I don’t know yet that I’m memorizing something I’ll never really have. That I’m cataloguing the architecture of belonging like a burglar casing a house I’ll never be allowed to enter through the front door.
Mrs. Hennessy’s hand is still on my shoulder, and I’m hyper-aware of its weight: not heavy, just present. Anchoring. I wonder if I’m allowed to lean into it or if that would be too much, too soon. The social worker said the Hennessys are “good people,” which I’m learning means they follow the rules and don’t shout. I don’t know yet what it doesn’t mean.
Declan’s behind the bar, all big gestures and bigger voice, and everyone’s watching him like he’s the sun they’re orbiting around. He catches my eye and winks, and something in my chest does this stupid flutter thing. Like maybe I matter enough to be included in the joke, even from across the room.
The chips arrive, proper chips not the frozen shite from the chipper, and they’re so hot they burn my tongue but I don’t care. There’s vinegar and salt and the fish is flaky under batter that crunches just right. Mr. Hennessy is talking to someone about hurling scores, his voice a comfortable rumble, and nobody’s asking me questions or watching to see if I’m grateful enough.
I think: I could stay here forever.
I think: This is what normal feels like.
I don’t think: In six months, Mrs. Hennessy will get pregnant and suddenly there won’t be room for the foster kid anymore. I don’t think: I’ll learn to pack a bag in under ten minutes. I don’t think: I’ll be back in this pub a decade later, serving chips to other people’s families, still on the outside looking in.
Right now, I just eat my chips and pretend I belong.
The fish arrives and Mr. Hennessy just slides the plate over, doesn’t make a production of it. “Get that into you.” Not asking if I like fish, not waiting for thanks, just: providing. Like it’s simple. Like feeding me is as natural as breathing.
I watch how Declan leans across the bar to hear old Mrs. Murphy, how his hand briefly touches her arm when she laughs. How two men by the dartboard shoulder-check each other in greeting, this casual violence that means affection. How the woman at the next table reaches over to steal a chip from her husband’s plate and he mock-slaps her hand away, both of them grinning.
There’s a grammar to it. A syntax of belonging I don’t speak yet.
I’m taking notes like my life depends on it. Which, in a way, it does. How close can you stand? When do you touch? What’s the difference between a joke and an insult? How do you know when you’re allowed to take up space?
I think if I can just learn the rules, I can make myself fit.
The glass appears before I’ve thought to want it: condensation already beading on the sides, ice clinking. Declan’s wink is quick, conspiratorial, like we’re in on something together.
“Can’t have the newest member of our community going thirsty, now can we?”
Newest member. The words land different than foster kid, different than placement, different than temporary. They settle somewhere behind my ribs, warm and dangerous. I want to believe them so badly it physically hurts.
I wrap both hands around the glass, feeling the cold seep into my palms. In my head, I’m already practicing: our pub. Testing the shape of possession, the weight of belonging. Trying it on like borrowed clothes, hoping nobody notices they don’t quite fit yet.
The man’s hand is heavy on Mr. Hennessy’s shoulder, but his eyes are on me. Weathered face, kind. “Good of you to take in the lad. His mother, God rest her, used to sit in that very spot when she was small.”
The world tilts. My mother. Here. In this exact booth, breathing this same air. I’m not just arriving.
I’m seven and the world makes sense for the first time: this room is mine, this family says my name like it belongs to them, this town holds my mother’s ghost. I fall asleep counting certainties like rosary beads, each one solid and real. I don’t know yet that certainty is just another word for temporary.
The pub feels different on Sundays: softer somehow, like even the brass fixtures are resting. I sit in what I’m already thinking of as our booth, the one with the carved heart that says “M+D 1987” and a crack in the leather that pinches if you sit wrong. I know which spot is mine now. Third from the window, where I can see the whole room but nobody really sees me.
Mrs. Hennessy lets me order for myself, which makes me feel older than seven. “The usual,” I say to Declan, trying the words out like a costume. He winks and I feel something warm unfold in my chest that I don’t have a name for yet.
The roast comes out on plates that don’t match, and nobody minds. That’s what I’m learning about this place: the things that would matter somewhere else don’t matter here. Mismatched plates are fine. Worn leather is fine. A kid with no surname that anyone mentions is fine, as long as he knows to say please and thank you and doesn’t track mud past the doormat.
I’m learning other things too. That Mr. Hennessy always sits facing the door: some army habit, he says. That Brighid’s granny cheats at cards but everyone pretends not to notice. That there’s a photograph behind the bar of a woman who looks like me around the eyes, but nobody talks about her when I’m listening.
I practice writing “Keiran Hennessy” in the condensation on my glass when the adults aren’t looking. The letters blur and run, but for a moment they’re there. Solid and real as the wooden table under my elbows. I don’t know yet that some things are beautiful precisely because they don’t last, that the running letters are trying to teach me something I’m not ready to learn.
The orange squash appears without asking, condensation already beading on the glass. Declan sets it down with a small nod, like we’ve made an agreement I don’t fully understand yet. I watch him do this week after week, never writing it down, never getting it wrong.
I start keeping track of other things he remembers: that Mrs. Hennessy takes her tea weak, that Mr. Hennessy won’t drink before six, that I pick the tomatoes out of my salad and leave them in a neat pile at the plate’s edge. These details feel like foundations, like the stone walls of the pub itself: solid things I can build a life on.
What I don’t know, can’t know at seven, is that Declan remembers everyone’s order. It’s his gift and his burden, this catalogue of preferences. The orange squash isn’t special. It’s just what he does, the same way he remembers that old Paddy takes his Guinness at room temperature and the Widow Murphy won’t sit near the fireplace since her husband died.
But I don’t know that yet. So I drink my orange squash and feel chosen.
The cards snap against the worn table with each deal, and Nan Cassidy’s twisted fingers never fumble. She teaches me Twenty-Five on Tuesdays when the afternoon light slants through the windows and the pub holds its breath between lunch and evening. Her voice carries histories I collect like the cards themselves.
“That’s Paddy Moran there (his grandfather pulled my Tom from the water in ’sixty-three.” She nods toward the bar. “The Byrne woman) sharp as they come, had a place at Trinity, gave it up for a fella who wasn’t worth it.”
I memorize these stories like they’re mine to inherit, like knowing them makes me real. Like if I learn the town’s mythology well enough, I’ll stop being temporary.
I catalogue the pub’s rhythms like scripture. Hennessy (three fingers of head, no more), whiskey neat for Father Dolan (Jameson, never Bushmills), hot port for the widow Murphy when November bites. Mrs. O’Connor wants two sugars and someone to listen. The farmers perform their Thursday sheep-price theatre. Declan’s shite puns translate to you’re safe here. I study belonging like it’s something you can earn through observation, through perfect mimicry of care.
The booth becomes his chapel. He adds the date beneath his initials when Mrs. Hennessy’s in the loo. Proof he existed here, November 2015. Brighid’s granny catches him at it, winks, slides him her penknife to finish proper. The wood accepts his mark like a baptism. He doesn’t understand yet that permanence and belonging aren’t the same thing, that you can be carved into a place that never carves you into its heart.
The bedroom they give me is temporary in every detail. The single bed with its faded blue duvet that belonged to someone’s childhood. The wardrobe that won’t quite close because the wood’s swollen with damp. The window that looks toward the back fields instead of the road, so I can’t even see the bus coming to collect me.
Mrs. Cleary calls it cozy. I call it nothing, because naming it makes it real.
I learn the household’s rhythms like a new language. Breakfast at seven sharp, the three Cleary kids claiming their chairs by habit while I hover until someone points me to the spare seat. Chores divided by age and permanence. They get the tractor work and the cattle, I get the chickens and the mucking out. Fair enough. I’m the one who might be gone by spring.
The egg basket becomes my morning meditation. Hens don’t care about your paperwork. They’ll peck you same as anyone, give you their eggs or withhold them based on nothing you can control. There’s honesty in that. I collect twenty-three eggs most mornings, arrange them in the basket like I’m building something that matters.
I help because helpful children are easier to keep. That’s not cynicism. It’s just mathematics. The social worker’s reports use words like “adjustment” and “integration,” but what they mean is: does he earn his keep without causing trouble? I adjust. I integrate. I become so quiet they forget I’m there until they need someone to fetch something or finish a chore the real children have abandoned.
At night, I lie in the temporary bedroom and count the days since I’ve seen the pub. The Clearys aren’t cruel. That’s what makes it worse. They’re kind in the way you’re kind to something passing through. They feed me and clothe me and never once make me feel like I’m home.
The school bus becomes my daily measure of exile. Twenty minutes each way, watching the Crossroads Inn’s green door shrink to nothing, then materialize again like a promise the world keeps forgetting to fulfill. I press my forehead against the window until the glass fogs with my breath, counting landmarks. The church. The petrol station. The turn where you can first glimpse the pub’s chimney.
On Saturdays, if I’ve been good (which means invisible) Mr. Cleary drives me to hurling practice. I’m shite at it, but I go because it’s in town. Afterward, I invent elaborate reasons to linger. Need to tie my boot. Left my jumper. Thought I saw someone I know. I stand outside the pub’s windows, watching Declan work the bar, making strangers laugh like it’s easy. The amber light spills onto the pavement, and I stand just outside its reach, close enough to smell the peat smoke, far enough to maintain the fiction that I’m not desperate.
The bus driver starts to recognize my face in the rearview mirror. Another temporary kid, watching the town disappear.
The grammar cuts deeper than any slap would. “Our foster” versus “my daughter”: possessive pronouns as border checkpoints. I start listening for it everywhere, this linguistic sorting. At the harvest festival, Mrs. Cleary’s smile freezes when Mrs. O’Brien asks, “Is he one of yours?” The pause stretches, a chasm opening in the space between question and answer. “He’s with us,” she finally says, which isn’t the same thing at all.
I learn to introduce myself before they can. “I’m Keiran, I’m fostering here.” Getting ahead of the explanation, controlling the narrative of my own temporariness. Better to claim the category than have it claimed for you. At least then it sounds like a choice.
The kindness arrives with conditions I can’t see but somehow feel. When Mrs. Cleary hugs her daughter, it’s different. My hugs are gentler, more careful. Affection with an expiration date.
I hear Mr. Cleary at the fence: “We’re doing our bit.” His voice carries pride I’ll never earn. I’m not a child. I’m community service. That night, I scrub my initials off the barn door with spit and shame.
I’ve memorized this choreography. Fionnuala’s knock sounds different from social visits. Three sharp raps, official. Mrs. Cleary’s relief bleeds through her concern, all those right words in the wrong order. My rucksack waits by the door, packed since Tuesday.
I’ve stopped asking where. Geography doesn’t matter when you’re cargo.
The car smells like the last kid’s fear and air freshener that can’t quite cover it.
The hallway’s cold seeps through my socks. I’ve been standing here long enough that my toes have gone numb, or maybe that’s just me disappearing from the feet up. Through the kitchen door’s gap, I didn’t close it all the way when I came down for water, stupid, careless, I can see Mrs. Murphy’s back, the phone cord doing that thing around her finger, wrapping tighter with each loop. She keeps looking toward the stairs. Checking for me like I’m a ghost that might materialize.
I know how to be a ghost. I’ve been practicing.
My feet remember the creaky board third from the top. I avoid it, stepping close to the wall where the floor’s more solid. In my room (not my room, the room they let me use) I sit on the bed I made this morning. Hospital corners. Tight enough to bounce a coin. I learned that from somewhere, some placement ago. The counselor’s breathing trick doesn’t work. I count anyway. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. The numbers mean nothing when your chest is full of broken glass.
I pull the rucksack from under the bed. The zipper sounds too loud. Three shirts, both pairs of jeans, pants, socks still matched in their pairs. The constellation book from the library, I’ll have to return it, leave another place with nothing to show I was there. The wooden horse sits in my palm, smooth from years of nervous fingers. Mine, then someone else’s, then mine again. It’s older than any placement, older than most of my memories.
“Not equipped for his needs.” I mouth the words, testing them. They sound clinical. Professional. They sound like the truth dressed up so it won’t cut as deep. But I know what they mean. I’m the equation that doesn’t balance. The problem with no solution.
The words loop through my head like a song I can’t stop hearing. “Sweet boy.” That’s what you call a dog you’re bringing to the shelter, something harmless that belongs to someone else. “Not equipped for his needs.” I turn it over and over, trying to find the edges, the part that explains what I need that’s so impossible to provide. Food? I eat less than their own son. Space? I’ve made myself small enough to fit in corners.
Maybe it’s the needing itself that’s the problem. Maybe I’m supposed to arrive complete, requiring nothing, like furniture that assembles itself.
I know the inventory by heart but I check anyway. Counting things makes them real. Makes them mine. The constellation book’s due back Thursday. I’ve been renewing it for three months, memorizing Orion and Cassiopeia like they’re friends I might need to recognize later. The wooden horse fits in my closed fist. Sometimes I squeeze it until my palm aches, just to feel something I can control.
Four placements in three years. I’m getting efficient at leaving.
At school the next day I become a study in erasure. The other kids move through the corridors like they own the air itself, shouting, shoving, taking up space with their bodies and voices like it’s a birthright. I watch them the way you’d watch telly with the sound off, cataloguing their easy belonging.
Lunch I spend with Orion and Cassiopeia, my only reliable companions. I’m perfecting this trick where I’m present but not visible, there but not demanding acknowledgment. It’s a skill I’m getting good at.
When Miss Brennan crouches beside my table, her face doing that concerned-teacher thing, I deploy the smile. “Everything’s grand at home, Miss.”
The lie tastes like nothing at all.
Mrs. Murphy goes into overdrive those final weeks: packed lunches with the crusts cut off, chocolate biscuits I never mentioned wanting, her hand hovering near my shoulder like she’s rehearsing comfort. Each gesture lands like an apology I’m meant to accept. I do the maths: kindness multiplied by guilt, divided by the countdown to my departure, equals something I’ll never trust again. I smile. I say thank you. I taste nothing.
The handshake is firm, adult, a performance of closure. Mrs. Murphy’s hug crushes the air from my lungs, her perfume, something floral that tried too hard, coating my throat. The twenty-euro note she presses into my palm is still warm from her pocket. “For emergencies,” she whispers, and I understand: this is her receipt, proof she cared. I climb into Fionnuala’s car. The Murphy house becomes small, then smaller, then nothing.
The language becomes a code I crack placement by placement. “Needs” appears in documents Fionnuala leaves face-down on tables, but I’ve learned to read upside-down: special needs, behavioral needs, therapeutic needs. The word transforms me from Keiran into a category, a checkbox, a problem requiring resources they don’t have. I watch her pen hover over forms, the way she chews her bottom lip before marking boxes that will scatter me to the next temporary bedroom.
“Not equipped” arrives in phone conversations I’m not supposed to hear. I develop a talent for stillness, for becoming furniture in hallways while Fionnuala’s voice goes tight and professional through closed doors. “I understand you’re not equipped for this level of need.” Translation: He’s too much. He’s too broken. We thought we could fix him but we can’t. The Ryans lasted four months. The Clearys, six weeks. Each time, the same careful phrases, the same apologetic tone that means I’ll be packing again.
I start cataloging my damage in their language. The nightmares that wake the house mean sleep disturbance. My silence at dinner tables becomes difficulty attaching. The way I flinch when Mr. Cleary raises his voice too quickly near the telly: that’s trauma response, which sounds clinical and manageable until it’s happening in their kitchen and suddenly they’re remembering they have their own children to think about first.
The bus schedules appear in my school copies, margins filled with departure times and routes. I don’t know I’m doing it at first. Just tracing lines that lead away, memorizing connections to places I can’t pronounce. Galway. Dublin. Shannon Airport. The maps in the library become prayer books. I learn the roads out of town the way other kids learn their times tables, preparing for an exam I haven’t been assigned yet.
I practice disappearing in increments. First the dinner table: shoveling food fast enough that seconds would be rude, mumbling excuses about homework before anyone can ask me to stay. I learn the exact pace that looks grateful but not desperate, the clean plate that says no trouble instead of still hungry.
Then the common spaces. Homework migrates from kitchen tables to bedroom corners, from sofas to the gap behind the armchair where I can hear them forget I’m there. I master the art of occupying negative space. Present enough to avoid concern, absent enough to avoid attention.
The laughter is harder. I study their jokes like exam material, catalog what makes each family smile. Mr. Ryan likes puns. Mrs. Cleary responds to self-deprecation. I learn to produce the right sounds at the right moments, a laugh track for their comfort. My face aches from smiling at things that aren’t funny, but it works: their shoulders drop, their voices warm. For a few hours, I’m a boy instead of a case file.
Until I’m not equipped for anymore, and we start again.
The library becomes my cartography of elsewhere. I spread the maps across scratched tables, trace arterial routes with bitten fingernails: the 51 to Limerick, the 350 to Cork, the express coach to Dublin that costs three weeks of lunch money. I memorize timetables like prayers: 07:[^15] departure, 09:[^43] arrival, connections possible if you run. I calculate fares in the margins of homework, convert my dishwashing wages into kilometers of distance.
Shannon Airport obsesses me most. I find it on every map, that small symbol of wings, thirty-two kilometers from this booth where I’m learning to disappear. Close enough to taste. I don’t know yet that I’m rehearsing escape, that my finger on these blue lines is writing my future in ink I can’t see.
I cross Main Street before the pub comes into view, take the long way round past the chemist’s and the bookies. If I time it right, 3:[^47], after the lunch crowd, before the evening regulars, I won’t see his silhouette moving behind those amber windows. Won’t catch the music spilling out when someone opens the door. Won’t have to remember that belonging, even temporary, leaves scars deeper than never having it at all.
The cheek-biting becomes automatic, a Pavlovian response to disappointment. He perfects the mirror work. Shoulders back, voice steady, eyes that don’t quite meet the reflection. “Grand, yeah. All good.” The lie tastes like copper and becomes muscle memory. He discovers that need is weakness, that wanting makes you vulnerable, that the system rewards boys who don’t ask for anything because they’re easier to place and simpler to forget.
I learn the architecture of temporary love. The way foster mothers measure detergent for “family” loads versus the smaller portions when it’s just you left. How foster fathers’ laughter includes you for the first month, then gradually curves around you like water around stone. The dinner table geography that shifts. Your chair migrating from the center toward the end, then to the counter with a plate balanced on your lap while the real family eats together.
Mrs. Hennessy’s house teaches me about photographs. The fridge is a gallery of her daughter’s achievements, her son’s football matches, cousins and grandparents in magnetic frames. I appear in exactly three photos over eight months. In the first, I’m stiff-shouldered at a birthday party that wasn’t mine. In the second, barely visible at the edge of a Christmas morning shot. The third never makes it to the fridge. I develop a taxonomy of “yours.” “Your bed” means you’ll be moved. “Your space” means don’t spread out. “Your things” means keep them contained, portable, ready. Nothing is ever “your home” or “your family” or “your place at the table.” The possessives are conditional, revocable, already preparing everyone for the inevitable.
