hires but claim they can’t find qualified candidates,” Deirdre was saying, her finger tracing a route between Ballymun and the Silicon Docks. “Meanwhile, we’ve got brilliant people who can’t afford retraining programs or don’t know they exist. It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a bridge problem.”
“And you think your family’s foundation can build that bridge.” Caoimhe kept her voice flat, waiting for the catch.
“I think we can fund it.” Deirdre looked up, those blue eyes direct. “But I can’t build it alone. I don’t know how to talk to tech companies. I don’t understand their incentive structures. I don’t know how to make this sustainable instead of just another feel-good initiative that collapses when the novelty wears off.”
She pushed a folder across the desk. “That’s why I need you. So tell me. What would you do differently?”
The question landed like a challenge and an invitation simultaneously. Caoimhe opened the folder, scanning Deirdre’s preliminary proposals, already seeing the gaps and possibilities.
“One pilot project,” she heard herself say. “Six months. Then we evaluate.”
Deirdre’s smile was small and determined. “Done.”
Three weeks in, Caoimhe found herself staring at Deirdre’s proposed salary structure for program participants and something inside her snapped.
“This is insulting.” She shoved the paper across the table. “You’re calling it a ‘living stipend’ like that makes it better than minimum wage. This is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re sanitizing poverty, making it palatable for your foundation’s board.”
Deirdre’s spine straightened. “That’s the market rate for training programs,”
“It’s exploitation dressed up in your family’s good intentions.” Caoimhe was standing now, months of careful professionalism cracking. “You think your money can fix systemic problems? This is a hobby for you. Something to feel good about between charity galas.”
The silence that followed was arctic. When Deirdre spoke, her voice had gone cold and precise in a way Caoimhe had never heard.
“And your cynicism is just cowardice.” Each word landed like a slap. “Refusing to hope because it’s easier than risking disappointment. At least I’m trying instead of sneering from the sidelines, convinced nothing matters because you’re too afraid to believe it might.”
Caoimhe’s breath caught. They were both shaking.
Then Deirdre said, quietly, “You’re right about some of it. Tell me how to do better.”
They worked through Saturday afternoon into evening, Deirdre’s Georgian dining room transforming into a war room of spreadsheets and coffee cups. Caoimhe’s laptop glowed beside Deirdre’s fountain pen. The contrast would have been laughable if it weren’t so effective.
“Fifteen euro an hour during training,” Caoimhe said firmly. “Non-negotiable.”
“My accountant will have a stroke.” But Deirdre was already writing it down.
When Caoimhe finally admitted, near midnight over curry containers, that she’d never trusted a business partner before, Deirdre’s smile was tired but genuine.
“I’ve never had someone make my ideas actually work,” she confessed. “Everyone just agrees with me.”
“Sounds exhausting,” Caoimhe said, and meant it as a compliment.
The community center smelled of fresh paint and ambition. Caoimhe watched her twelve participants and felt something dangerous: investment.
“Corporate diversity programs,” she said, clicking to her next slide, “are often performative bullshit designed to make companies feel progressive without changing power structures.”
She waited for Deirdre to object. Instead, her partner leaned forward.
“So let’s teach you to recognize it,” Deirdre said, “and leverage it anyway.”
Caoimhe blinked. Weaponized hope indeed.
Bewley’s café hummed with mid-morning commerce: tourists photographing their scones, students hunched over laptops. Caoimhe stirred her Americano, watching Deirdre review their metrics with unsettling competence.
“I thought you’d be decorative,” Caoimhe said finally.
Deirdre glanced up, pearl earrings catching light. “I thought you’d be insufferable.”
“I am insufferable.”
“Yes, but productively.” Deirdre smiled. “We should expand. Three more programs by autumn.”
Caoimhe’s chest tightened. The old instinct to flee before things mattered too much. But she thought of Killian’s workshop, of choosing to build rather than run.
“Alright,” she said. “Partners.”
They shook hands formally, then laughed at themselves, and Caoimhe realized: this was what collaboration felt like when you stopped protecting yourself from it.
The morning air carried autumn’s first real bite as Brendan approached the Fusiliers’ Arch, spotting Niamh already there, hands wrapped around a takeaway cup. Three weeks since the reunion, and he’d spent two of them composing and deleting messages before finally sending one that tried for casual and probably landed on desperate.
She turned as he approached, and something in her shoulders relaxed. They were both here, then. Both willing to risk seeming too eager.
“Grand day,” Brendan offered, immediately wincing at the inanity.
“If you like grey.” But Niamh smiled, and they fell into step without discussing direction.
The conversation limped along. The swans were aggressive this year, wasn’t the reunion mad altogether, this weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Brendan felt himself performing, offering the carefully curated version of Recent Returnee Making the Best of Things. Exhausting, even with someone he barely knew.
“It’s a relief,” he said abruptly, “not having to explain myself to you.”
Niamh stopped walking. For a long moment she studied the lake, and Brendan thought he’d misjudged entirely, revealed too much too soon.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said finally, so quietly he almost missed it.
They walked the full circuit without noticing, words coming easier now. The exhaustion of constructing yourself for public consumption. The weight of maintaining a story about who you were and why you’d made your choices. How lonely it was, being the person everyone expected rather than whoever you actually were underneath.
When they reached the Grafton Street gate, Brendan realized an hour had passed like minutes.
“Same time next week?” Niamh asked, aiming for casual and missing by a mile.
“Yeah,” Brendan said immediately. “Same time.”
They parted in opposite directions, both permitting themselves small smiles only after turning away.
The childcare text came through at seven-thirty Tuesday morning, apologetic and useless. Brendan stared at his phone, calculating. Cancel on Niamh (again) or bring Aoife and risk seeming unprofessional, presumptuous, like he thought they were actual friends rather than two people who’d accidentally found each other bearable.
He brought Aoife.
“I’m so sorry,” he started, but Niamh was already crouching, eye-level with his daughter.
“What do you like to draw?”
Aoife’s shyness lasted approximately twelve seconds. Soon napkins covered their table, populated by increasingly elaborate ducks. Brendan watched Niamh’s careful attention, the way she treated his eight-year-old’s observations about shadow and reflection as genuinely interesting. Something in his chest that had been clenched for months began, tentatively, to unfurl.
“You draw better than Miss Murphy,” Aoife announced with devastating certainty. “Even better than Dad.”
“That’s not difficult,” Brendan said.
Niamh studied a napkin duck, then looked up. “I could use practice teaching. If she wanted weekend lessons. She has real talent.”
The offer hung there, and Brendan understood what it cost her. This invitation into her carefully guarded life.
“We’d like that,” he said. “Very much.”
The following Tuesday, Brendan arrived with a folder of printouts about tax deductions for artists. Niamh blinked at the highlighted sections, the Post-it notes marking relevant pages.
“You didn’t have to. He was already opening his laptop.”It adds up. You should claim everything you’re entitled to.”
She studied him across the table, this careful man who’d researched Irish tax law for someone he’d known barely two months. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re teaching my daughter to see the world differently.” He met her eyes. “And because nobody helped me figure this out when I came back. It was lonely.”
“Yes,” Niamh said quietly. “It is.”
They sat in companionable silence, watching ducks paddle across the pond. Brendan’s phone buzzed: his sister, finally. “I should take this,” he said, but hesitated. “Go ahead,” Niamh said. “I’ll be here.” Such a small promise, but it meant everything: someone who’d wait, who wouldn’t disappear. When he returned, she’d moved to the sunny bench, saving his spot beside her.
Brendan hung up, the phone still warm against his palm, and found himself unable to speak. His throat had closed around something too large, relief, vindication, the terrifying possibility that he’d made the right choice after all.
“Well?” Niamh leaned forward, reading his face with that artist’s attention to detail. “Don’t leave me in suspense.”
“I got it.” The words came out hoarse. “Senior architect. Full benefits. Hours that mean I can actually pick Aoife up from school.”
The silence after Roisin’s confession stretched like taffy, sticky and uncomfortable. Caoimhe found herself studying the woman’s paint-stained coffee mug: when had Roisin started painting? Another detail she’d missed whilst being dazzled by all that copper-haired effervescence.