The social worker’s folder grows thicker with each placement. I imagine it like rings in a tree: each layer marking a failure, a mismatch, a family who tried and decided I wasn’t worth the effort. Fionnuala doesn’t let me see it, but I know it’s there. My entire childhood reduced to bureaucratic shorthand: “Adjustment difficulties.” “Attachment issues.” “Not a good fit.”
I’m ten years old and I’ve already learned the most important lesson: fitting in means making yourself smaller, quieter, less. It means needing nothing. It means becoming the kind of boy who’s easy to forget, because being memorable means being blamed when it doesn’t work out.
The bag becomes my religion. Every night before sleep, I inventory its contents like prayers: clean socks rolled tight, the spare shirt that doesn’t need ironing, toothbrush in a plastic case so it stays clean. The photo of my mother goes in the interior pocket, protected by cardboard I’ve cut to fit. Three library books I’ve renewed until the librarian stopped asking when I’d return them: she knows what the packed bag means, same as everyone.
Mr. Donnelly sees it there beside my bed, this confession of impermanence, and his face does that thing adults’ faces do. Softens with pity that feels worse than anger. “You could use the wardrobe, son. Plenty of space.”
Son. The word lands wrong, a coat that doesn’t fit.
I tell him I like having my things close. Don’t tell him that unpacking feels like tempting fate, like believing in something that’ll only hurt worse when it’s taken away. The bag stays packed. I stay ready. It’s the only control I have: being prepared to leave before they’re ready to let me go.
The signs arrive like weather I’ve learned to predict. Mrs. Donnelly’s questions about my day shrink from paragraphs to yes-or-no answers. Saturday trips to Galway suddenly become “maybe next time” until next time stops being mentioned. I catch them whispering in the kitchen, voices dropping to static when my footsteps hit the squeaky floorboard outside the door.
I give myself the week they won’t. Start the slow work of detachment. Stop hoping for breakfast conversation, stop leaving drawings on the fridge, stop saying goodnight like I expect tomorrow. By the time Fionnuala’s car pulls up with that apologetic expression already arranged on her face, I’ve been gone for days. My body just catches up to where my heart’s already fled.
At school, I make myself the helpful one: tutoring younger kids in maths, lending pens I don’t expect back, laughing at shite jokes without needing the spotlight returned. I’ve cracked the code: being useful earns you smiles, but needing anything back makes you weight they’re already calculating how to shed. The trick is measuring the exact distance between appreciated and attached, between present and permanent.
By Christmas of that placement, I’m brilliant at the performance. Cheers for the jumper I’ll abandon in June, carols sung with a smile that doesn’t reach my chest, sitting through their traditions like a polite ghost. I’m there but not there, you know? Present enough they feel good about themselves, absent enough that leaving won’t shatter me. The trick is making nobody matter. Can’t lose what you never held.
I lie there in the dark, the streetlight outside casting shadows that move across the ceiling like accusations. My mind won’t shut off: it’s running through the day like rewinding a tape, searching for the exact frame where I fucked it up.
Was it breakfast? I’d asked if there was any more milk. Simple question. Normal question. But maybe my voice had that edge, that neediness that makes adults’ faces go tight. Or lunch. Ten minutes. That could be it. Proof I’m careless, ungrateful, more trouble than I’m worth.
The homework help. Christ, the homework help. I’d asked her to explain long division again because I’d missed it at the last school, the one before this placement. Her smile had been patient but her eyes had gone somewhere else, somewhere tired. I’d seen that look before. It’s the look that comes before the phone calls.
My shoes. The fucking shoes by the door instead of in the cubby. Such a small thing. But small things add up, don’t they? That’s what I’m learning. You’re not sent back for one big thing. You’re sent back for the accumulation of small things, the death by a thousand paper cuts of being someone’s charity project.
I try to do the maths of it, like if I can just solve for x, I’ll have the answer. If I’m 10% too loud plus 15% too needy minus 5% helpful enough, what percentage unwanted does that make me? There has to be a formula. There has to be a way to calculate exactly how much of myself I need to subtract to equal someone worth keeping.
The shadows keep moving. I keep counting.
The notebook becomes my bible, my survival guide. I write in it after lights out, the pen pressing hard enough to leave grooves in the pages beneath. Don’t finish the milk carton: someone will notice. Smile when they introduce you to their friends. Never cry where they can hear you. Remember which topics make them uncomfortable and steer around them like rocks in a stream.
Some rules I learn from watching, from the micro-expressions that flicker across faces. Others I learn the hard way, from mistakes I won’t make twice. Don’t mention your real parents. Don’t ask about the future. Don’t get too comfortable with their things.
The list multiplies like cells dividing. By week three, I’ve filled seven pages. By week five, I’ve memorized them all. I’m becoming an expert in erasure, in the careful choreography of taking up just enough space to justify keeping but not so much that I become a burden. I’m learning to be the kind of child who exists in the conditional tense: always provisional, never permanent.
The cafeteria is where the distance becomes most obvious. I sit with my sandwich, plain ham, nothing that might go to waste, and listen to Sarah Murphy rage about her mam checking her texts, to Cian Doherty moan that his da won’t let him take the car. They throw around words like “always” and “never” with the casual certainty of people who know their parents will still be their parents tomorrow.
I nod along, make sympathetic noises, but inside I’m calculating: would my foster mother even notice if I didn’t come home? I’m performing outrage at rules I’d be grateful to have enforced consistently. They’re complaining about foundations I’m still trying to build on sand. Their anger is a luxury I can’t afford: you don’t bite the hand that might decide to stop feeding you.
I start tracking everything. Water usage, electricity, food. Five-minute showers timed on my phone. Portions measured against what others take. I teach myself to wake at six-thirty without an alarm, slipping from the room before anyone needs to knock. I’m turning myself into data, into something manageable. If I can make my existence small enough, precise enough, maybe I’ll become the kind of easy that people choose to keep.
Ms. Cassidy’s eyes track the backpack: to breakfast, to the bathroom, everywhere. “Planning a runner?” she asks, not unkindly. I’m not. Not yet. But I’ve learned the difference between staying and leaving is just preparation, and I’ll never be caught without an exit again. Never believe in permanent enough to unpack completely. The bag stays packed. Just in case.
The mathematics of displacement become clear in those two weeks. Mrs. Hennessy’s extra biscuits arrive wrapped in cling film with notes, “For later, love”, as if she can stockpile affection against future hunger. I take them with the smile I’ve perfected, the one that says grateful-but-not-desperate, appreciative-but-not-attached. Too much emotion makes people nervous. Too little makes them think you’re damaged beyond their capacity for kindness.
I’ve got the formula down now, after six placements. The precise angle of the head when receiving charity. The exact duration of eye contact that reads as sincere without being needy. The tone of voice that says “thank you” in a way that absolves them of guilt without making them feel manipulated. It’s a performance, but then again, so is their generosity: we’re both playing parts in a script written by people who’ve never had to pack their lives into a rucksack.
Mr. Hennessy talks while we work, filling silence with stories about Sarah’s childhood, how this room used to be painted pink, how she’d practice violin here until the neighbors complained. I nod at appropriate intervals, careful not to point out that I’ve only been here eight months, that I barely remember what color the walls were when I arrived. My memories of this place are already fading, self-preservation erasing what won’t matter soon.
The boxes multiply. Mine are practical: clothes folded military-tight, school books I’ll need at the next placement, the few things I’ve learned are worth carrying. Theirs overflow with sentiment: baby clothes saved for grandchildren, photographs, Sarah’s old diary with its tiny lock. Objects that assume continuity. Objects that believe in staying.
I don’t own anything that assumes I’ll be anywhere long enough for it to matter.
Sarah’s pregnancy glow makes her look like she’s swallowed light, all that hope radiating outward. She moves through the house like I’m furniture: necessary to navigate around but not acknowledge. I catch her once, hand on her stomach, staring at my half-packed rucksack in the hallway. The look on her face isn’t cruel, exactly. It’s mathematics. Her baby needs this room more than the foster kid needs stability.
Fair enough. I’ve done the same calculation from the other side.
Mr. Hennessy tries to make it less awkward, chattering about how the cot will fit by the window, how Sarah always loved the morning light in here. I hand him boxes, careful not to point out that I’ve been waking up to that same light for eight months. That I know which floorboard creaks, which radiator clanks at 3 AM, where the afternoon sun makes a pattern on the wall that looks almost like a map.
None of that matters now. The room’s already transforming in their minds. Not mine anymore, maybe never was. Just another temporary stop in the long geography of not-belonging.
Mrs. Hennessy holds me too long at the door, her tears dampening my shoulder through the worn cotton. “You’ll visit, won’t you? For Sunday dinners?” Her voice cracks on the lie we’re both performing. I nod because it’s easier than honesty, already constructing the distance I’ll need. Three weeks, maybe four, and the invitations will taper off. Six months and they’ll struggle to remember my middle name.
I’ve learned the trick now: treat goodbyes like weather. Every hello is a countdown. Every kindness comes with an expiration date I can’t see but know is there. The Hennessys were kind. That’s the problem. Kindness hurts worse when it ends.
I don’t unpack. The other lads clock it straightaway. The way my rucksack stays zipped, only toiletries on the metal shelf. There’s a language in luggage here, and mine speaks fluent temporary. Bottom bunk, corner spot, nearest the fire exit. Always the exits. I add the Hennessys to my running tally: eleven months, biological priority, kind enough to make leaving ache.
In the dark, I sort them like specimens. The Clearys: money, not mercy. The Donovans: lasted till I cried, which was twice. The Hennessys: genuine, but their blood mattered more. I’m mapping my own damage, searching for the algorithm of acceptable. If I can crack the code of keepable, maybe I’ll stop collecting addresses. Or maybe I’ll just know which goodbye to pack for next.
At ten, my body turns traitor. Growth spurt, they call it, like it’s something to celebrate. But I haven’t figured out where my limbs end anymore, I’m all elbows and knees that don’t answer to me, angles that jut out wrong. I’m reaching for water, just water, the most basic fucking thing, and my arm sweeps wide like I’m trying to clear the whole mantle. Mr. Hennessy’s hurling trophy goes over. The sound it makes hitting the floor is final: that crack that means broken, not chipped. The base splits clean through.
The room does that thing where all the air gets sucked out. Kitchen radio’s still going in the next room, some presenter laughing about the weather, and it makes the silence here sharper. I know yelling. Yelling I can handle. Means you’re still worth the energy, still real enough to make someone angry. This isn’t that.
Mr. Hennessy just stares. At the trophy first, the pieces catching light on the carpet. Then at me. His face does something I’ve seen before in other houses, this careful closing down, like shutters coming across a shop window. He bends to pick up the pieces, methodical, and doesn’t say my name. Doesn’t say anything.
Mrs. Hennessy comes to the doorway, tea towel still in her hands. She touches his shoulder, just her fingers, light, and they do that married-people thing where they have whole conversations without speaking. I can read it now, after three houses. I’ve learned the grammar of reconsideration.
I start calculating. How long till the social worker’s next visit. Whether I’ve got anything here worth packing. The Hennessys are genuine, which makes it worse somehow. Not their fault I break things just by existing in their space. Not their fault their blood daughter matters more than someone else’s broken boy.
That night I lie in the box room they cleared out for me, the one that still smells like storage, and I hear them through walls that aren’t meant to keep secrets. Mrs. Hennessy’s voice comes first, soft, reasonable: “He’s just at that awkward age, love. Growing into himself.”
But it’s the silences between words that tell the truth. The pause before Mr. Hennessy answers. The careful way she’s building her argument, like she’s already losing it.
“I know,” he says. Just that. I know. Which means he’s already done the math, weighed his dead father’s trophy against someone else’s damaged kid, and the scales didn’t tip my way.
I pull out my notebook, the one I keep under the mattress. Start a new page. “Ways to Take Up Less Space.” I’m getting good at these lists. Walk closer to walls. Eat less at meals. Breathe quieter. Stop reaching for things. Stop wanting things. Stop being a thing that breaks other things just by existing in the same room as them.
Outside, a dog barks. Inside, I practice becoming smaller.
The notebook becomes a bible of erasure. Page after page of rules I write in the dark: Turn sideways going through doorways. Count to three before answering questions. Eager boys are exhausting boys. Shower in under five minutes. Keep your things in your bag, ready. Never ask why they’re whispering. Never ask if you’re staying.
I practice in the mirror, making my face blank, pleasant, forgettable. The kind of face that doesn’t demand anything. The kind of boy who could vanish tomorrow and leave behind nothing but a slightly lighter grocery bill and a room that goes back to being storage.
By the end of the week, I’ve nearly perfected it. I’m practically invisible.
Mrs. Hennessy says I’ve gotten so quiet lately, is everything alright?
I smile. “Grand, yeah. Just tired.”
I map the house’s rhythms like a burglar in reverse: learning when pipes groan, which stairs sing, where light falls at what hour. I become a student of absence, cataloging what goes unnoticed: the toilet that doesn’t flush at night, the tea I don’t make, the space beside them on the sofa I never claim. I’m teaching myself to be optional, a presence so light it won’t leave an impression when it lifts.
I measure myself in negatives: the silence I don’t break, the seconds I don’t linger, the questions I don’t ask. I learn the exact weight of gratitude that shows appreciation without suggesting permanence. Each careful gesture is a promise that I won’t become a problem, won’t require more than they bargained for. I’m auditioning for temporary, perfecting the art of being kept without being wanted.
The fridge hums at night when I can’t sleep, a mechanical heartbeat that reminds me I’m in someone else’s kitchen. I stand there in borrowed pyjamas. The ones Mrs. Cleary bought in a three-pack from Dunnes, practical and impersonal. And trace the laminated edges of the chore chart. My name is written in dry-erase marker, easily wiped away when the next placement comes. The permanent family names are in vinyl lettering.
I’ve memorized the system better than they have. Thursday is bins: recycling separated into three categories, compost lid secured against foxes. Saturday mornings are bathroom cleaning, and I’ve learned Mrs. Cleary checks behind the toilet for dust. I do my tasks on Wednesday nights and Friday evenings, staying ahead of the schedule, proving I’m not the kind of foster kid who needs reminding.
The calendar mocks me with its assumptions of continuity. Doctor’s appointments stretch into September. A family wedding in July has a question mark beside my name. Will he still be here? I want to take the marker and make the question mark permanent, honest. Instead I add nothing, claim nothing, assume nothing.
Emergency numbers are listed in descending order of crisis: ambulance, fire brigade, Gardaí, poison control, Fionnuala’s mobile. My name isn’t on the list, but I’ve memorized every number anyway, including the bus station they didn’t think to include. That one I found myself, wrote it on the inside cover of my English copy in pencil light enough to deny.
I complete tomorrow’s tasks tonight, next week’s reading this weekend. I’m building a buffer of competence, a fortress of not-needing. If I can just be good enough, quiet enough, grateful enough, maybe the phone call won’t come. Maybe “not equipped” won’t apply to someone who requires nothing, who’s learned to be a guest in his own temporary life.
I smile and nod and say something about settling in, but inside I’m cataloguing the failure. Three months of perfect behavior and she’s noticed the performance, which means I haven’t been perfect enough. Real children don’t try this hard. Real children leave wet towels on the floor and forget to take out the bins and ask for things they want.
That night I find the bus schedule in the recycling. She’s thrown it away, thinking she’s helping, thinking I don’t need escape routes anymore. I smooth the creases against my thigh, fold it small enough to hide in my sock drawer beneath the three-pack underwear. The routes to Galway blur as I memorize them: 350 to Ennis, connection to the 51, four hours door to door if the traffic’s good.
I add a new rule to my internal list: be good enough they keep you, but not so good they think they’ve fixed you. The performance needs better calibration. I need to learn how to fail in acceptable ways, to be broken enough to justify their charity but not so broken I’m “not equipped for.”
The tea sits cooling between us, steam rising like the space between what she means and what I hear. She’s pushed the plate of chocolate digestives closer (the good ones, not the own-brand) and her face has that soft expression that means she thinks she’s helping.
But I’ve miscalculated. Been too invisible, too frictionless. Real sons leave crumbs on the counter and forget to hang up their towels. They don’t thank you for dinner like they’re guests at a hotel. They don’t freeze when you touch their shoulder.
I’ve shown her the puppet strings, and now she’s trying to cut them, not understanding they’re the only thing holding me together. Her kindness is an X-ray, revealing all the places I’ve learned to be hollow.
I lie there counting my failures like rosary beads. The hesitation before taking seconds at dinner. Still asking permission to use the jacks, for fuck’s sake, like I’m a guest in a hotel. The way I go rigid when Mr. Cleary shouts at the football match, my body preparing for impact that never comes.
Being a child means trusting tomorrow. Means believing you’ll still be wanted when you wake. I don’t have that foundation: just memorized schedules and the muscle memory of packing light.
The paper becomes a talisman against permanence. I trace the routes with my thumb during awkward family dinners, feeling the worn creases like scars. The 51 to Galway. Hourly escapes. The 300 to Dublin: three daily chances at erasure. Local routes branching toward anonymity. I memorize the times instead of doing homework, whispering departure schedules under my breath like incantations. Other kids pray for salvation. I pray for the 6:[^15] northbound.
The first week, I watch them like an anthropologist. Conor leaves his football boots in the hallway and they’re still there the next morning, unmoved, waiting for him like loyal dogs. Eamon’s school books colonize the kitchen table, spreading across the surface in a territorial claim no one challenges. They wear each other’s clothes without asking. They finish each other’s sentences and each other’s dinners. They know which floorboards creak and use them strategically: avoiding them when sneaking out, stepping on them deliberately when they want attention.
I learn their rhythms without participating. Breakfast is chaos: everyone talking over everyone, reaching across the table, the radio competing with their voices. I eat quickly, quietly, clearing my plate before anyone notices I’m there. Mr. Murphy reads the paper like a shield. Mrs. Murphy orchestrates the chaos with the weary competence of someone who’s done this a thousand times. The boys bicker about nothing. Whose turn it is to take out the bins, who ate the last yogurt, whether United or City will take the league. Stupid, meaningless arguments that they’ll forget by lunchtime.
I envy those arguments more than I’ve envied anything.
At night, I hear them through the walls, Conor’s music bleeding through, Eamon on the phone with some girl, their muffled laughter at jokes I’m not part of. The house creaks and settles around their noise, absorbing it, built for it. I lie still in the converted office, surrounded by empty shelves that seem to judge my emptiness, and practice breathing quietly. Taking up less space. Needing less. Being the kind of easy that makes people say “he’s no trouble at all” instead of “we’re not equipped.”
The bus schedule is in my pocket. The 51 to Galway runs hourly. I just need to last until I can use it.
The worst part is how they try. Mrs. Murphy sets a place for me like I’ve always been there, serving me the same portions as her sons, asking my opinion on whether we need more salt. Conor offers me the remote sometimes, this careful generosity that makes my throat tight. Eamon invites me to kick the ball around, then doesn’t know what to do when I’m shite at it, his encouragement more painful than mockery would be.
They’re kind. That’s the problem. They treat me like I might break, and maybe I will.
I watch them fight over the last rasher, over who gets the shower first, over nothing at all, and I see how fighting means you’re staying. You don’t bother arguing if you’re leaving. So I agree with everything. I like whatever they’re watching. I’m fine with whatever’s for dinner. I’m grand, always grand, so determinedly grand that Mrs. Murphy’s eyes linger on me sometimes with something that might be worry or might be relief that I’m so easy.
Easy to keep. Easy to leave.
Dinner is seven pm sharp, a ritual I can’t quite sync with. They talk over each other, Conor’s football practice, Eamon’s maths test, some story about their cousin in Limerick that everyone finds hilarious. Mr. Murphy reaches out as he passes, ruffling his sons’ hair without looking, this casual touch that means everything and nothing. They remember to include me, Mrs. Murphy turning with that careful smile: “And how was your day, Keiran?” The gentleness in her voice is a spotlight. I’m the guest they’re minding, the project they’re being good about. I learn to have answers ready, brief enough not to interrupt their real conversations. I finish my plate first, ask to be excused, and they let me go with visible relief.
The library sits three streets over from the school, past the chipper and the bookies. I push through the heavy door and the silence hits different than home: not waiting-for-me-to-mess-up silence, just… quiet. Stone walls thick enough to muffle the world. Mrs. Chen glances up from her desk, takes in my school bag and careful posture, and goes back to her cataloguing. No questions. No concern. I find a chair by the tall window where the light falls wrong for reading but right for disappearing.
The library becomes mine in ways the Murphy house never will. I work through fantasy alphabetically. Other worlds, chosen families, boys who turn out special. Mrs. Chen starts leaving books on the returns cart, no words exchanged. For six months I have somewhere that doesn’t need me to be anything. Then the call comes. I pack my bag. Practice leaving again.
The social worker’s voice becomes background noise, something about “better fit” and “age-appropriate resources,” words that mean nothing and everything. I’ve learned the vocabulary. “Challenging behaviors” means I asked too many questions. “Attachment difficulties” means I didn’t ask enough. “Not a good match” means they tried me on like a jumper that didn’t suit.
I keep my eyes on the father and son. They’re still waiting, still talking. The boy gestures wildly, nearly knocking his father’s chips, and the man laughs at the near-disaster. No tension. No careful measuring of reactions. Just easy, thoughtless affection.
“Keiran? Are you listening?”
“Yeah. Resource allocation. I get it.”
She sighs, and I feel bad for maybe three seconds. She’s tired. They’re all tired. I’m tired of being the reason people are tired.
The car pulls away from the chipper. I twist in my seat to watch them until they disappear. The boy’s probably thirteen, maybe fourteen. Old enough to know how lucky he is, or maybe still young enough to think everyone lives like this. That every kid gets a father who buys them chips on a Tuesday, who lets them argue about football, who touches them like they matter without even thinking about it.
I face forward again. The Donnellys’ house is supposedly nice. “Experienced foster carers,” the file says. Which means they’ve had practice at this. At taking in boys like me and teaching them the rules and watching them leave. I wonder how many of us have sat in this exact seat, backpack clutched tight, watching other people’s families through car windows.
The social worker’s still talking. Something about giving it time, about fresh starts. I nod. I’m excellent at nodding. I’ve been practicing for years.
I catalogue it all like evidence: the way the man’s thumb taps absently against the boy’s shoulder blade, keeping rhythm with whatever point he’s making. How they interrupt each other without apology, voices tangling up like they’ve got all the time in the world to be heard. The boy shoves his hands in his pockets and leans into the argument, body language loose, undefended. He’s annoyed but not afraid. There’s a difference. I’ve learned to spot it.
I’ve never rolled my eyes at a foster parent. Never slouched or interrupted or assumed I’d get another chance if I fucked this one up. Every interaction is an audition I’m perpetually failing. Mrs. O’Brien used to say I was “too polite,” like good manners were somehow suspicious. Maybe they are, when you’re twelve and performing gratitude for a roof that’s temporary anyway.
The father ruffles the boy’s hair as they reach the door, casual, thoughtless, the kind of gesture that means nothing because it means everything. The boy ducks away, laughing, and they disappear inside.
I turn back to face the road. My hands are fists in my lap.
The light changes. Through the shop window, I catch one last glimpse: the father’s hand gesturing, the boy laughing at something, both of them taking up space like they own it. Like they’ve never had to earn the air they breathe.
I try to inventory my own skin for casual touch. Mrs. Chen’s hand on my shoulder that one time, snatched back like I’d burned her. The doctor who checked my throat for strep, gloved and efficient. Fionnuala’s handshake at our first meeting, professional, measured. Every point of contact in my life has required paperwork or apology.
The car pulls forward. I press my palm against the window, leaving a print that fogs and fades.
Her voice fills the car. I watch her mouth shape the words, selling me the Donnellys like they’re a prize I’ve won instead of another house that’ll learn I’m not worth keeping.
“Built-in friend,” she says, and I taste copper. Because I know what the Donnelly son doesn’t yet: that I’m arriving gift-wrapped in good intentions, that his parents have already told him to be kind, to include me, to make allowances. That every interaction between us will be measured against their expectations, weighed for proof that charity works.
I wonder if they’ve already cleared a space in his room, or if I’m getting the box room again. If his mates know yet that he’s getting a project for a brother.
I pull out the schedule: three placements old, soft as cloth now from handling. The routes blur together. I don’t need to read it anymore; I know every line that leads away from here, from anywhere. But my hands need the ritual, need to fold it smaller and smaller until it’s dense as a stone, until it fits in my fist like proof I can still disappear.
The bus itself is a kind of freedom I’ve never known: a space between places where nobody can claim me. The seat fabric scratches through my jeans, smells like decades of strangers, and I love it. Forty minutes of watching the world transform through glass streaked with rain and fingerprints.
First the familiar: the Crossroads Inn shrinking to toy-size, then gone. The O’Connor farm where Brighid’s grandmother still keeps chickens. The turn-off to the coast road where I’ve stood a hundred times, staring at horizons. Stone walls dividing fields that have belonged to the same families since before anyone bothered writing it down.
Then the walls start crumbling, gaps appearing like missing teeth. Housing estates bloom in colours that would scandalize Ballycragh. Identical houses in neat rows, each with a car in the drive and curtains that match. Anonymous. Beautiful.
Industrial parks next, all corrugated metal and car parks big enough to hold the entire population of home. Signs for companies I’ve seen on telly, proof that the world in the box actually exists somewhere. Lorries with foreign plates, going places I can’t pronounce.
Then the city starts bleeding into itself. Buildings pressed shoulder to shoulder, no fields between them, just more buildings. The sky shrinks to a stripe above rooflines. I press my forehead against the window, feel it vibrate with the engine’s rhythm, and watch Ballycragh disappear in the side mirror. Just another cluster of buildings. Just another place the world drives past without slowing.
Fionnuala sits across the aisle, reading case files, giving me this. She knows what she’s doing. She knows I’m cataloguing escape routes, counting distances, learning the shape of elsewhere.
The notebook in my jacket pocket feels heavier with every mile.
Cork City unfolds like a map that keeps adding pages. Streets branch into more streets, each one leading somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere nobody knows to look for me. Shops selling things I didn’t know existed: kitchen gadgets, imported tea, books in languages I can’t identify. A restaurant with a menu entirely in Italian, people inside eating like it’s normal to sit somewhere your grandmother has never been.
The River Lee cuts through it all, dark and purposeful, nothing like the temperamental Atlantic that batters Ballycragh. It flows somewhere, comes from somewhere, connects this place to other places in a way the sea never does. The sea just ends things. Rivers keep going.
At one intersection, I count seven different bus routes. Seven. Each one a direction a person could choose without asking permission, without explaining why. The numbers on the signs might as well be coordinates to different lives.
I stand there long enough that Fionnuala doubles back to find me, her hand light on my shoulder. She doesn’t ask what I’m thinking. She already knows. She brought me here to show me the shape of leaving.
The notebook sits in my hands like evidence of something criminal: wanting more than this. The blue cover catches light through the shop window, and I run my thumb along its spine, feeling the pages compress and release. Blank. Waiting.
The clerk is maybe twenty, with purple streaks in her hair and a name tag that says “Aoife” but probably isn’t from anywhere near here. She doesn’t smile with recognition or pity. Just scans the notebook, tells me the price, takes my coins without counting them twice to make sure the foster kid isn’t short.
“Receipt?” she asks.
“No,” I say, because I want nothing that proves I was ever here.
She nods like that’s reasonable. Like I’m reasonable. Like I’m just another customer on a Tuesday afternoon, not someone whose entire existence is documented in files and case reviews. For three minutes and forty-seven seconds I’m nobody’s tragedy. Just a person buying a notebook.
The transaction is so ordinary it feels revolutionary.
The bench is cold through my jeans, but I don’t move. Around me, Cork City breathes: strangers eating lunch, students arguing about football, a woman singing to her baby in a language I don’t recognize. No one looks at me twice.
I open the notebook. The first page is terrifyingly empty.
My pen hovers, then touches down: Places That Aren’t Ballycragh.
The notebook’s spine cracks as I close it, pages already warped from how tightly I’ve been gripping the pen. Fionnuala’s standing by the fountain, mobile pressed to her ear, and when she spots me she doesn’t ask what I’ve been writing. Just tilts her head toward the cafés.
“Starving,” I say, and mean it. The hunger feels different here. Like wanting, not needing.
The café has more languages than people at some tables. I stand in the doorway like a thick, watching this group of students (international, Fionnuala called them earlier, like that explains everything) and they’re switching mid-sentence. French to Irish to English to something with harder consonants I can’t place. The girl ordering has a French accent that makes even “cappuccino” sound elegant, but when the barista responds in Irish, she fires back without hesitation, then pivots to English for her friends, then that fourth language again.
In Ballycragh, you’re Irish or you’re blow-in, and blow-ins stay blow-ins for three generations. Niamh’s mam has been there sixteen years and still gets called “the Polish woman.” But here, this girl is French and Irish and whatever else she wants to be, all at once, and no one’s keeping score.
Their laughter cuts across the language barriers. That’s the same everywhere, I suppose. But it’s what they’re laughing about that gets me. Not gossip, not tearing someone down. They’re arguing about a film, I think, or maybe a book, and it’s heated but not mean. Like ideas matter more than who’s saying them.
I order tea because it’s cheapest and find a corner where I can watch without being obvious about it. The French girl catches me staring and smiles. Not the Ballycragh smile that asks “who’s your family?” but just a smile. Friendly. Forgetting me already as she turns back to her friends.
My notebook’s in my jacket pocket, pages full of place names copied from maps. But watching these students, I realize I’ve been collecting the wrong information. It’s not just about where you go. It’s about who you get to be when you arrive. Here, your surname doesn’t write your story before you open your mouth. Here, you could be anyone.
The tea tastes like possibility.
The posters are layered thick as history. Punk bands I’ve only heard through YouTube compression, indie acts Brighid mentioned once, names in fonts I can’t read but want to learn. Next Friday. Three weeks out. August bank holiday. The city plans in months, not just the next holy day or harvest festival.
A couple debates which show to attend, weighing options like they’re spoiled for choice. In Ballycragh, entertainment is what’s on at the pub or what’s on telly. Here, you choose between five different futures on the same night.
I photograph a poster with my cracked phone screen: some band called The Murder Capital, playing a venue called Whelan’s. Not because I’ll go. Because I want proof that places exist where next month’s calendar isn’t already written by tradition. Where you can plan a life instead of inherit one.
The queue moves forward. People buy tickets like they’re buying time itself, claiming future moments in a city that keeps generating them. Back home, the future’s already happened. It’s just waiting for you to repeat it.
The anonymity of it breaks something open in my chest. Nobody knows her family. Nobody’s calculating which household she’s leaving, what history trails behind her like tin cans on a wedding car. She’s just a girl on a bus, and the city swallows her without comment or judgment.
I think about Ballycragh’s single shelter where Mrs. Hennessy watches from the post office window, where every departure gets discussed over Sunday dinner in a dozen kitchens. Where leaving requires explanations, justifications, promises to return.
Here, the board flips to another destination. Galway. Shannon. London Stansted. Each name a door that doesn’t need permission to open. The girl’s bus pulls away and nobody marks it. Nobody mourns. The city just keeps breathing.
The words land in my chest like a key turning. I have a life here too. Not I’m building one or I’m trying to have one. Present tense. Fact. Like it’s that simple. Wanting something for yourself doesn’t require apologies written in blood.
I press my pen so hard the page tears slightly. Write it again. Again. The ink bleeds through to the next page, staining tomorrow.
The woman at the counter doesn’t look up when I linger too long. Doesn’t ask why a teenager is staring at rental listings like they’re scripture. In cities, I realize, your presence doesn’t demand explanation. You’re just another body moving through space, your damage private, your history irrelevant. The anonymity isn’t loneliness. It’s permission to start over.
The pages smell different than the books in Ballycragh’s library: no must, no salt air embedded in the binding. I run my thumb along the spine of the Berlin guide, feeling the raised letters. Inside, photographs show graffiti-covered walls turned into art galleries, cafés where people sit alone with laptops and no one asks what they’re running from. A city that invented itself twice over. A place where reinvention is architecture, not character flaw.
I flip to a page about neighborhoods. Kreuzberg. Neukölln. Names that mean nothing to me, which is exactly the point. No one there knows the difference between O’Malley and Murphy, couldn’t trace my mother’s people back three generations over pints. The anonymity isn’t erasure: it’s the opposite. It’s the chance to be seen for what you do rather than what was done to you.
The book weighs almost nothing. Twenty euro, the price tag says. I’ve more than that in my jacket from last night’s tips, coins that smell like the pub’s brass rail. Could buy it. Could carry these photographs back to Ballycragh, proof that elsewhere exists in more than my head.
But then what? Keep it under my mattress at Declan’s, flip through it when the walls press close? Let Brighid see it and watch her face do that thing where she tries not to look hurt? The book would become evidence. Another item on the list of ways I’m already gone.
I slide it back onto the shelf between Barcelona and Prague. The spines align perfectly, cities queuing up like buses I haven’t caught yet. The knowledge is enough for now. That these places exist, that their pages wait here, that Cork City has a bookshop where no one monitors what a foster kid touches. That wanting to leave doesn’t require permission, only planning.
The university student shifts beside me, and I step back, making space.
The student doesn’t even glance at me, just reaches across with the ease of someone who’s never had to justify their presence in a space. Their fingers pluck a Portuguese phrase book from the shelf. One of the pins on their backpack catches light: a tiny windmill, Amsterdam probably. Another shows the Charles Bridge. Barcelona’s Gaudí cathedral.
They’re not souvenirs. Souvenirs are what you bring back to show people where you’ve been. These are proof of concept. Evidence that a person can simply… go. Can stand in front of the Eiffel Tower or whatever and then come home and be the same person, just with a pin to mark it.
The student tucks the phrase book under their arm, casual, like buying bread, and walks toward the register. Lisbon next, apparently. Just like that.
I’ve never been further than this bookshop. Never needed a phrase book because everyone within a hundred kilometers speaks the same English, knows the same families, asks the same questions about my mother.
The pins wink at me as the student disappears around a corner. Collected cities. Casual proof that the world past the coast road actually exists.
The student’s gone but their casual certainty lingers like expensive perfume. I’m still rooted here, Berlin guide gripped so tight the cover’s bending. My entire world fits inside ninety minutes of coastline. Never needed documents to cross borders because I’ve never reached one. Never stood in an airport queue, never heard departure announcements, never watched Ireland shrink beneath wings.
Tokyo glows from a glossy cover: neon and temples and crowds where nobody’s cousin knows your business. Mumbai sprawls across another spine. São Paulo promises distances my mind can’t properly hold. These aren’t just places. They’re witness protection programs. Cities so vast you could dissolve into them, emerge someone new, someone without paperwork that follows like a shadow.
The books cost eighteen euro each. I have seven fifty in my pocket.
My thumb runs the spines like rosary beads, calculating what I’ve calculated dozens of times: bus to Dublin, ferry to Holyhead, then the math gets fuzzy. These books cost more than I’m holding. The journeys inside them cost what I can’t fathom yet.
But here, ringed by evidence the world exceeds one town’s ledger, something loosens in my chest. Not hope. Something quieter. Permission, maybe. To want beyond running. To want toward.
I pocket the notebook like contraband, like proof. The receipt she hands me is anonymous. No name, no account, just a transaction between strangers. In Ballycragh, even buying milk gets recorded in the town’s collective memory. Here, I’m nobody’s cautionary tale. Just a customer. Just a person who wanted something and got it without explaining why I’m allowed to want at all.
The coins feel warm from my pocket, mixed with lint and a receipt from the chipper where Fionnuala bought me lunch. I spread them across the counter like I’m laying down cards, like this transaction matters more than its sum. €3.[^50] in silver tens and copper pennies that smell of metal and all the small patience it took to save them. Bottle returns. Sweeping Declan’s pub after closing. Finding a euro coin in the street and not spending it for three weeks.
The girl, Aoife, her name tag says in looping handwriting, doesn’t sigh the way Mrs. Hennessy does back home when I count out change, like my poverty is a personal inconvenience. She just starts counting with me, her purple-streaked hair falling forward to hide her face. Her nails are painted black but chipped, and there’s ink on her thumb like she’s been writing something herself.
When we both reach for the same ten-cent piece, our fingers touch. Just for a second. Just skin on skin, accidental and meaningless. But she doesn’t pull back like I’m contagious. Doesn’t do that thing people do in Ballycragh. That microscopic flinch when they remember who I am, what I am. The foster kid. The one whose mother couldn’t. The one who doesn’t really belong to anyone.
She just picks up the coin, adds it to the pile, and keeps counting.
“Three-fifty exactly,” she says, sweeping the coins into her palm. Not “Are you sure you can afford this?” Not “Shouldn’t you be saving that?” Not any of the questions that would come wrapped in concern back home, concern that’s really judgment wearing a kind face.
Just the transaction. Just the exchange. Money for goods, simple as breathing.
She doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know my history. Can’t recite my family tree or lack thereof. I’m just a customer who wants a notebook.
It feels like being human.
“Nice choice,” she says, and there’s Cork in her voice, a different music than Clare. Rounder vowels, softer edges. The accent alone tells me I’m somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t home.
She doesn’t follow it with questions. Doesn’t ask what I need it for, if I’m visiting, who my people are. In Ballycragh, Mrs. Hennessy at the shop can’t sell you a Mars bar without extracting your family history and current living situation. Every purchase comes with interrogation, gentle as a knife.