“I’ve been seeing a therapist,” Roisin continued, her voice steadier now that the worst was out. “Twice a week for the past month. She asked me what I actually want, and I realized I’ve no bloody idea. I’ve been so busy being wanted that I forgot to want anything myself.”
Deirdre shifted in her seat, and Caoimhe braced for the inevitable sunny optimism, the there-there-we-all-make-mistakes platitude that would make her want to throw something. But Deirdre’s voice, when it came, was surprisingly direct.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
No absolution. No reassurance. Just the question that mattered.
Roisin’s laugh was wet and startled. “Christ, I don’t know. Talk to Sean, properly this time. Stop hiding in other people’s attention like it’s a bloody fort. Figure out if I want to fix my marriage or end it, instead of just… floating.”
Killian, his arm resting along the back of Caoimhe’s chair in a gesture that still felt new enough to notice, met Roisin’s eyes. Something passed between them: not forgiveness exactly, but acknowledgment. He’d been used, yes, but he’d also been half-willing to be used, seeking comfort in something that demanded nothing.
“Fair play,” he said quietly. “That takes courage.”
Brendan, who’d been clutching his phone like a rosary, finally set it down. “We’re all figuring it out as we go, aren’t we? Making a bags of things and trying again.”
Niamh raised her coffee cup in a sardonic toast. “To making a bags of things.”
Roisin’s fingers twisted around her coffee mug, knuckles white against the ceramic. “Sean, my husband, not my ex, we’ve been separated eighteen months. He’s in Cork with his mother, I’m here, and neither of us has filed anything because that would make it real.” Her voice caught. “I’ve been collecting attention like… like some desperate magpie. Killian, others. Telling myself it was casual, that I was just enjoying life, but really I was using people as proof I still existed, that I was still someone worth wanting.”
Her gaze found Killian’s, unflinching now in her mortification. “Especially you. You were kind and heartbroken and I knew you’d never demand more than I could give, so you felt safe to play with. Like a practice relationship with no consequences.”
Someone inhaled sharply. Caoimhe couldn’t tell who.
Niamh’s expression shifted: recognition flickering across features usually so carefully blank. She understood, Caoimhe realized. Understood performing a version of yourself so convincingly you almost believed it, using people as mirrors to reflect back the person you wanted to be rather than facing who you actually were.
The silence stretches, uncomfortable but not hostile. Deirdre leans forward, elbows on the table, her cashmere cardigan sliding off one shoulder. “So what are you going to do about it?” Not will you be okay or we understand. A question demanding action, not absolution.
Roisin’s laugh is watery. “I don’t know yet. I’ve started seeing someone in Rathmines: a therapist, not a man.” A few people smile despite themselves. “Deleted all the apps. Called Sean last week for an actual conversation, not just logistics about the house.” She swipes at her eyes. “I might try to fix it. I might end it properly. But I need to stop pretending I’m this breezy, available person when I’m actually a complete mess.”
Caoimhe, who respects honesty above almost everything, surprises herself by saying quietly, “That’s the first real thing I’ve heard you say.”
He’s been sitting beside Caoimhe, their shoulders touching in the casual intimacy they’re still learning to navigate. When he finally speaks, his voice carries the quiet authority of someone who’s done his own reckoning. “I appreciate you saying it.” He meets Roisin’s eyes directly. “I knew something was off, but I let myself ignore it because the attention felt good after so long without it.”
The room doesn’t fracture. Instead, something settles, permission, perhaps, for imperfection. Niamh’s sketch passes from hand to hand, each person holding it carefully, recognizing homesickness made visible. Brendan’s pride in Aoife glows warm and uncomplicated. Deirdre’s funding talk sparks genuine questions about logistics, not performance. When Roisin asks about painting technique, Niamh answers seriously, artist to interested student. The stilted quality matters less than the trying.
The text arrives at 2:[^47] AM, just Niamh’s name on Caoimhe’s screen, but something in the timestamp itself screams emergency. Caoimhe calls back immediately, pacing her flat in bare feet and yesterday’s clothes, still awake because the London rejection letter required three drafts and she’s been staring at the final version for an hour.
“He was just there,” Niamh says, voice thin as wire. “At the door. He said.”He said Mam’s been ill. That they’ve been looking. That he saw the painting in the window and knew the rocks, the exact angle of, ”
“Where are you now?”
“The studio. I’ve got a bag. I can be at Busáras in twenty minutes, there’s a bus to,”
“Don’t.” Caoimhe surprises herself with the certainty. “Come here. Bring nothing if you want, bring everything, I don’t care. Just come here first.”
The silence stretches long enough that Caoimhe checks if the call dropped. Then: “Why?”
Because running is what I’d do, Caoimhe thinks, and I’m trying to learn it doesn’t work. “Because you shouldn’t be alone right now. Because we’re,” The word catches. “Because I’m asking you to.”
Niamh arrives forty minutes later, no bag after all, just herself and paint under her fingernails. Caoimhe makes tea neither of them drinks. At dawn, she starts texting: Emergency. Need everyone. My place, 9 AM if possible. No explanations, just coordinates and urgency.
They come. Brendan arrives first with Aoife’s breakfast still in his beard. Deirdre cancels a foundation meeting. Killian brings his mother’s carer and comes anyway, can only stay an hour but he comes. Even Roisin, who usually deflects anything heavy, shows up with pastries and says nothing, just sits.
Niamh tells them everything. They listen. That’s the miracle: not solutions, not yet. Just the radical act of staying.
The morning after Niamh’s brother leaves, Caoimhe wakes to find her flat still full of people. Brendan’s fallen asleep on the sofa with his laptop open to legal aid websites. Deirdre’s texted the solicitor three times already. Killian had to leave at midnight but sent a message at six: Thinking of you both.
They make breakfast like they’ve done this before, moving around each other’s exhaustion. Niamh sits at the table, hollow-eyed but present, and says: “I need to practice what I’ll tell him. The real reasons. I keep losing the words.”
So they practice. Caoimhe plays the brother, too harsh at first until Deirdre gently redirects her. They try different approaches. Brendan suggests writing it down first. Roisin, surprisingly, asks the questions Niamh’s avoiding: But do you miss them? Do you want them back?
The answers surprise everyone, Niamh most of all.
By afternoon, they’ve created something new: not a script, but a framework. A way to hold truth and kindness simultaneously. Niamh looks at them and says, “Can we do this again? Not just for crises. For everything we’re afraid to say.”
The first Sunday they gather without crisis feels strange. Caoimhe arrives expecting emergency, finds instead Brendan’s daughter Aoife teaching Niamh to fold origami cranes. Deirdre’s brought wine and questions about a difficult email to her mother. Killian sits with his notebook, finally writing to his siblings about care facilities.
They’ve stumbled into something unnamed. Not friendship exactly: too deliberate for that. Not therapy: no one’s qualified. Roisin calls it “rehearsal space for being honest,” which makes Caoimhe laugh but isn’t wrong.
They workshop Deirdre’s email, Caoimhe cutting the apologetic opening, Brendan adding structure, Niamh suggesting where kindness matters most. Two hours yields three paragraphs that say what Deirdre actually means.
“Can we always do this?” Aoife asks, gluing her crane’s wing.
The adults exchange glances. Apparently, yes.
The vote happens without drama: they’ll remain seven, but seed the practice elsewhere. “Like spores,” Niamh says, which shouldn’t be poetic but is. Caoimhe watches Deirdre’s disappointment transmute into strategy. She’s already planning her foundation’s version, probably with better wine. Brendan’s quiet “I could do this for parents” sounds like permission he’s giving himself. They’re not hoarding connection; they’re learning to replicate conditions for growth.
The rain intensifies against the windows, making the room feel smaller, safer. Caoimhe finds herself describing the panic attack she had before calling Killian’s care facility, how she’d rehearsed introductions to a woman who wouldn’t retain them. “Why go, then?” Roisin asks, genuinely curious. Killian answers before she can: “Because witness matters, even when memory doesn’t.” His hand finds Caoimhe’s under the table, callused thumb tracing her knuckles. She doesn’t pull away.
Aoife’s breathing deepens into the rhythm of true sleep, her small chest rising and falling against Brendan’s. He shifts carefully, redistributing her weight without waking her, his large hand cradling her head with the unconscious expertise of four years’ solo parenting. The napkin she’d been drawing on slips toward the floor. “You’re all giants,” she observes, “and she’s drawn herself the same size.”