But Aoife just slides the notebook across the counter, already in a brown paper bag like it’s precious. Like I’m a real customer who deserves packaging. Her name tag is pinned to a vintage Cranberries t-shirt, the kind you’d find in a charity shop if you looked hard enough. The name’s written in her own hand, not printed by corporate machinery. Even her job allows for personality here.
She’s already looking past me to the next customer, a woman with a pram and a stack of cookbooks. I’m dismissed. Forgotten.
It’s the most liberating thing I’ve ever felt.
I step away from the counter, clutching the bag against my chest like contraband. The shop smells of paper and possibility, nothing like the pub’s stale beer and old stories. Around me, people browse without performing, without checking who’s watching. A man in paint-stained jeans reads poetry aloud to himself. Two students argue about philosophy, their Cork accents making even Kant sound musical.
Nobody cares that I’m here. Nobody’s calculating which family I belong to, what my presence means, whether my being in their space requires acknowledgment or avoidance.
This is what it means to be unknown. Not invisible. Here, I’m simply unseen, which is different. Better. I’m a person-shaped space that could be filled with anything.
I could invent myself entirely.
“Thanks,” I manage, and the word comes out different here, lighter, unanchored. She’s already turning to the next customer, and the dismissal doesn’t sting. It liberates.
I could be anyone in this moment. Someone planning adventures, not escapes. Someone whose story begins with choosing a notebook, not with a file marked O’Malley, Keiran: Case #2847-B.
Someone who just walked in off the street.
The bag crinkles against my chest, and I’m aware of my heartbeat in a way that has nothing to do with anxiety. This notebook (Christ, it’s just paper and cardboard, costs less than a pint) but it’s the first thing I’ve bought that isn’t about survival. Not secondhand. Not borrowed. Not assigned by someone who gets paid to care.
Mine. Chosen. Anonymous.
The first letters come out shaky (R-e-y-k) and I have to steady my wrist against the notebook’s spine. My handwriting’s always been shite, all angles and inconsistent pressure, the kind that makes teachers sigh. But these words demand precision. I copy the accent marks like they’re architectural blueprints, those strange dots and slashes that transform familiar letters into something other.
Reykjavík. The ‘k’ and ‘v’ together feel violent in my mouth when I sound it out silently. Viking-sharp, yeah, like the travel book said. A place where winter means darkness and summer means endless light, where the rules are completely inverted. Where being cold and remote isn’t a personality flaw but geography.
Lisboa. The ‘s’ that sounds like ‘sh’, all warmth and sibilance. The book showed yellow trams climbing hills, tiles covering every surface in blue and white patterns. A city that faces the Atlantic like we do but sees it as a beginning, not an ending. They sailed out from there, toward the unknown, and called it discovery instead of exile.
Praha. The ‘h’ catches in my throat. Fairy tale spires and bridges, the book said, a city that survived empires and occupations and still has its own name in its own language. Not Prague. That’s what outsiders call it. Praha. The locals’ word, the real word.
Montréal. I’m careful with the accent over the ‘e’, that little mark that changes everything. A place where they speak two languages and neither one is quite English, where being from somewhere else is ordinary. Where “foster kid from Ballycragh” would require translation, explanation, context: and by the time you’d explained it, it wouldn’t matter anymore.
The pen stills. Four cities. Four versions of elsewhere. Four places where my story hasn’t already been written.
Fionnuala’s voice bleeds through from the front seat. The words are just sounds to me, bureaucratic noise. For once I’m grateful she’s distracted, grateful for this pocket of invisibility in the moving vehicle.
My hand cramps around the pen. The letters come out desperate, crowded together like they’re racing off the page. As if these cities might evaporate if I don’t pin them down fast enough, as if Cork’s gravity will pull them back into impossibility. I copy everything exactly as it appeared in the travel books: every accent mark, every unfamiliar letter combination preserved like I’m transcribing something holy.
Because maybe it is. Maybe this is scripture for people like me: the gospel of elsewhere, the promise that the world extends beyond what everyone here insists is real. Each city name is a small rebellion, proof that Ballycragh’s version of inevitable isn’t the only truth available.
The pen hovers over Montréal, ink pooling slightly where the accent mark should go.
The bus window reflects my face back at me, ghosted over fields I’ve known my entire life. I press the pen harder, making the letters darker, more permanent. Lisboa. Praha. The names taste foreign on my tongue, all sharp consonants and vowels that don’t behave like they should.
I add another line to the margin: Places where no one knows what your mother did or who your father wasn’t. The ink bleeds slightly into the cheap paper, making the words look urgent, fevered.
Fionnuala’s still talking, something about placement reviews and stability assessments. The words that usually make my stomach clench just wash past. For once, the bureaucracy that defines me feels distant, irrelevant. These cities don’t care about case files or social workers’ reports. They don’t care about anything except whether you show up.
His finger traces Reykjavík, the accent mark like a tiny mountain peak. He mouths the names silently (Lisboa, Praha, Montréal) feeling how they reshape his mouth, require different breath. In those syllables, he’s not Mary O’Malley’s boy or another MacBride placement. He’s nobody’s cautionary tale, nobody’s paperwork. Just Keiran. The name alone, stripped of its footnotes and whispered context. The lightness of it makes his chest ache.
The pen hovers. The bus slows for a junction, hedgerows blurring past. He’s emptied his memory of cities, but stopping feels like surrender. So he invents (Nordhavn, Castellmare) sounds that taste like destinations. Then catches himself. Crosses them out hard enough to tear the page slightly. This isn’t fantasy. It’s cartography. These places exist right now, full of people who’ve never heard of County Clare. Who couldn’t find Ballycragh if their lives depended on it. The pen: key and compass both, pointing relentlessly away.
That night in his new temporary room at the Hennessys’ (smaller than the last one, wallpaper pattern different but equally faded, the radiator clanking in a rhythm he hasn’t learned yet) I continue the list by lamplight. The pen moves faster now, chasing the momentum from Cork, from that bookshop where nobody knew me. Dublin first, because it’s obvious, because every Irish person knows someone who moved there. Then London, Manchester, Edinburgh. Places tourists mention while ordering pints, their accents making the names sound exotic even though they’re just across the water.
Mrs. Hennessy’s nephew went to Berlin for university. I write that down. Amsterdam comes from a documentary I half-watched in the Clearys’ living room, two placements ago, before everything went sideways there. The notebook becomes a catalog of elsewhere, each name a small act of defiance against the town’s gravity, against the way Ballycragh pulls everything back toward its center like water circling a drain.
My hand cramps but I keep going. Paris, because obviously. Barcelona, because I heard someone at the pub say it never gets properly cold there. Stockholm, Copenhagen. The pen scratches against cheap paper, the only sound besides the house settling around me with its unfamiliar creaks, the smell of someone else’s fabric softener drifting up from downstairs.
By page five, I’m running out of places I’ve actually heard of. But stopping feels like admitting defeat, like the world is smaller than I need it to be. So I keep the pen moving, building a paper bridge to anywhere but here, each city name another plank laid across the distance between who I am and who I might become.
By page seven, I’m pulling names from news reports half-remembered, their syllables heavy with distance and difference. Toronto. Sydney. San Francisco. I don’t know what these cities actually look like beyond their skylines on the telly, beyond the two-second establishing shots before the camera cuts to whatever tragedy brought them into the news cycle. But I write them down anyway, testing how they feel in my mouth, San Fran-cis-co, three beats like a heartbeat, like a promise.
The radiator clanks its unfamiliar rhythm. Someone’s walking around downstairs. Hennessy, probably, getting water or checking the locks like people do in houses they actually own. The smell of their fabric softener is different from the Clearys’, sweeter, almost cloying. Everything here is slightly wrong, slightly off, like wearing someone else’s glasses.
But the pen keeps moving. Tokyo, because why not. Buenos Aires, the name rolling off my tongue like music. Mumbai. Johannesburg. Each one another plank laid across the distance between this borrowed room and a life that might actually be mine. The world’s vastness spreads across cheap paper, and for once, being unmoored feels like freedom instead of falling.
Around page ten, my hand’s cramping something fierce, but stopping feels like admitting defeat. I push through, adding places overheard at the Crossroads: Chicago, where Tommy Donnelly went for construction work and never rang home. Oslo, mentioned by that Norwegian backpacker who got lost looking for Doolin and ended up three pints deep at our bar. Wellington. Prague. Reykjavik: names I collect like stolen coins, like evidence that the world actually extends beyond where the coast road runs out of tarmac.
Each city I add makes Ballycragh smaller in my head, shrinks it down to a single dot on a map that’s suddenly crowded with alternatives. But my hand’s shaking now, and I can’t tell if it’s from writing or from something else entirely.
The light’s going grey when I finally stop, twelve pages deep in cramped writing that looks desperate even to me. I stare at the names, Melbourne, Toronto, São Paulo, and the excitement’s gone sour in my stomach. All these places and not a single reason to pick one over another. No uncle in Boston to ring up, no cousin who’ll vouch for me in London. Just cities that don’t know I exist, waiting to swallow me whole or spit me back.
I close the notebook and it feels heavier than twelve pages should. The grey light makes the Hennessys’ floral curtains look like prison bars. All those cities, and I’ve no more claim to any of them than they have to me. The list isn’t a map. It’s just proof I’m untethered, floating. You can’t choose a home when you’ve never had one to measure against.
The Dublin accent I’ve practiced sounds hollow in my own ears the moment I try it on real people, the vowels sliding wrong like they’re coated in something slippery, but I commit anyway because commitment is the only thing that sells a lie. I tell Sarah Murphy in maths class that my parents are consultants, vague enough to mean anything, prestigious enough to mean something, and watch her freckled face rearrange itself into polite interest. I tell Cormac Brennan that I lived near St. Stephen’s Green, a detail lifted from a tourism website I studied like scripture the night before, and he nods like he knows it, though I’d bet money he’s never been to Dublin either.
The trick is in the details. Not too many. That’s where liars always fuck up, piling on specifics until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. Just enough to sketch the outline, let them fill in the rest with their own assumptions about what Dublin means, what traveling parents mean, what temporary placement in a backwater town means for someone who’s supposedly from somewhere real.
I drop references to cafés I’ve never visited, complain about missing the Luas with the weary tone of someone who’s taken it a thousand times. I let my vowels flatten just slightly, swallow the ends of words the way I’ve heard it done. In the mirror that morning, it sounded almost right. In the corridors of the secondary school, with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the smell of floor cleaner and adolescent anxiety thick in the air, it sounds like exactly what it is. A performance by someone who’s learned that the truth makes you small, makes you the foster kid, makes you the one people’s mothers warn them about in careful voices that carry further than they think.
But those three days, Christ, those three days I believe it myself. I walk different, talk different, like the fiction has weight enough to reshape my spine. People lean in when I mention Grafton Street, nod knowingly when I complain about tourists clogging Temple Bar, and I can feel the space opening up around me, the way “Dublin” works like a spell to transform the foster kid into someone temporarily slumming it in the provinces. Someone with a return ticket. Someone whose presence here is circumstantial rather than circumstantial evidence.
Brighid sees through it immediately but she doesn’t call me out, just raises one eyebrow when I pronounce “three” with that flattened Dublin vowel. Even that small mercy feels like power, like I’m controlling the narrative for once instead of being written by it. For three days, I’m not the O’Malley kid. I’m from somewhere that matters, somewhere that makes this town look exactly as small as it feels.
The unraveling happens in the corridor outside the science lab, my back against cold tile, invisible in that way I’ve perfected. Katie Dolan’s voice carries: “That MacBride foster boy, yeah, clearing tables at the Crossroads. Maureen says he’s been in the system since he was nine. The O’Malley name, you know. From the court reports years back.”
I feel the fiction peeling off me like sunburned skin. Each word she speaks is a nail in the coffin of my Dublin accent, my traveling parents, my temporary cosmopolitan existence. By lunch, the whole school knows. By evening, I’m back to being exactly who I was. Who I’ve always been here. Just another case file with a familiar surname, another story the town already knows how to tell.
The Dublin accent I’d practiced dies in my throat Wednesday morning. By afternoon, the traveling parents have become a joke, “Traveling through the court system, more like.” Thursday, someone leaves a photocopied news clipping in my locker, my actual surname highlighted in yellow. The reinvention I’d built crumbles like the old coast road in winter, and I’m left standing in the rubble of who I’d tried to become.
I watch them watching me in the corridors, their eyes doing that thing where they’re looking at you but also through you, seeing not Keiran-who-might-be-interesting but Keiran-from-the-files, Keiran-who-thought-he-could-lie-his-way-into-belonging. The satisfaction in their faces is worse than the pity. At least pity pretends at kindness.
I don’t look at her. Keep my hands busy with the bike lock I’m not actually unlocking, just spinning the numbers like they might tumble into a combination that gets me out of this conversation. The metal’s cold enough to sting.
“Traveling parents,” she continues, and there’s this lightness in her voice that makes my stomach clench. “That’s actually brilliant. Very mysterious. Very (what’s the word) cosmopolitan?” She leans against the rack, and I can feel her watching my face, cataloguing my reaction. Niamh’s always been good at reading people. It’s why I thought we were mates. “Except, you know, your file’s been through half the county. Foster care doesn’t exactly travel light with the paperwork.”
The numbers on the lock blur. Three-seven-two. Two-seven-three. Nothing opens.
“I’m not taking the piss,” she says, softer now, and when I finally glance up her smile’s gone sympathetic. That’s worse somehow. The cruelty I could handle. But sympathy from Niamh Kowalczyk, who knows what it’s like to have people look at your surname and make assumptions, who understands the weight of being defined before you’ve spoken. That cuts different. “I’m just saying. You can’t outrun your story here, Keiran. Everyone knows everyone’s grandmother.”
She’s not being mean. That’s what makes it true.
“Mrs. Donnelly’s got a memory like a steel trap,” Niamh continues, pushing off the rack. “And she’s in the shop every Tuesday telling anyone who’ll listen about the time you,”
“Yeah, I get it.” My voice comes out rougher than I meant. The lock clicks open in my hands, finally, but I don’t move. Can’t, really. Because she’s right. In a town this size, you don’t get to choose your story. It’s already written in everyone else’s memory.
I try to laugh, to make it seem like I was taking the piss all along, like the whole thing was performance art or whatever. But the sound that comes out isn’t convincing even to me: too sharp, too late, dies in my throat before it reaches my eyes.
She doesn’t wait for me to recover. “Everyone knows everyone’s grandmother here,” Niamh says, and she’s not gloating. That’s the thing. She’s explaining gravity, basic physics of small-town life. “You can’t outrun your story in a town this size.”
The words land like stones. Each one true. Each one a nail in the coffin of whatever version of myself I’d been trying to build. Because she’s right. In Ballycragh, your history isn’t something you carry. It’s something that carries you, passed between neighbors like currency, refined with each retelling until the truth doesn’t matter as much as the story everyone’s agreed on.
I feel the walls of the town close in. Not metaphorical walls. Actual ones. The school, the church, the pub, the houses where people remember me at eight, at ten, at every age I’ve tried to leave behind.
I stand there, feeling the architecture of the trap. It’s not just that people know my history: it’s that Ballycragh is physically too small for amnesia. Too interconnected for reinvention. Too dense with memory for anyone to become someone new.
Niamh’s still talking, something about her mother’s cousin recognizing me from when I was placed with the Hennessys two years back, but I’m not listening anymore. I’m doing the math. Population: maybe eight hundred if you count the outlying farms. Degrees of separation: two, maximum. Every person a witness. Every witness a storyteller.
You can’t disappear in a place where your entire life fits in a single pub’s worth of collective memory.
The realization doesn’t arrive gently. It crashes through me like the Atlantic through the gaps in the harbor wall.
I’m trapped in a snow globe. That’s what this is. Ballycragh isn’t a town. It’s a sealed system, a closed loop where information circulates endlessly and nothing ever truly leaves. Niamh thinks she’s being kind, explaining the rules. But she’s just named the bars of the cage I’ve been rattling against without knowing why.
The stone walls press closer with every step back to the pub. I can feel the town’s knowledge of me like a physical weight, Mrs. Doherty at the post office knows my mother’s maiden name, Father Quinn remembers my baptism, the butcher’s wife recalls which foster home had the broken heating. I’m not a person here. I’m accumulated data, a walking file folder that everyone’s already read. The only blank pages left are the ones I’ll write somewhere else.
The atlas lives under my mattress, spine cracked from consultation like some sacred text. I pull it out at half-five in the morning when the pub’s finally quiet, when Declan’s snoring rattles through the wall between us. The pages have gone soft as cloth from my fingers tracing routes. 127 kilometers to Galway. I’ve walked that distance in my head so many times I know exactly how my feet would ache.
237 to Dublin. Far enough that my accent would mark me as country, not as Keiran O’Malley, the foster lad from the pub. Far enough that I could be anyone’s son, anyone’s past.
I do the maths obsessively. Three hours on the bus if you catch the express. Four and a half if you’re taking the local route, stopping at every crossroads where someone’s granny needs collecting. I’ve memorized the timetables, know which drivers are chatty and which ones leave you be. I’ve counted the coins in my jar so many times I can tell you the exact weight of freedom: €247.[^50] as of this morning, enough for a ticket and two weeks’ hostel fees if I’m careful.
The numbers are prayers, really. Mantras against the way this place wants to claim me. Every kilometer is a promise that I’m not just the sum of what everyone here remembers: the primary school fights, the foster placements that didn’t take, my mother’s reputation preceding me like weather. Distance equals anonymity equals the possibility of becoming someone I choose rather than someone I’ve been assigned to be.
I measure escape in increments small enough to believe in. Not “leaving Ireland” or “starting over”: too vast, too terrifying. Just: get to Galway. Then: survive a week. Then: see what happens when nobody knows your name before you speak it.
At school, I start watching the scholarship kids like they’re a species I need to understand for survival. Fionnuala Cassidy. Gone to Trinity, came back a social worker. Mr. Hennessy who teaches English: made it to London for ten years, returned when his da got sick. There’s a pattern here I’m desperate to crack, some code that separates the ones who escape from the ones who just take the scenic route home.
I make lists in the margins of my copybooks. Stayed: married local, took over family business, never left the county. Left-then-returned: university, brief city stint, pulled back by obligation or loneliness. Actually gone: the ones nobody mentions anymore, the ones who became rumors.
That third category: that’s what I’m aiming for. Not the prodigal son narrative, not the “he’ll be back” knowing looks. I want to be the one they eventually forget, whose name comes up years later and someone says “whatever happened to him?” and nobody quite remembers.
The difference between escape and orbit feels like the difference between living and drowning. I need to understand it before I make my move.
The bus to Ennis costs €4.[^50] each way. Saturdays, I walk streets where nobody’s aunt remembers me at six, where I’m not “that foster lad from the Crossroads.” The anonymity sits on my skin like relief, like finally exhaling after holding my breath through the entire week.
I practice being ordinary. Just some teenager browsing the bookshop, getting chips, existing without a backstory trailing behind like a shadow. No one here knows my mother’s name or which families passed on taking me. I’m remarkable only for being unremarkable.
It’s addictive, this rehearsal for disappearance. Each trip, I stay a bit longer, venture a bit farther from the bus station. Testing how far I can stretch before the elastic snaps me back.
The atlas becomes evidence after that, something I can’t look at without feeling exposed. I move it under my mattress where Declan won’t find it during his apologetic attempts at tidying my room. But Niamh’s seen it now, seen the pencil marks tracing escape routes like veins carrying blood away from the heart. She knows what I’m planning even if I haven’t admitted it to myself yet.
The phone becomes a talisman he checks obsessively, scrolling through his coded lists during slow shifts, adding cities he’s only seen in films. Amsterdam. Berlin. Barcelona. Each name a small act of defiance against the gravity of this place. Sometimes he searches property prices just to feel the vertigo of possibility, imagining studio flats where nobody knows what “O’Malley” means, where his accent marks him as Irish generally rather than Ballycragh specifically.
The ritual of counting becomes meditative, almost sacred. Every Sunday night after closing, I spread the notes across my bed in denominations, smoothing the creases from crumpled fivers, organizing them into neat stacks that represent futures. Fifty euros: three days of freedom. Two hundred: a week of being nobody. Five hundred: enough distance that the town becomes just another dot on a map, small enough to cover with my thumb.
I’ve memorized the exchange rates, the way other lads memorize football statistics. I know exactly how far a hundred euro stretches in Prague versus Porto, which hostels don’t ask questions, which cities have communities of Irish emigrants where I could disappear into the familiar while still being gone. The research happens in stolen moments. Library computers that don’t track history, incognito browsers on my phone during bathroom breaks, conversations with backpackers at the pub who don’t realize they’re providing intelligence.
Declan jokes about my sudden interest in European geography, thinks maybe I’m finally engaging with school. I let him believe it. Better he imagines me planning some future gap year, something respectable and returnable, than understand I’m calculating the precise coordinates of my vanishing point.
The hardest part isn’t the saving: it’s the spending I don’t do. Watching Siobhan’s face when I claim I’m skint, can’t chip in for the cinema. Declining rounds at the pub when the lads are celebrating, nursing a single pint all night while they wonder if I’ve become tight with money. Each refusal builds a wall between us, which is probably necessary. Easier to leave people you’ve already half-left.
I’ve got nearly two thousand now. The number feels simultaneously massive and insufficient. Enough to disappear, not enough to stay disappeared. But then, I’m not planning to stay anywhere. Staying is what got me into this.
The rucksack lives in the back of my wardrobe now, behind the winter jumpers Declan’s sister knitted that I’ll never wear. Army surplus, bought with cash three towns over where nobody knows me. Dark green canvas that won’t catch light, straps adjusted to my frame so precisely I could run in it.
I practice the packing like some lads practice their instrument scales. Seven minutes from standing still to ready to vanish. Jeans, two shirts, the hoodie without logos. Socks rolled tight. The documents came from Declan’s office during Ireland versus Wales. He was shouting at the television, never heard the filing cabinet drawer. Birth certificate, PPS number, the medical card that proves I exist in the system’s eyes. My mother’s photo goes in the interior pocket, face-down so I don’t have to see her expression every time I check the money.
Each rehearsal makes my hands steadier and my chest tighter. The bag’s weight becomes familiar, almost comforting. Twenty-three pounds of everything I am, everything I’m taking. The rest I’m learning to leave behind like skin I’ve outgrown.
She comes up on a Wednesday after school, drops her bag by the door like she’s done a hundred times. I’m at the wardrobe reaching for a clean shirt when she spots it: the rucksack, half-visible behind the knitwear.
“Going camping?” Her voice is light, curious.
The lie forms itself, smooth as anything. “Just organizing my stuff.”
I watch her face accept it, watch her choose to believe because questioning means naming what’s happening between us. She nods, moves on to telling me about her grandmother’s hip surgery, and I’m cataloguing this moment like evidence. Another small violence. Another down payment on the larger devastation coming. I’m learning to hurt people in increments they can absorb, spreading the damage thin enough that nobody bleeds out all at once.
The test runs teach him what freedom costs. In Galway, anonymous among tourists and students, he feels himself expand into the space. No histories trailing him, no careful performance. But the bus ride back shrinks him again, each familiar landmark a tightening. He catches his reflection in the pub’s window that evening: still here, still Keiran-from-the-system, still wearing someone else’s father’s jacket. The choice isn’t whether to leave anymore. It’s whether he can live with himself if he stays.
The money becomes a physical weight, pressing against his spine through the rucksack’s fabric. He counts it obsessively now. Not adding, just confirming. €847. The number memorized like a prayer or a curse. Some nights he considers spending it, sabotaging his own escape, forcing himself to stay through poverty rather than choice. But his fingers always smooth the notes back into their hiding place, preserving the option even as the paralysis deepens.
I practice the tilt of his head when someone’s telling a story he’s heard six times before. The angle that says I’m listening without the dishonesty of feigned surprise. I mirror the way he touches people’s shoulders, that brief contact that somehow conveys both intimacy and respect. My reflection becomes a study in borrowed gestures, each one catalogued and rehearsed until my body remembers them without thought.
The scary bit is how natural it starts to feel. How my laugh begins to sound like his: that warm, rolling thing that makes people lean closer. How I catch myself doing the open-handed gesture when I’m explaining something to Siobhan, as if I’m physically offering her my words. The performance stops requiring effort, starts becoming reflex.
I watch Declan more carefully then, searching for cracks in his facade. Looking for the moment when the mask slips and I can see what’s underneath. The real him, the one who exists when no one’s watching. But there’s nothing. Just layers of performance so practiced they’ve fused into something that might as well be genuine. He’s kind because he’s been kind so long he doesn’t remember how to be otherwise. He’s welcoming because the alternative has atrophied from disuse.
That’s what sends ice through my veins late at night. Not that I’m learning to perform, but that performance might be all there is. That if I stay long enough, practice these gestures enough times, I’ll become them completely. The boy who wanted to leave will get buried under the man who learned to stay, and I won’t even notice the moment of burial.
I study my reflection and wonder if Declan ever stood here at seventeen, practicing someone else’s gestures, planning his escape. If he remembers what it felt like to be the person underneath, or if that boy is just gone.
The thing is, I don’t know when I started doing it. Can’t pinpoint the exact moment my shoulders learned that particular slouch of easy confidence, when my hands began moving in those same expansive arcs. Mrs. Flaherty’s “young Declan” lands like a punch I should’ve seen coming. I pour her sherry with steady hands, smile that borrowed smile, and feel something fundamental shift inside my chest. This awful cocktail of wanting her approval and hating myself for wanting it.
She’s not the only one. Old Tom nods at me now like I’m someone worth acknowledging. The Murphys save me the good shifts. Even Father Quinn mentioned me in a homily about second chances and community, though he had the grace not to use my name.
They’re writing me into their story, these people. Casting me as the boy who stayed, who learned, who became. Each warm glance is a vote of confidence I never asked for, a brick in a wall I’m simultaneously building and trying to scale. I catalogue them obsessively. Proof of belonging I might actually achieve, evidence of the trap I’m walking into with my eyes wide open.
Brighid catches me mid-gesture (Declan’s gesture, that open-palmed thing he does when he’s telling a story) and her face does something complicated. “You’re doing the thing,” she says, quiet enough the punters won’t hear.
“What thing?”
“The Declan thing. The making-everyone-comfortable thing.”
It’s not a compliment. I can hear that in the careful flatness of her voice, the way she won’t quite meet my eyes.
Later, walking her home past the closed shops, she asks if I’m trying to convince the town or myself. The question hangs in the salt air between us. I don’t answer because I genuinely don’t know anymore, because the performance has started to feel like a cage I’m building from other people’s approval, each nod of recognition another bar clicking into place.
The notes accumulate in a tin under his mattress. Contaminated currency, each one a small betrayal. He counts them obsessively, these payments for performing belonging, for wearing Declan’s gestures like stolen clothes. The money should feel like freedom. Instead it feels like evidence: proof he’s good at becoming whoever they need him to be, which means he’s never been anyone at all.
I catch myself doing it. The head tilt, the laugh that isn’t mine, the way I lean against the bar like I’ve grown roots through the floorboards. Declan sees it too. Something crosses his face that makes my stomach drop. Pride, maybe. Or recognition of something sadder: that I’ve learned his loneliness so well I can wear it like a second skin.
The junction becomes a threshold I can’t cross, not yet. Twenty minutes I stand there like some fecking statue, watching tail lights disappear toward Galway, toward anywhere. My thumb twitches at my hip. But when the lorry actually slows, when I see the driver’s face in the windscreen doing the calculation every decent person does, is this kid in trouble or trouble himself, my hand drops like it’s been burned.
Not tonight.
The words taste like failure. Like all the other nights I’ve walked this road and turned back before the real decision point. Twenty-seven minutes to return, and I count every one of them. Each step is a small violence against the version of myself who was supposed to be brave enough. Who was supposed to just go.
The wind off the Atlantic pushes at my back, helpful now, urging me toward town. Toward the amber windows of the Crossroads, where Declan’s probably wiping down the bar, humming off-key to whatever’s on the radio. Toward my room above the pub with its slanted ceiling and the rucksack I’ve packed and unpacked seventeen times.
I’m good at leaving. I’ve done it six times before, different houses, different families. But those were removals, not escapes. Social workers drove me, my life in bin bags in the boot. This has to be different. This has to be my choice, my timing, my terms.
The problem is choice requires commitment. And commitment requires knowing what you’re running toward, not just what you’re running from.
At the bottom of the hill, the pub sign creaks in the wind. I can see Declan through the window, laughing at something a customer said. Performing happiness like it’s his job. Because it is.
Not tonight. But soon.
The notebook starts as theft: a water-damaged Moleskine someone left behind after a session, pages still blank enough to matter. I nick it during closing, slide it under my jacket like contraband. Which it is, in a way. Evidence of premeditation.
First entry: Junction to town center: 27 min walking, 18 running. Then it grows. The Hennessys’ collie at number twelve that goes mental at movement. Mrs. O’Brien’s motion lights that flood the road bright as judgment. The gap in the stone wall at mile marker two where you can piss without being seen from passing cars.
I sketch the junction from memory, my pencil making the bus shelter more substantial than it is in life. Just three walls and a bench covered in carved declarations of who loves who. 6:[^15] to Galway, €12.[^50] single. Below that, calculations that shame me: how many shifts until I can afford the ticket, how many kilometers I could cover on foot if I couldn’t.
The notebook transforms from journal into instruction manual. A recipe for disappearing. Step one: know every inch of the route. Step two: still be too afraid to take it.
She doesn’t ask to see the notebook, but I show her anyway. Open it to the sketches, the timings, the pathetic arithmetic of escape. Her finger traces the route I’ve drawn, stopping at the junction where my pencil pressed hard enough to indent the page.
“You’ve walked this a hundred times in your head,” she says.
“More.”
The flower’s already wilting between the pages, turning brown at the edges. She notices, doesn’t comment. Just stands there with the Atlantic wind whipping her grandmother’s cardigan, looking at my evidence like it’s something precious instead of proof I’m already half-gone.
“When?” she asks.
I can’t answer. Don’t know if that makes me honest or coward.
The wind cuts through my jacket like it knows I’m lying to myself about being ready. Sixteen minutes. A new record, but my lungs burn and my hands shake from more than cold. I sit on the wall, stones rough under my palms, and pull out my phone. The screen’s too bright against the darkness. Fionnuala answers before the second ring finishes, like she’s been waiting.
“I need to know if leaving makes me like everyone who left me.”
The silence stretches. I hear her breathing, careful and measured. Behind her, papers rustle. Case files, maybe. Evidence of all the others who disappeared.
“No,” she says finally. “It makes you someone who survived long enough to choose.”
I stop walking the road after that call. The route’s burned into my muscle memory now. Every pothole, every gap in the wall where the Atlantic screams through. The notebook goes into the rucksack, zipped tight with everything else I’ll carry. When I pass the turn-off during daylight runs for Declan, I keep my eyes forward. The road’s given me what I needed: proof that leaving is just motion, repeated until you’re somewhere else. The junction will wait. It’s patient with cowards learning to be brave.
The worst part is how the language starts to feel true. I catch myself mid-conversation with Declan, about to tell him about this book Brighid lent me, and the phrase “superficial engagement” floats through my head like smoke. I close my mouth. Watch him notice. Watch him choose not to push. That’s going in someone’s notes somewhere, I think. “Subject withdrew from interaction when foster parent showed interest.”
I’m doing their job for them now, writing my own case notes in real time.
At the pub, I pour drinks and the words pour through me. Mrs. Hennessy orders her usual gin and tonic, asks how I’m getting on, and I hear “difficulty maintaining appropriate boundaries with non-familial adults” before I can hear actual concern. I give her the smile I know she wants, polite, grateful, not too familiar, and she beams like I’ve done something clever. Performance of normalcy, I think. Masking underlying detachment.
Brighid corners me after my shift, asks if I’m alright, actually alright, and I want to tell her everything. Want to explain how I’ve been reading my own autopsy while I’m still breathing. But “resistant to vulnerability” slides between us like a pane of glass, and I shrug instead. Say I’m grand, just tired. She doesn’t believe me but she lets it go because that’s what Brighid does. She gives people space even when space is the last thing they need.
Later, walking home alone, I realize the file hasn’t just described me. It’s rewriting me. Every word I don’t say, every connection I don’t make, every time I choose distance over risk, I’m becoming the person in those pages. They wrote “flight risk” and I’m proving them right by running from everything that isn’t actually chasing me.
The testing becomes systematic, almost scientific. I start cataloguing my own dysfunction like I’m gathering evidence for their case. Monday: arrive fifteen minutes late, see if Declan writes it down. Tuesday: ignore Siobhan’s texts, count how many it takes before she stops trying. Wednesday: let Brighid reach for my hand and pull away just before contact, watch something dim in her eyes.
Each time, I’m waiting for someone to pull out a clipboard, nod knowingly, tick a box. See? Told you. Attachment difficulties. Emotionally guarded. Poor prognosis.
The fucked thing is, I want them to. Want someone to point at the file and say “this is why you’re like this” so I don’t have to take responsibility for being a person who hurts people. The paperwork offers an escape route from guilt. Programmed by trauma and placement failures.
But when Declan doesn’t write anything down, when Siobhan keeps texting, when Brighid keeps reaching despite my flinching: that’s somehow worse. Because then I’m just doing this to myself.
The file’s language becomes my interior monologue. Resistant to authority when Declan asks about my shift. Flight risk when I check bus times on my phone. Emotionally guarded when Brighid’s hand finds mine and I count seconds before pulling away. I start narrating myself in third person clinical: Subject demonstrates consistent pattern of self-sabotage. Prognosis remains poor.
The relief is real, though. Not my fault I’m wired wrong. Just faulty programming from too many placements, too many families who sent me back like a jumper that didn’t fit. But relief tastes like resignation. If they documented the pattern, mapped its trajectory, maybe I’m just following the only route available. Maybe leaving isn’t choice but inevitability, written in my file years before I read it.
The check-in comes. Fionnuala’s office smells like bergamot tea and old files. I sit across from her, rehearsing the words until they lose meaning. I know what the file says. But what comes out is: “Am I actually broken, or did writing it down make it true?” Her pen stops mid-note. The silence stretches like the coast road, dangerous and clarifying.
I stand there holding Declan’s biro, the file’s phrases circling my head like gulls over the harbor. Attachment difficulties. The ink bleeds slightly on my thumb. What would I even write? That I’m not broken, just careful? That their words got inside me, turned observation into prophecy? I set the pen down. There’s no margin wide enough for the truth they didn’t document: that I loved people here, and leaving them is the cost of surviving.
The worst part is catching myself mid-performance. In History, Mrs. Donnelly asks about the Famine migrations and I know the answer. Read three books about it last month, actually, because understanding why people leave feels urgent now. But I keep my hand down, let Cillian Murphy give his half-arsed response about potatoes. She glances at me, that particular look teachers get when they’re deciding whether to push, and I make myself smaller in the chair. Withdrawn in group settings. Check.
During the science project, I position myself at the corner of the lab table while Brighid and Siobhan debate methodology. I have thoughts but I let them work it out. Contribute just enough to not be useless, not enough to be noticed. When Mr. O’Brien pauses by our station and I actually explain our hypothesis, his eyebrows climb toward his hairline. “Excellent thinking, Keiran. Didn’t know you had it in you.”
Didn’t know. As if I’ve been hiding it. As if I haven’t been performing exactly what they expected.
The file’s language has become my script. I’m method acting my own life, and I can’t remember when I started or how to stop. In English, I write essays that are good but not remarkable. Wouldn’t want to seem like I’m trying too hard, like I think I belong in the university-track conversations. At lunch, I sit where I can see the exits. Not because I’m planning to bolt, but because the file said flight risk and now I’m wondering if I’ve always done this or if I’m doing it because they said I would.
It’s like reading a horoscope that’s vague enough to fit. Once you’ve seen the words, you find evidence everywhere. I’m haunting myself with their version of me.
Her fingers were warm against my wrist, just the lightest touch across the lunch table, and I jerked back like she’d burned me. Watched her face do that thing where the hurt arrives before she can hide it, her hand retreating to her lap.
“Sorry,” I said, but it came out flat. Defensive.
“It’s fine.” That particular tone that means it isn’t.
Attachment difficulties. The words from the file hover between us like smoke. Did I pull away because I’m wired wrong, or because I read those words and now I’m performing them? Maybe I’ve always flinched from touch and never noticed until someone wrote it down in clinical language. Or maybe reading it planted something, turned a tendency into a prophecy.
I can’t tell anymore what’s authentic and what’s script.
Brighid’s already turned to Siobhan, laughing at something, but there’s a new carefulness in how she holds herself. Distance I created. I want to reach back, prove the file wrong, but my hand stays flat on the table. Maybe that’s the real difficulty: not knowing if I’m broken or just convinced I am.
The worst part is catching myself mid-action and wondering: would I have done this anyway? When I avoid Declan’s eyes over breakfast, am I protecting myself or fulfilling the prophecy? My backpack stays packed, three changes of clothes, toiletries, the emergency cash, but I’ve always kept it that way, haven’t I? Or did I start after reading “history of absconding”?
Siobhan spirals about her mum’s drinking, and I offer practical solutions instead of comfort. Emotional distance, the file called it. But maybe I’m just shite at feelings. Maybe everyone is, and I’m the only one who’s read the diagnosis.
I’m living inside a case study, and I can’t remember who I was before I became data.
Mrs. Brennan calls on him to analyze Oedipus, and the words catch in his throat. “He runs from the prophecy but fulfills it anyway.” The class nods, scribbling notes. But I’m running because of the prophecy, he thinks. If they’d never written “flight risk,” would I still be packing? Or did they just name what was already inevitable?