“She does that,” Brendan says quietly, pride and concern mixing in his voice. “Her therapist says it’s about feeling equal, not small.”
Killian’s eyes meet his across the table: something passes between them that needs no words. The recognition of men who’ve learned caretaking’s particular exhaustion, though Killian’s runs in reverse, parenting the woman who raised him. He nods slightly, and Brendan’s shoulders drop an inch, tension he’d been holding released by simple acknowledgment.
The conversation continues around the sleeping child, voices lowering instinctively but not stopping entirely. No one suggests moving her, or leaving, or pretending this isn’t exactly what it is: messy and real and imperfect. Deirdre reaches across to tuck Aoife’s cardigan more securely around her shoulders, the gesture automatic and kind. Roisin, for once, simply watches rather than filling silence with chatter.
Caoimhe observes Brendan’s careful tenderness. The way he’s angled his body to support Aoife’s sleep, accepting the numbness that must be spreading through his arm, the way he tracks the conversation while simultaneously monitoring his daughter’s comfort. Something shifts behind her ribs, a lock she didn’t know existed turning over. Caretaking doesn’t have to mean erasure. It can look like this: present and whole, giving without disappearing.
Under the table, Killian’s thumb continues its slow circuit across her knuckles, patient and unhurried, asking nothing.
Her hand finds Killian’s under the table, fingers threading through his with deliberate intention. The gesture costs her something but she overrides it. His palm is warm and calloused against hers, the hand of someone who builds things meant to last. He doesn’t startle or squeeze too tight, just accepts the contact with the same steady patience he brings to everything.
She thinks about the London offer sitting in her inbox, the deadline she’s already decided to miss. About Deirdre’s ridiculous optimism that somehow translates into actual results, into housing units and job programs instead of just good intentions. About this table of people who’ve seen her at her worst, dismissive, defensive, desperate to prove she didn’t need any of them, and showed up anyway.
“I’m staying,” she says, not to anyone in particular, testing the words in her mouth. “In Dublin. I’m staying.”
Killian’s thumb resumes its circuit across her knuckles, and she realizes he’s been waiting to hear it. Not demanding, just hoping. She lets herself hope back.
“I said no to him,” Roisin announces into the comfortable quiet, and the way she says it makes clear she means more than just Thursday’s dinner invitation. Her fingers worry the stem of her wine glass, but her voice stays steady. “Not because he wasn’t lovely. Because I caught myself doing it again: becoming whoever I thought he’d want to see.”
She looks up, meeting their eyes without her usual deflecting smile. “I’m exhausted from being everyone’s ideal. I need to work out who I actually am when nobody’s performing back.”
Caoimhe reaches across the scarred wood and squeezes her hand once, brief and certain. No wisdom offered, no problem solved, just acknowledgment. This is what they’re learning together: sometimes courage means stopping the performance entirely.
His thumb traces circles on her knuckles. Comfort offered without depleting himself. He speaks of yesterday, how his mother remembered his name, asked about the chair he was making. Grief and gratitude share space in his voice, unapologetic. Caoimhe doesn’t joke away the weight. She’s learning to witness sadness she can’t fix, to offer presence rather than solutions. Her foot hooks his ankle beneath the table, anchoring them both while the fire settles into embers.
The candles gutter in their holders, wax pooling like small promises. Rain percussion against ancient glass, and from below the floorboards transmit rebellion. Some ballad about rising up, about refusing to stay down. Their upstairs room answers with its own defiance: Brendan’s unconscious lullaby hum, crystal meeting wood as Killian pours another round, Deirdre’s fountain pen planning futures that include them all, Niamh’s shoulders releasing tension she’s carried like armor. Three hours dissolved and nobody’s reached for the escape hatch of their screens in nearly an hour. This is what they’ve constructed from wreckage: not lightning-strike transformation but sedimentary change, this discipline of arriving broken and remaining present. Through the doorway’s crooked frame, eight hundred years of confessions seep into stone, and theirs adds its verse: damaged people selecting vulnerability over safety, constructing belonging in the gap between their performed selves and their actual becoming.