The librarian watches me stack books on outcomes and statistics, her expression careful. Pity or concern, I can’t tell anymore. Every percentage feels like a cage. Seventy percent don’t finish university. Forty percent experience homelessness. I’m searching for the outliers, the ones who escaped the data, but the books only document the predictable. Maybe I’m not running toward something. Maybe I’m just running on schedule.
The thing about being watched is you develop a second consciousness: the one that observes yourself being observed, that narrates your own performance even as you’re living it. So I’m standing there feeling my face go hot while simultaneously noting the heat, cataloging it as evidence of vulnerability, weakness, the exact reaction she wanted. My throat closes around words I can’t afford to say because we both know the truth: she’s right about the genetic lottery, just wrong about which one of us lost it.
Her mother’s accent thickens when she’s nervous. Her father drinks alone in their perfect house with its perfect lawn. I’ve seen her hands shake before tests, watched her rewrite essays until the paper tears. We used to compare notes on performing normal, back when we were both new to pretending. Before she decided the safest way to stop being a target was to become the archer.
The audience wants a reaction. Violence or tears, something to screenshot and disseminate. Proof that the foster kid finally cracked, that the file got it right all along. Flight risk. Attachment difficulties. I can feel my body preparing to give them what they want, adrenaline turning my legs to springs, my vision to tunnel. Every muscle knows the choreography of leaving because leaving is what I’m good at.
But walking away from Niamh means walking toward the bathroom, the library, another class, more hours in this building that smells like industrial cleaner and teenage anxiety. It means staying when every cell is screaming run. So I do what the file never predicted: I choose the harder thing. I turn my back on her performance and refuse to play my assigned role.
Behind me, she’s already rewriting the scene, casting my silence as guilt or instability or whatever fits her narrative. I don’t look back to see who’s buying it.
Walking away requires every ounce of control he’s learned in seven placements. The careful neutrality, the blank face, the steady pace that shows neither flight nor defeat. My legs want to sprint but I make them walk, heel-toe, heel-toe, like I’m not dissolving inside my own skin. Behind me, Niamh’s voice rises to fill the silence I’ve left her, spinning narrative from my refusal to engage, turning my restraint into evidence of exactly what the file predicted. “See? He can’t even handle a simple conversation. That’s what happens when,”
I count steps to the bathroom. Make it to thirty-seven before my breathing goes ragged, before the performance cracks and I’m just a body trying not to come apart in a school corridor. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. The numbers are a lifeline, something concrete when everything else is dissolving. Forty. The bathroom door is heavy, blessedly heavy, requiring both hands to push through. Forty-one steps from her voice to this fluorescent-lit sanctuary that smells like industrial soap and teenage desperation.
The metal’s cold seeps through my skull, a small mercy against the heat crawling up my neck. Four counts in, Fionnuala’s voice in my head, patient and clinical. This is just physiology, Keiran. Your body doesn’t know the difference between real danger and social threat. Seven counts hold, and my lungs are screaming because panic doesn’t follow therapeutic rhythms. Eight counts out, shaky and insufficient.
The bell’s shrill ring makes me flinch. I should move. Should get to History, where Mrs. O’Brien will mark me late with that particular look that says she’s adding evidence to some invisible file of her own. But my legs have gone liquid, and staying here (hidden, pathetic, avoidant) feels like the only honest thing I’ve done today.
Another prediction confirmed. Another reason to leave.
By lunch, the story’s metastasized. I catch fragments between classes: my silence weaponized into aggression, my exit now “storming off.” Brighid and Siobhan don’t mention it when I sit down, which means they’ve heard. Their careful kindness wraps around me like evidence. I push chips around my plate, tasting ash and vindication. Every bite confirms what the file already knows: I don’t belong here. Never did.
The Crossroads fills with Friday regulars, and I’m behind the bar pulling pints on autopilot. Muscle memory from a hundred shifts. Declan’s doing his usual performance, all terrible puns and expansive gestures, but his eyes keep finding me. Checking. Worrying. Mrs. Healy asks am I alright and I say “grand” in that particular way that means don’t ask again, wiping down surfaces that are already clean, my hands busy while my head maps distances: sixteen days, two buses, one ferry. Every smile I serve feels like perjury.
I climb the narrow stairs with the wrapped book feeling like a brick in my hands: proof of trying, evidence I’ve been paying attention. Siobhan mentioned it once, passing comment in the school corridor, and I filed it away like I’m building a case for my own normalcy. See? I remember things. I care about the right details. I’m not what the file says I am.
Her ma opens the door with that particular brightness that comes from starting early, wine glass already in hand though it’s barely seven. “Keiran! Come in, come in, she’s been watching for you.” The words are warm but slurred at the edges, and I catch Siobhan behind her, face going tight with mortification.
I know that expression. Wore it myself last month when Declan told that story about me sleepwalking to three different families at the pub quiz, turning my childhood trauma into entertainment. The way you want to dissolve into the floorboards when the person who’s supposed to protect you exposes you instead.
“Thanks, Mrs. Byrne,” I say, stepping past her carefully, and Siobhan’s eyes meet mine with something desperate in them. Don’t acknowledge it. Don’t make it worse by being kind. I get it. So I pivot fast, hold up the book. “Happy birthday. You mentioned it ages ago, so.”
“You remembered.” She takes it like it might break, and I can’t tell if she’s pleased or alarmed that I’ve been keeping score of her casual comments. Maybe both. Maybe that’s what I do: collect people’s throwaway words and build monuments from them, trying to prove I’m the kind of person who stays, who matters, who belongs in rooms like this.
Her ma’s already drifted toward the kitchen, calling something about crisps, and Siobhan exhales. “Sorry. She’s,”
“Grand,” I say. “Mine tells shite jokes to strangers. We’re sound.”
The sitting room’s too small for the seven of us, furniture pushed against walls to make space that still isn’t enough. I take the spot by the door, not even conscious of doing it anymore, just muscle memory, and watch myself like I’m surveillance footage: laugh track on a two-second delay, nodding like one of those dashboard dogs, every muscle locked in the shape of casual.
I’m performing so hard I’ve forgotten what the real version feels like.
Across the room, Brighid’s watching me over her cup, and I see the exact moment she clocks it. The confusion in her eyes, like she’s trying to match this wind-up toy version with the lad who sits beside her on the cliffs, saying nothing, being nothing but honest silence. I look away first. Can’t bear to see her work out that maybe the coast road version is the performance, that maybe there’s no real me underneath all the trying.
My jaw aches from smiling. I’ve been here twenty minutes and I’m already exhausted from being so aggressively fine.
“Never Have I Ever,” someone calls out, and my hand shoots up before the sentence finishes. See? Eager. Normal. Participating.
I know every variation from years behind the bar, watching hen parties and stag dos make themselves vulnerable for entertainment. Three fingers up, recite the line, drink when you’re guilty. Simple as a catechism.
But I’m counting beats between responses, calibrating my reactions, treating friendship like an exam I can ace through pure preparation. When it’s my turn, I say something safe about never having been to Dublin, and everyone drinks except me, and I feel the distance like a physical thing. Them moving through life collecting experiences, me collecting evidence that I’m capable of being kept.
The grim satisfaction of another box ticked: social engagement, demonstrated.
The kitchen smells like her mother’s cigarettes and the lavender oil she uses to calm down. I can see my reflection fractured in the window behind her: seventeen and trying so hard to be uncomplicated that I’ve become a performance with no performer left inside it.
“I don’t know how to just be here,” I say, and the admission cracks something open.
Siobhan doesn’t try to fix it. She hands me water, fingers trembling slightly, and says, “You’re trying so hard you’ve gone somewhere else entirely.”
The truth of it winds me. I’ve been so busy disproving “flight risk” that I’ve fled anyway: not my body, but everything that makes the body matter. I’m a perfect attendance record with nobody home.
“Are you sure you’re not drunk?” I ask, desperate for her to be unreliable.
Her clear eyes answer before her mouth does.
The worst part is watching her decide to let me go. It happens in real time. The softening around her mouth hardens, the hand that was reaching toward my arm drops back to her side, the worry in her eyes transmutes into something colder. Protection. I’ve seen it before, that moment when someone stops trying to save you and starts saving themselves from you instead.
“Right so,” she says, and the casual dismissal in those two words is more final than any argument. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
I could tell her the truth. That I’ve been reading myself as a case file, a collection of risk factors and predictable failures. That I’m trying to become someone who doesn’t match the paperwork by erasing everything that makes me real. That I’m so terrified of becoming the person those clinical notes predicted that I’m disappearing myself before the system can do it for me.
But the words stick in my throat, trapped behind years of learning that vulnerability gets weaponized. That opening your file means giving people the language to reduce you. That the moment you admit you’re struggling, you prove you were always going to struggle.
So I do what Declan taught me. Another joke, lighter this time, about being a moody teenager. A self-aware laugh that acknowledges the awkwardness while refusing to address it. The social grease that lets uncomfortable moments slide past without friction.
She doesn’t smile. Just nods once, sharp, and turns away. I watch her walk down Main Street, the cardigan billowing behind her like a flag of surrender, and I know I’ve just chosen the file’s version of myself over the person who saw me as more than my history.
The ghost town I’ve been mapping just gained another empty street.
She corners him outside the chemist’s on a Tuesday, her grandmother’s cardigan wrapped tight against the wind coming off the Atlantic. “You’re disappearing,” she says, and there’s no preamble, no small talk. Just the truth delivered like she’s afraid if she doesn’t say it now, there’ll be no one left to say it to.
The words hit like an accusation and a plea braided together. He watches her face (open, worried, still willing to believe in him despite everything) and feels the Declan-taught deflection rise automatically. Something about needing space to think, a self-deprecating quip about being shite company lately anyway. The humor comes out wrong, lands like a slap instead of a deflection, a shield she recognizes immediately as rejection.
Something shutters behind her eyes. Not anger. That would be easier. Just this careful closing, like watching someone pull curtains across a window you used to be welcome at. Her hand, which had been reaching toward his arm, drops back to her side.
“Right,” she says quietly. “Grand so.”
And he knows he’s just lost something the file never accounted for.
The words taste like ash even as he speaks them and Christ, he could be reading from the file itself. Demonstrates evasive communication patterns. Deflects emotional engagement. Brighid’s hand, which had been reaching for his arm, drops away like he’s burned her. He watches her face do the math, that terrible calculation between caring and self-preservation, between reaching for someone and knowing when you’re just grasping at air.
“Okay, Keiran.” Her voice is steady, careful, already grieving. Not grand this time. Just okay: the word you use when nothing’s okay but you’re done fighting it.
He lets her walk away. Watches her cardigan disappear around the corner. He’d meant to prove the file wrong, to be more than their predictions. Instead he’s become their best evidence, fulfilling every risk assessment like prophecy.
That night he serves pints at the Crossroads, hands moving through muscle memory while his mind catalogs evidence against himself. Declan’s concerned glances. His own clipped responses. The way he’s standing. Shoulders angled toward the door, weight on his back foot. Demonstrates hypervigilance and exit-seeking behavior. A regular asks if he’s grand twice before Keiran realizes he’s been staring through the taps, performing presence while evacuating himself completely.
The wall’s rough stone grounds him. Three generations of MacBrides’ hands on this same surface, Brighid’s grandmother courted here, Declan’s father proposed. History he’s studied like escape routes. He pulls out his phone, thumbs hovering over Brighid’s name, but the clinical words loop: demonstrates attachment difficulties, sabotages relationships, confirms predicted patterns. He pockets it. Lets the file win again.
The shaking travels up from my hands into my shoulders, my jaw, until I’m vibrating like the strings on the fiddle Declan keeps behind the bar, the one nobody’s played since his father died. I’ve screamed myself empty but my body’s still full of something: rage or grief or whatever you call the feeling when you realize you’ve been performing someone else’s script of who you’re supposed to be.
My grip on the wall tightens until the stone bites into my palms, sharp enough to hurt, sharp enough to feel real. The drop below is maybe forty meters of air and then rocks and then nothing, and some fucked-up part of me thinks that would be definitive, that would be data they couldn’t argue with, but my fingers won’t uncurl. My body’s smarter than my head, apparently. Knows something I’m still learning.
The wind shifts and I catch the smell of salt and kelp and something older, the Atlantic doing what it’s done for millennia while I’m up here having my little crisis about paperwork. The absurdity hits me and I laugh again, properly this time, the sound torn away before it’s fully formed. Here I am, seventeen and bleeding through my trainers, letting a social worker’s assessment tell me who I am like it’s gospel instead of just one woman’s professional opinion written on a Tuesday afternoon between other cases, other problems, other kids reduced to bullet points.
But the words have teeth. They’ve burrowed in. Attachment difficulties. Like it’s a failing that I learned not to love people who were paid to house me. Flight risk. Like wanting to leave a place that’s never quite felt like home is pathological instead of sensible.
I look at my hands, still white-knuckled on stone, still holding on. Still here. That has to count for something the file doesn’t measure.
I fish the pages from my jacket, crumpled, sweat-damp, stolen because apparently I’m committed to fulfilling every prediction they’ve made about me. The irony isn’t lost. My phone screen casts blue light across words that were never meant for my eyes, clinical sentences that have been quietly constructing me in filing cabinets and case conferences for years.
“Subject demonstrates pattern of preemptive withdrawal from attachment figures.”
The laugh that comes out of me is ugly, more bark than breath, and the wind takes it before it’s properly formed. Subject. Not Keiran. Not even “the minor.” Just subject, like I’m something being studied, a specimen exhibiting predictable behaviors. And maybe I am. Maybe Fionnuala’s right and I do pull away first, always, before anyone can do the pulling for me. Maybe that’s not insight, just pattern recognition. Maybe I’ve been so busy proving I won’t be abandoned that I’ve abandoned everyone first.
The pages flutter in my grip like they’re trying to escape. Like they know what’s coming.
I crouch there, trainers squelching, blood or Atlantic spray, impossible to tell anymore, and I’m moving, pacing, wearing grooves into gravel that’s already grooved by decades of leavers before me. The same hundred meters, back and forth, like distance will solve what stillness can’t.
The first page goes easy. Just a corner torn, testing. Then the whole thing, ripping clean down the middle, and suddenly I’m shredding bureaucracy into confetti, into nothing. Words scatter across the cliff face, “attachment difficulties” plastered against gorse, “placement history” cartwheeling toward the drop. The ocean doesn’t even want them. They just hang there in the wind, pathetic, before tumbling into dark.
I’m breathing hard. Hands empty. Still subject to nothing but myself.
The stone’s cold through my jeans, legs swinging over nothing. Seven years old, Mrs. Hennessy’s kitchen, me saying “I love strawberries” like I’d rehearsed it, desperate-bright. She’d smiled, bought them special. I’d choked them down for three months, allergic, throat closing, because the file said foster kids needed to seem grateful. Adaptable. Easy.
Christ, I’ve been performing their adjectives my whole life.
The horizon bleeds from black to grey to that raw blue that makes promises it can’t keep. I’ve been choosing this (the cold stone, the bleeding feet, the screaming into wind) because loneliness is easier than letting someone close enough to leave. My phone’s gone quiet. Twelve missed calls from people who never needed a file to know me.
I stand. My feet scream. I turn toward town, toward the lights coming on in kitchen windows, toward Declan probably pacing the pub floor, toward the terrifying possibility that I’m more than what’s written about me.
The tea’s too hot but I wrap my hands around the mug anyway, letting it burn a bit because the pain feels cleaner than everything else. My fingers are still numb from the cold. Walked until my legs ached and my thoughts finally went quiet.
Declan doesn’t look at me directly, which I’m grateful for. He’s studying his tea like it might have answers, and I can see the exhaustion in the way he holds himself: not just tired, but the bone-deep weariness of someone who’s been performing for too long. The sweater his sister knitted is brilliant even in the dim morning light, lime green with purple stripes that should be ridiculous but somehow suit him. It’s the kind of thing he wears like armor, bright and cheerful and look-at-me-I’m-fine.
Except he’s not fine. I can see it now, in the grey threading through his stubble, the way his shoulders curve inward when he thinks no one’s watching. How many mornings has he found me like this. Sleeping in doorways, walking all night, trying to outpace whatever’s chasing me? How many times has he made tea instead of asking questions I can’t answer?
“The bins are a new low,” I manage, and my voice comes out rougher than I meant it to.
He huffs something that might be a laugh. “You were using your jacket as a pillow. Very dignified.” A pause, then quieter: “You’re going to catch your death, sleeping rough like that.”
I’m already leaving, I don’t say. What’s the point of staying warm?
But the tea’s good, and the pub’s quiet, and for just this moment I let myself be found.
“Found you by the bins,” Declan says, and there’s no judgment in it, just that same matter-of-fact tone he uses when mentioning the weather or that the Guinness tap needs changing. His hands wrap around his own mug, fingers overlapping like he’s trying to hold something together. “Figured you’d either walked the coast road or you’d been sitting in one of those spots you think I don’t know about.”
He doesn’t say the spots you go when you’re planning to disappear. Doesn’t have to. I hear it anyway in the careful way he’s not looking at me, in the space between his words where all the questions he’s not asking live.
The thing is, he does know about those spots. The abandoned coastguard station. The hollow behind the standing stones where the wind can’t reach. The bench at the cemetery where no one visits anymore. He knows because he probably had his own versions once, back when he was the scholarship kid trying to figure out if leaving meant winning or losing.
I take another sip of tea, burning my tongue properly this time, and wonder which one he decided it was.
My hands shake lifting the mug (exhaustion, cold, something worse I don’t want to name) and I hate that he clocks it immediately. Hate more that he doesn’t say anything, just slides the sugar bowl closer like it’s coincidence, like he’s reaching for it himself.
The tea is exactly how I drink it. Two sugars, splash of milk, strong enough to taste the bitterness underneath. He’s never asked. Just learned me over two years of early mornings and late-night kitchen conversations, the quiet accumulation of someone actually paying attention.
That’s the problem with Declan. He notices everything and pretends he notices nothing, gives you space to pretend you’re fine while making sure you know you’re not alone.
It’s unbearable, sometimes. This careful kindness.
I don’t know how to hold this. His vigil, his deliberate earliness, the tea that means I was watching for you to break. My chest does something complicated, gratitude twisted up with resentment twisted up with this terrible relief that someone noticed I was drowning.
“Yeah,” I manage. “So.”
The word hangs there. Neither acceptance nor refusal. Just acknowledgment that he’s offering what I can’t ask for.
The clock’s mechanical heartbeat fills the silence between us. Quarter past five. Staff arrives at six. Forty-five minutes before this becomes performance again, before I have to be the grateful foster kid and he has to be the cheerful guardian who definitely hasn’t been arriving an hour early for three weeks, watching the back step like a fucking lighthouse keeper scanning for shipwrecks.
The water sounds different at this hour. I watch Declan’s hands because it’s easier than meeting his eyes, watch them move through steps he could do blind. The kettle’s dented on one side from where his brother threw it during some argument I wasn’t here for, back when this was still just their family business and not my temporary port in someone else’s storm.
He doesn’t use the good mugs. Never does, not for us. The chipped ones come down from the cabinet: mine with the handle that’s been glued twice, his with the faded logo from some festival in the nineties. There’s something almost aggressive about it, this insistence that we’re not customers, not performance. That this counts as real.
The tea bags are the fancy ones his sister sends in care packages, the ones that come with handwritten notes he pretends to find annoying but keeps in the drawer by the till. She thinks the local brands taste like dishwater. She’s not wrong, but she’s been in Dublin long enough to forget that sometimes dishwater is what home tastes like.
I should say something. Thank you, maybe. Or sorry for making him worry. Or the truth, which is lodged somewhere between my throat and my chest like a stone I can’t swallow and can’t spit out. But the words won’t come, and Declan doesn’t push. He just moves through the ritual like it’s ceremony, like making tea at dawn for a kid who won’t talk to him is somehow enough.
The kettle starts its low rumble, building toward the scream. We both know it’s coming. Neither of us moves to stop it early.
The mug lands in front of me with a soft thunk, steam rising between us like something alive, curling and dissipating before I can trace its shape. I wrap both hands around it because they’ve gone numb. Not from cold exactly, more like they’ve forgotten they’re supposed to feel anything. The ceramic burns, but it’s the good kind of pain, the kind that reminds you you’re still tethered to your body.
The tea’s so dark I can see my reflection in it, warped and unfamiliar. Three sugars, the way I’ve taken it since I was fourteen and he figured out I wasn’t sleeping. Not because I like it sweet. Because sugar is calories and calories are caring when you’re too stubborn to accept anything that looks like pity.
I should drink it. Should say something. Should do anything except sit here like a ghost haunting his own life while Declan pretends this is normal, like he finds kids on his doorstep every morning, like this is just another Tuesday and not the beginning of whatever comes after everything falls apart.
The chair scrapes against the floor: not loud, just enough to announce his presence without demanding acknowledgment. He settles across from me, not beside where he could reach over and grip my shoulder in that way adults do when they’re trying to transfer their strength into you. Not standing where he’d tower with all that parental concern, that foster-dad authority he’s never quite comfortable wielding.
Across. Eye level. Where I can look at him or not, my choice entirely.
It’s deliberate, this positioning. Everything with Declan is deliberate even when he’s pretending to be casual, even when he’s making it look effortless. He’s giving me space to breathe, to decide if I want this conversation or just want to exist in the same room as another person for a while.
I hate that he knows the difference.
The silence stretches between us like taffy, and I’m braced for it the script every guardian learns, the performance of concern. But Declan just drinks his tea, cradles the mug like it’s precious, and says nothing. The absence of questions lands heavier than accusations would. He’s waiting for me to choose this, to offer it freely instead of having it extracted. That kind of patience feels like a debt I don’t know how to repay.
The tea scalds my tongue and I’m grateful for it. Something sharp and immediate to cut through the fog. Too sweet, the way Declan always makes it. The way he’s been making it for months now, which means he’s been watching, learning the small architecture of me when I wasn’t paying attention. When I thought I was the one doing the observing.
His hands stay wrapped around that mug like it’s the only thing anchoring him to this moment, to this story he’s never told me before. And I realize (actually realize, not just intellectually know) that Declan doesn’t do this. Doesn’t sit still like this. Doesn’t let silence stretch between his words like something that matters instead of something to be filled with noise and laughter and the next joke that’ll keep everyone comfortable.
The morning light coming through the pub’s back windows catches the grey in his hair, makes him look older than forty-two, makes him look like someone who’s carried weight I never bothered to notice because I was too busy cataloguing my own.
“I thought if I could just get out,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that sounds like my voice, like the voice in my head at three in the morning when I’m mapping bus routes and counting saved euros and imagining myself anywhere but here. “If I could just make it to Dublin, to university, to somewhere that didn’t know my family’s history before they knew my name. Drinks his tea. And I watch his throat work around the swallow, watch him decide whether to finish the thought or retreat back into the safety of his usual performance.
“But you came back,” I say, and it comes out harder than I mean it to, almost accusatory, because I need to understand why anyone would choose to return to the place they escaped from. Need to understand if it’s weakness or strength or something I don’t have a word for yet.
His eyes meet mine then, and they’re not doing the thing they usually do. That slight crinkle at the corners that signals a punchline coming. They’re just looking at me. Seeing me seeing him.
I know that particular silence, the one where you’re editing yourself in real time, deciding which truths make you look ambitious versus desperate. I’ve done it in every new foster placement, every first day at a new school, every time someone asks where I’m from and I have to calculate how much history to include.
“What did they see?” I ask, because suddenly I need to know if the performance worked, if you can actually outrun the smell of spilled beer and financial anxiety, if borrowed shoes and careful omissions are enough.
“A scholarship kid trying too hard.” He laughs again, softer this time. “Same as all the others. We had a look, apparently. Like we’d memorized the same script for how to be grateful and hungry and unthreatening all at once.”
The tea in my own mug has gone cold, but I don’t move to reheat it. Don’t want to break whatever this is. This moment where Declan’s not being the jovial publican, the easy foster parent, the man who deflects everything serious with a terrible pun.
I watch his profile against the lightening sky: the grey threading through his hair, the way his shoulders curve forward like he’s still trying to make himself smaller, still wearing those too-big shoes in his mind. He’s not looking at me. We’re both staring out at the empty street, the shuttered shops, the town that’s waking up around us with all its familiar rhythms and suffocating expectations.
And Christ, I feel it then. This recognition that cuts deeper than I want it to. That Declan’s been sitting on this same cold step, metaphorically speaking, trying to figure out if leaving makes you free or just makes you lost in a different location.
I watch his hands tighten around the mug, knuckles going white. “Turns out you bring yourself with you, though. All the shame, all the trying-too-hard. Just wore it in different clothes, spoke it with a different accent.” His voice cracks slightly. “The chip grease smell was in my head, Keiran. Still is, some days.”
The light’s shifting, dawn bleeding into proper morning, and I watch Declan’s face change with it: the careful way he sets his jaw, the deliberate breath he takes. He’s gathering himself for something, pushing past every instinct to crack wise and dodge. I know that look. It’s the one I see in the mirror when I’m about to admit something that costs.
His fingers tighten further on the mug, and I can see the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. It’s the same grip I’ve watched him use when the till doesn’t balance or when his brother rings with advice nobody asked for. The grip that says stay here, don’t run.
“The worst part wasn’t what they actually thought,” he continues, and there’s something raw in his voice now, something I’ve never heard before. “It was what I assumed they thought. Built this whole narrative in my head. Disappointed lecturers, pitying relatives, the lads I’d left behind thinking I was too good for them and then watching me prove I wasn’t good enough for anywhere else.”
He pauses, swallows. The steam from his tea rises between us like something we could hide behind, but he doesn’t take the out.
“Turned myself into a fucking joke before anyone else could. Became the cheerful publican, the one who never takes anything seriously, who’s always good for a laugh. Easier than admitting I was terrified. That I’d failed at leaving and didn’t know how to succeed at staying.”
The morning light catches the grey in his hair, makes him look older than forty-two. Makes him look tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with last night’s closing shift.
“And the thing is, Keiran.”The thing is, I was so busy performing that version of myself, so committed to the bit, that I nearly missed the actual life I was building. The people who actually gave a shite. The kids who needed. The kids who needed what he’d needed once. What I need now, even if I can’t admit it.
“Spent four years at Trinity convinced someone would figure out I didn’t belong there,” Declan says, his voice quieter than usual, stripped of its performative warmth. The words come slower than his typical patter, like he’s translating from a language he doesn’t speak often. “Then came back here convinced I’d failed by returning. That everyone who’d invested in the scholarship kid’s success was watching me pour pints and thinking they’d wasted their money.”
He sets the mug down, and the ceramic sound against wood is too loud in the morning quiet. His hands flatten on the table, palms down, like he’s steadying himself against something.
“Wrote this whole script in my head about what my return meant. My da’s disappointment, though he never said a word. My sister’s pity, though she was nothing but kind. The lads I’d gone to school with, thinking I’d gotten notions and then couldn’t hack it. Even the ones who’d never left, who I’d somehow managed to condescend to and fail in front of simultaneously.”
His laugh is brief, bitter. Not the sound I’m used to hearing from him.
The silence stretches between us, filled with the distant sound of gulls and the heating pipes ticking as they cool. I can feel the weight of what he’s saying, the specific gravity of a confession that’s cost him something to make.
My tea’s gone cold in my hands, but I don’t move to reheat it. There’s something in his face I’ve never seen before. Not the careful cheerfulness, not the practiced deflection. Just exhaustion and something that might be hope, offered like a gift I don’t know how to accept.
“The shame wasn’t mine,” he says finally. “But I carried it like it was.”
I hold his gaze even though everything in me wants to drop it, to make some cutting remark that’ll let us both retreat to safer ground. But there’s something in his face that won’t let me: not pity, not performance. Just the specific recognition of someone who’s walked the same cliff edge I’m standing on now, who knows exactly how the wind feels.
The words land different than his usual deflections. Not a joke with truth hidden inside it, but truth offered plain. The kind that costs something to speak. I watch his hands wrap tighter round his mug, knuckles going white, and realize he’s as scared of this honesty as I am of receiving it. That maybe he’s been rehearsing this conversation in his head for weeks, waiting for me to be desperate enough to actually hear it.
The notebook sits between us like evidence at trial. Physical proof that someone made it out and came back intact, or at least functional. That the shape of leaving isn’t always a straight line away from everything you’ve known.
I can see where the pages have been thumbed most: certain addresses worn nearly transparent, phone numbers traced over and over like prayers or spells. There’s coffee stains and what might be beer, margin notes in different colored inks spanning years. “Ring after 6pm” next to one number. “Mention Galway scholarship” beside another. “Helped with rent when grant was late” in tiny letters that make my throat tight.
This isn’t just a list. It’s a survival manual written in real time by someone who was drowning and learned to swim.
My fingers finally make contact with the cover. Leather gone soft as skin, warm from Declan’s hands. The pages fall open to a section near the middle, and I see an address in Dublin crossed out with a note: “Moved to Cork, still answers calls though.” Someone cared enough to update it. To keep the information living, useful.
“How many of these did you actually use?” My voice comes out rougher than intended.
“All of them.” No hesitation. “Some more than once. That hostel on Talbot Street kept me going for three months when I couldn’t afford student housing. The professor whose number is on page twelve talked me out of dropping out twice.” He pauses, and I can feel him choosing his next words with the same care he’s choosing to let me see this vulnerability. “The counselor on page nineteen helped me figure out that going home wasn’t failure.”
I turn the page. His mother’s phone number is written there, careful and deliberate, like an anchor point.
I look at him properly then: really look, past the terrible puns and the sweaters his sister knits, past the performance of easy cheerfulness he wears like armor. See the scholarship kid who learned to code-switch between worlds, who came back because leaving taught him something about the weight of roots.
“Why are you giving me this?” The question comes out smaller than I meant it.
His hand stays on the notebook, but his eyes are on me. “Because I spent three years thinking I had to choose: be the person I was here, or the person I could become there. Took me too long to figure out you can be both. Or neither. Or something new entirely.” He pushes the notebook closer. “I’m not saying come back, Keiran. I’m saying don’t burn the bridge while you’re still standing on it.”
The leather is warm under my palm. Proof that someone survived the crossing. That drowning isn’t inevitable.
“Some of them might remember you,” I say quietly.
“Some of them will definitely remember you.” His smile is real this time, reaching his eyes. “That’s the point.”
The silence stretches between us, thick enough to choke on. Outside, delivery trucks rattle past on Main Street and gulls scream over the harbor like they’re mourning something. My throat works around words that have no shape yet: thanks or fuck you or I’m scared, all of them true, none of them enough.
The notebook sits there between us like a treaty we haven’t signed. An offering that costs him nothing and everything. Proof that someone made it across and didn’t forget the way back.
The town’s waking up beyond these walls, oblivious. Kettles boiling. Doors opening. Another ordinary morning that isn’t ordinary at all.
His words land like stones in still water, rippling outward. I want to argue. Tell him it’s different for me, that he had a family to come back to, that he chose this place instead of having it choose him. But the exhaustion in his voice stops me. He’s not lecturing. He’s confessing. Offering up his own failure like it might save me from repeating it, like regret is something you can hand across a table with the sugar bowl.
My throat tightens. The notebook feels heavier than it should, weighted with all the futures Declan mapped out and then abandoned. “Did you use any of these?” I ask, though I already know. He wouldn’t have come back if he had. He shakes his head, and there’s the answer. Every contact a road not taken, every address a life he chose against.
The handwriting shifts halfway through the notebook, I can see where hope turned careful, where ambition learned caution. Names crossed out. Phone numbers that end in question marks. Addresses for flats he never rented, jobs he never took. There’s a whole map of Dublin here, drawn in someone else’s dreams.
“You were organised,” I say, because it’s easier than asking why he came back.
Declan makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “I was terrified.” He sits back down, cradling his own mug like it might anchor him. “Thought if I planned every detail, I could control how it felt to not belong. Wrote down conversation starters. Memorised the names of professors’ research interests. Bought clothes I couldn’t afford so I’d look like I fit.”
The notebook falls open to a page covered in tiny, frantic notes. How to hold a wine glass. What to say about theatre you haven’t seen. When to mention where you’re from (never first). How to make your accent smaller.
“Jesus,” I breathe.
“Yeah.” Declan’s finger traces one of the lines, the same way mine just did. “Spent two years performing someone I thought they wanted. Then another year realising I’d forgotten who I actually was.” He looks at me properly now, and there’s something raw in his face that I’ve never seen before. “The file got me there, Keiran. But it nearly erased me in the process.”
The tea’s gone cold in my hands. Outside, the town’s waking up, I can hear Mrs. Brennan opening her shop, the morning bus rattling past. All the sounds that mean staying.
“So why’d you come back?” The question comes out smaller than I meant it.
I stare at the notebook, at all those careful plans that led him right back here. The irony should be funny, but it just makes my chest tight.
“Different how?” Declan’s voice is gentle, like he’s reading my thoughts. “You think because I came back it means I failed? That leaving only counts if you never return?”
The question hangs between us. I want to say yes, that’s exactly what it means, but something in his face stops me. He looks tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with the early hour.
“I came back because I chose to,” he says, and there’s an edge to it now, something almost defensive. “Not because I couldn’t hack it. Not because I didn’t belong. I came back because I figured out that belonging isn’t about geography.” He taps the notebook once, hard. “This got me out. But it was coming back that taught me who I actually was. There’s a difference between running from something and running toward it.”
The words settle like sediment. I don’t know if I believe him, but I’m too fucking tired to argue.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out except a breath that might be a laugh or might be something breaking. The truth of it lands like a punch. Have been for weeks. Months, maybe. Every shift at the pub where I’m present but not really there. Every conversation with Brighid where I hold something back. The way I’ve stopped memorizing new things about this place because what’s the point if I’m leaving?
My feet pulse with each heartbeat, blisters singing their small song of pain. Even sitting still hurts now. Even this costs something I’m not sure I can afford.
I look down at my tea, watch the steam curl and vanish. He’s right and I hate that he’s right. Been practicing absence like it’s a skill I’ll need. Testing how little I can give before people stop asking. Measuring every goodbye in increments, thinking if I do it slow enough, no one will notice I’m already gone.
But I’m not ready for that framework yet. Can’t hold something I don’t understand. So I just nod, fingers wrapped around the mug like it’s the only solid thing in the room. The amber light catches the dust between us, makes it look almost holy. Declan doesn’t push. Just sits there, patient as stone, waiting for nothing.
The mug appears in front of me before I realize mine’s gone cold, steam curling up between us like something living. Declan doesn’t ask if I want more. Three years in this house and he knows, I always want more, always drink it too fast, always burn my tongue because I can’t wait.
“My own da,” he says, not looking at me, watching the tea instead, “never understood why I came back from university.”
I freeze with the mug halfway to my mouth.
“Saw it as wasting the scholarship. Throwing away the escape.” His fingers drum against the table, that nervous habit he pretends he doesn’t have. “Spent four years getting out, came straight back to pull pints in the same pub he’d pulled pints in. He thought I was mad.”
The words just sit there between us, heavy and deliberate. An offering I don’t know how to accept.
“Was he right?” I ask, because apparently I’m an eejit who can’t leave well enough alone.
Declan’s laugh is soft, more exhale than sound. “Some days, yeah. Some days I think I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.” He finally looks at me, and there’s something raw in it, something that makes my chest tight. “Both things can be true, is what I’m saying. Leaving can be brave. Coming back can be brave. Being terrified either way. That’s just being human.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Don’t know if there’s anything to say. The kitchen feels smaller suddenly, warmer, like the walls have moved in while we weren’t paying attention.
“You’ll figure it out,” he says, quieter now. “Whatever you decide, Keiran. You’ll figure it out.”
The certainty in his voice feels like a gift I haven’t earned yet.
The phone buzzes against my ribs like something alive trying to get out. I fish it from my jacket pocket (cracked screen, third-hand like everything I own) and the message lights up before I can stop myself from reading it in front of him.
Thinking about your secret with a heart emoji that feels like a promise.
The smile happens before I can control it, spreading across my face like I’m some lovesick eejit in a film. Which maybe I am. The warmth of it, being known, properly known, not just observed, still feels unreal. Like something that happens to other people, people whose lives don’t fit in a rucksack.
I look up and Declan’s watching me, but not in that worried way he usually does, counting my exits. There’s something softer in it. Recognition, maybe.
“That’s a good smile,” he says, turning back to his tea. “Haven’t seen that one in a while.”
He doesn’t ask. Doesn’t pry. Just nods once, like he remembers what it’s like. Having someone who sees the real shape of you and doesn’t look away.
The coaster feels heavier than it should, cardboard gone soft at the edges from Declan’s thumb. I trace the pub’s logo, that faded shamrock I’ve seen a thousand times, and the numbers blur slightly. Not tears. Just tired eyes from the late shift.
“Thanks,” I manage, and it comes out rough. The word doesn’t hold what I need it to. Thank you for not making me explain. Thank you for knowing without asking. Thank you for helping me leave even though it’ll gut you.
Declan’s already turning away, busying himself with glasses that don’t need washing. His shoulders are tight beneath that ridiculous yellow jumper his sister made. He’s giving me space to feel whatever I’m feeling without having to perform it for him.
I slide the coaster into my wallet, next to the bus schedule and the folded hostel confirmation. Evidence of conspiracy. He’s building me an escape route with careful handwriting and phone numbers, brick by brick.
I pocket the coaster, something catching in my throat that’s neither gratitude nor grief but both twisted together. Declan clears his throat, reaches for levity like a lifeline.
“Galway seagulls are vicious bastards, mind. Make our Clare ones look like doves.”
The joke lands wrong, too forced, but I laugh anyway because he needs me to. Because this is how we’ve learned it. Loving each other sideways, through deflection and terrible humor, never quite head-on.
The evening rhythm pulls us in, Declan behind the bar pulling perfect pints, me navigating between tables with a cloth and collected glasses, both of us moving through steps we could perform unconscious. Mrs. Hennessy wants her usual, Mr. Doherty’s arguing football with the lads by the fire, and the words are right there in my mouth but he’s laughing at someone’s joke, and I’m lifting another tray, and the truth stays lodged behind my ribs where it’s lived for months. Tomorrow, I think. I’ll tell him tomorrow.
Siobhan’s face tells me everything before I’m close enough to see the screen. She’s gone grey-pale, that particular shade she gets before a panic attack, and her hands are shaking as she tries to angle the phone away from the others. But they’re not looking at her anymore: they’re looking at me.
“Keiran.”So it’s true then? You’re just fucking off after graduation?”
The phone gets thrust at me. Niamh’s Instagram, posted at 11:[^47] last night. A photo of the sunset from the cliffs and beneath it, paragraphs. My words, but not. The shape of what I said, twisted just enough. Some people see kindness as a resource to exploit. My friend is planning to abandon the man who saved him, who gave him a home when no one else would. Says Ballycragh is “suffocating” and he “can’t breathe here.” Must be nice to be so ungrateful you can just walk away from people who love you.
The comments are worse. People I’ve known since primary school, people who’ve never spoken to me directly, suddenly experts on my character. Always knew there was something off about him. Poor Declan. Typical foster kid behavior. That last one has forty-three likes.
“I didn’t. The truth is complicated: leaving as survival, not rejection, the difference between abandoning and saving yourself. Niamh’s version is simple, fits perfectly into the town’s existing narrative about people like me. Ungrateful. Damaged. Destined to disappoint.
Siobhan’s trying to say something but the bell’s ringing and they’re all still staring, and I can feel the story calcifying around me, becoming fact through repetition. By lunch it’ll be gospel. By evening, Declan will have heard.
I walk to class through a corridor that parts around me like I’m contagious.
Mrs. Fitzgerald’s chalk stops mid-word when I slip in three minutes late. The sympathy that floods her face is worse than any detention. She knows. They all know.
“Keiran.” Her voice has gone soft, careful, like I’m something breakable. “Take your seat.”
The class doesn’t even pretend not to stare. I can feel their eyes cataloguing evidence: the secondhand jacket, the careful way I don’t take up space, every detail suddenly proof of Niamh’s story. Foster kid. User. Runner.
Mrs. Fitzgerald assigns paired work and no one meets my eyes when choosing partners. I end up with Cillian Murphy, who’s been kept back twice and doesn’t have his phone. Small mercies.
She stops by our desk, touches my shoulder. “If you need to talk to someone, the guidance counselor. The words come out harder than intended.
Her hand lingers. She thinks she’s being kind, offering help to the troubled foster child who’s planning to hurt his savior. Niamh’s given them a story that makes sense, that confirms what they already suspected about people like me.
There’s no arguing with a narrative this neat.
The canteen goes quiet when Siobhan drops into the seat across from me, her phone thrust forward like evidence at trial. I don’t want to look but my eyes find the screen anyway.
Niamh’s profile picture: her in that cardigan she wore the night I told her everything. The post is a masterclass in weaponized grief. “Some people see kindness as weakness to exploit.” Every phrase could be about anyone. Every detail is specifically, devastatingly about me.
The bit about Declan’s late-night talks. The thing I said about feeling like a visitor in my own life. My words, filleted and reassembled into proof of monstrosity.
“Keiran.” Siobhan’s voice cracks. “Everyone’s sharing it.”
I can’t breathe properly. The canteen air tastes like betrayal.
The janitor’s got that expression I’ve learned to read: the one that says he’s already chosen whose story to believe, and it isn’t mine. My backpack weighs more with each second I stand here, straps cutting into shoulders that want to curl inward. The black paint drips down the metal like it’s still wet, still bleeding accusation. He doesn’t ask if I’m alright. Nobody’s asking that.
The messages pulse like accusations. He deletes them in batches, doesn’t need to read the specifics when Niamh’s already written the script they’re all performing. His thumb hovers over Declan’s name. Three missed calls. He pockets the phone before he can see if there’s a fourth.
The printout sits between us like evidence at a trial, and I can’t stop staring at my own words weaponized. She’s good. Because I did say those things. I did tell her I couldn’t stay, that the town felt too small, that sometimes I woke up gasping like the walls were closing in.
I just never said it was Declan doing the suffocating.
“The thing is,” Declan says, and his voice has gone quiet in that way that means he’s actually hurt, not performing hurt for the punters, “I always knew you’d leave. That was never. Checking your phone for job postings in Dublin, Galway, anywhere with a population over five thousand?”
My throat closes. He knew. Of course he knew. Declan notices when someone’s usual order changes, when they need space or company, when the smile doesn’t match the eyes.
“But this,” he taps the paper, right over the line about him specifically, “this makes it sound like I’ve been: like you’ve been trapped here. Like everything I’ve tried to do was just another cage.”
“It wasn’t.” The words come out strangled. “It’s not. You’re not. He looks up, and his eyes are red-rimmed, exhausted.”Because according to this, I’m the reason you’re drowning. And if that’s true, if I’ve fucked this up so badly that you couldn’t even tell me yourself, then I need to know. I need to fix it.”
I want to tell him he can’t fix what isn’t broken, that some people are just born needing to run.
The truth sits behind my teeth like broken glass. I meant the town. The weight of being known, of walking past the primary school where I showed up mid-term with everything I owned in a bin bag, of buying milk from the woman who fostered me for three months before deciding I was “too much work.” I meant the way Mrs. Hennessy still calls me “poor pet” at the post office, the way Father Quinn asks about my “struggles” every Sunday, the way my entire history is public record discussed over pints.
I meant the suffocation of being Ballycragh’s charity case, its cautionary tale, its redemption story depending on who’s telling it.
Not Declan. Never Declan, who gave me keys before trust, who let me work the bar without hovering, who bought secondhand textbooks without making it a production, who understood that sometimes help means leaving someone alone.
But Niamh knew exactly which words to lift, which context to strip away. She turned my escape into his failure, my claustrophobia into his cage.
And now the truth doesn’t matter because the story’s already written.
The silence stretches between us like the coast road in fog. You know there’s a drop coming but you can’t see where. I watch his face cycle through hurt and confusion and something worse: resignation. The look of someone who expected this disappointment all along, who’s been waiting for the foster kid to prove everyone right about damaged goods and bad investments.
That expression is what finally breaks something in my chest. Because I’ve become exactly what Niamh painted me as just by failing to deny it. My silence is confession. My inability to explain is proof.
I’ve turned myself into the story she wrote, and Declan’s face says he’s reading the ending he always knew was coming.
The words are folded into that paper now, creased into permanence. I want to say she twisted it, but the bones of the lie are my truth: the bus schedules memorized, the money saved, the application to that Galway hostel. I did choose escape over explanation. I did measure the distance to the door while he was measuring me for belonging.
The silence stretches like the coast road before a curve. You know what’s coming but can’t stop the momentum. His hand lifts, falls. My throat works around explanations that would sound like excuses: survival, not betrayal; escape, not abandonment. But Declan’s already moving away, making himself small in his own pub, and I realize some truths are identical to lies when measured by the empty space they leave behind.
The folder sits between us like evidence at a trial I didn’t know I was attending. My hands stay flat on my thighs because if I reach for it, if I touch those pages, it becomes real in a way I’m not ready for.
“How bad?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
Fionnuala’s jaw tightens. She’s wearing her grandmother’s ring today, turning it round and round her finger: the only tell that she’s rattled. “Bad enough that I had to schedule this meeting instead of just ringing you. Bad enough that there’ll be a home visit next week, unannounced. Bad enough that. When she speaks again, it’s in her professional voice, the one that means she’s translating horror into procedure.”They’re questioning whether your current placement is appropriate given your stated intention to leave.”
“My stated,” The words taste like ash. “I never stated anything. Not officially.”
“No.” She finally looks at me, and Christ, she’s furious. Not at me. For me. “But someone did. Someone who apparently has detailed knowledge of your plans. Bus schedules. Savings amounts. Even the hostel in Galway you’d researched.” Each word lands like a punch. “Information specific enough to be credible, framed carefully enough to sound like concern rather than,”
“Revenge.” The word comes out flat. Niamh knew all of it. Every detail I’d shared in the dark of her car, windows fogged, when I’d thought I was finally safe enough to want something. To want someone. To imagine a future that included more than just escape.
“I can’t prove who filed it.” Fionnuala’s voice gentles, which somehow makes it worse. “The system protects anonymous reporters. It’s designed that way, to encourage people to speak up when they’re genuinely worried.”
“And when they’re not? When they’re just. My hands have curled into fists without permission.
The pages blur as she turns them toward me, but certain phrases leap out with perfect clarity: “expressed desire to sever attachment” where I’d said I wanted to see what else was out there. “Hoarding resources” for the €847 I’d saved from two years of washing glasses. “Emotionally withdrawn from guardian” because I’d stopped pretending Declan’s jokes could paper over the fact that I’m still just a placement, still temporary, still someone else’s good deed.
“They’re saying you’re manipulating Declan’s emotions,” Fionnuala says, and her voice cracks on manipulating because we both know who’s actually being manipulated here. “That you’re using his guilt about his own past to avoid accountability.”
I recognize the architecture of it immediately. She’d listened to me talk about Declan’s scholarship-kid baggage, how he tries too hard, how I feel guilty for not being grateful enough. She’d held my hand and said she understood.
She’d understood perfectly. Well enough to weaponize every word.
The words land like bureaucratic shrapnel: two weeks, mandate, supervised, permanently. That last one echoes worst. I’d thought leaving meant escape, clean break, starting over. Turns out your file follows you like a shadow with teeth. Every university that runs a background check, every job that requires references, every future social worker who’ll see those two words, flight risk, and decide I’m the problem before I’ve opened my mouth.
“They’re building a narrative,” Fionnuala says, and I hear what she’s not saying: narratives are harder to escape than towns. “Once it’s in the system…”
She doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. I’ve been in the system long enough to know that once they’ve decided who you are, proving otherwise is like arguing with your own reflection.
Her hands tremble pouring water, proper shaking, not nerves, and Christ, she’s terrified. Not of me. For me. Scared of how easily the system she’s dedicated herself to can be turned into a weapon, how her years of advocacy mean fuck-all against one anonymous phone call. Scared that all her knowledge of loopholes and procedures won’t matter when they’ve already decided I’m the kind of kid who runs.
“We fight this,” she says, but I can hear the defeat already threading through, the way her voice catches on fight like she knows it’s performative. Because I am planning to leave. The accusation is a lie wrapped around truth like barbed wire around bone, and every careful thing I’ve done all of it transforms from escape plan to evidence, my own preparation testifying against me.
Brighid doesn’t explain. Doesn’t text, doesn’t pull me aside between classes, doesn’t offer the courtesy of an actual ending. She just moves to a different table: the art students who’ve always intimidated me with their easy confidence about leaving, about NCAD applications and portfolio reviews, about futures they discuss like certainties rather than fantasies. They welcome her like she’s always belonged there, and maybe she has. Maybe I’ve been the anchor she needed an excuse to cut loose.
When I catch her eye across the cafeteria, she looks away first. That small gesture, her deliberate turning, the way her shoulders shift to angle her body toward her new companions, hurts more than anything Niamh said. More than the whispers that follow me down corridors, more than the way conversations die when I enter rooms. Because Brighid knows the truth. She knows I’m not abandoning anyone, that leaving is survival, not betrayal. But she looks away anyway.
I understand it, which makes it worse. She can’t be seen supporting someone the town has decided to condemn. Not when her family’s reputation is built on loyalty, on staying, on being the kind of people who don’t abandon their responsibilities. Four generations under one roof: that’s their pride, their identity. Her grandmother tells stories about neighbors who left for America and never came back, says their names like curses. Brighid can’t afford to be associated with another deserter. Not when she’s trying to prove that staying can be a choice.
So she chooses them over me. Over us, whatever we were becoming in those moments on the coast road when the future felt like something we might share. She chooses her family’s approval, and I can’t even hate her for it. That’s the cruelest part. Understanding exactly why she’s doing this, knowing I’d probably do the same if our positions were reversed.
I find Siobhan outside the girls’ bathroom because I hear it through the door: that specific rhythm of panic I’ve learned to recognize. The sharp gasps, the desperate attempt to breathe quietly, the small sounds of someone drowning in air.
I sit with my back against the wall, close enough that she’ll know someone’s there. Don’t try to go in, don’t make it worse by forcing her to be seen. Just talk through the wood about nothing that matters. The 14:[^30] bus to Galway runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That new song she sent me has this guitar bit in the bridge. Random shite, anything to give her breathing something to follow besides its own spiraling.
Twenty minutes before the door opens. She emerges wrecked. Mascara tracked down her pale cheeks, eyes red-rimmed, that hollow look that comes after the adrenaline drains.
“I can’t do this without you.” Barely a whisper.
And I understand what she means. Not just the group, though that too. The entire structure she’s built to survive each day, I’m load-bearing. My leaving brings the whole architecture down.
The worst part is how they’re not wrong. Not entirely. I am planning to leave. Every accusation Niamh twisted into existence has a seed of truth at its rotten center, and that’s what makes it stick. I catch fragments of conversations (“after everything Declan’s done,” “typical foster kid,” “never grateful”) and I can’t defend myself without lying or confirming their worst assumptions. So I do what I’ve always done: make myself smaller, move through the pub like a ghost, take orders with my eyes down. But now the invisibility feels different. Before, I chose it. Now it’s being forced on me, and there’s a violence in that I didn’t expect. They’ve made me disappear while keeping me visible enough to judge.
I watch Declan deflect another pointed comment with a joke about teenagers being allergic to gratitude, and something in my chest cracks. He’s spending currency he can’t afford. Every defense costs him something I can never repay, and he knows I’m leaving anyway. He’s buying me time with social capital that took him decades to earn, and we both know it’s a loan I’ll default on.
The worst part is the recognition in their eyes. Not judgment, but knowing. Old Tommy at the corner table nods like he’s seeing himself thirty years ago, scholarship to Dublin in hand, two semesters before he came crawling back. They’re not angry I want to leave. They’re waiting for me to fail, to return, to prove that escape is just a story you tell yourself before you accept your place.
The car park smells like petrol and wet concrete. I can hear the younger years shouting on the pitch behind us, their voices carrying that careless energy of people who still think they have time. Niamh’s shoulders are hunched, defensive, and I realize she’s positioned herself where no one from the windows can see her cry.
“I told you because I trusted you.” My voice sounds foreign to my own ears: scraped raw. “I told you things I haven’t told Declan, haven’t told anyone.”
“Exactly.” She pushes off the wall, and there’s something wild in her face now, something I’ve never seen before. “You trusted me with your escape plan. Your grand adventure. Did you think about what that felt like? To be the person you confide in about leaving?”
“That’s not. The words come out sharp, accusatory.”You’re Irish. You’re from here. People know your name, your history. You can come back anytime you want and they’ll welcome you. The prodigal son, yeah?” Her laugh is bitter. “I’ve lived here since I was six. Eleven years. And I’m still Kowalczyk. Still the Polish girl. Still asked where I’m really from.”
I watch her chest heave with the effort of not sobbing. There’s mascara tracking down her cheeks, and her carefully straightened hair is coming loose from its ponytail.
“You were going to leave me here.” Her voice drops to something quieter, more devastating. “In this place that will never be mine. And you’d get to be the one who escaped, and I’d just be… what? The girl you used to know? Another person from your past you don’t talk about?”
The wind shifts, bringing the salt smell from the coast. The road out.
“You want to know why?” Her voice cracks on the words, and the tears come properly now, but there’s something harder underneath: anger that’s been fermenting into rage. “Because you were leaving, Keiran. You told me your whole plan like it was this brilliant secret, like I should be honored you trusted me with it.” Her accent shifts mid-sentence, the careful Irish pronunciation she’s spent years perfecting starting to fracture. Vowels bend wrong, consonants sharpen. “Jak nic. Like nothing. Like I was nothing.”
She swipes at her face with the back of her hand, and the mascara smears across her cheekbone in a dark streak. Her fingers are shaking.
“You sat there in my kitchen and told me about the bus schedules. About Galway. About getting out.” Each sentence lands like an accusation. “And you never once asked if I wanted to come. Never once thought that maybe I’m drowning here too.” Her voice drops to something rawer. “But I can’t leave, can I? Because this isn’t even my country to escape from.”
“You don’t understand,” she says, and her voice goes thin, stretched tight over something breaking underneath. “You were born here. Your name sounds right in their mouths. O’Malley.” She pronounces it with exaggerated precision, mocking. “When you walk into a room, they see someone who belongs, even with the foster care, even with the leaving.”
Her hands twist together, knuckles white. “I’ve been here twelve years. Twelve. And I’m still the Polish girl. Still Kowalczyk said wrong every single day. Still asked where I’m really from when I say something they don’t like.”
The rawness in her voice makes my throat close. I’ve never heard her sound like this, unguarded, accent thick, all the careful construction stripped away.
I want to say she’s wrong, that I never belonged either, that foster care made me just as other as her accent does. But that’s not true, is it? My otherness has an expiration date, eighteen, emancipation, then I’m just another Irish lad who left. Hers follows her everywhere. Even her cruelty makes a terrible kind of sense now, and that’s what guts me most.
The whole architecture of it unfolds. How my leaving wasn’t just about me, how my freedom threw her cage into sharp relief. She destroyed what I was planning because she couldn’t destroy what she was feeling. It doesn’t hurt less, understanding it, but it makes a sense that’s somehow worse.
“You could have just talked to me,” I say, but we both know that’s shite. In this town, talking is just another form of exposure.
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing mascara. For a second she looks sixteen again, not the armored thing she’s made herself into.
I turn to go. Behind me, I hear her whisper something in Polish: a prayer or a curse, I’ll never know which.
The notebook’s spine cracks when I pull it from the bottom of my backpack, where it’s been living under textbooks and the spare shirt I keep for closing shifts. Two years I’ve carried this thing. Two years of careful planning written in three different pen colours because I kept losing biros and had to nick new ones from the pub’s till area.
The cover’s gone soft at the corners from being shoved into bags and pockets, from being pulled out during slow periods at school when I should’ve been paying attention to Irish grammar or the causes of the First World War. Instead I’d been calculating: how many shifts until I had enough saved, which scholarships had deadlines I could actually meet, whether the 6:[^15] bus to Galway or the 7:[^40] to Dublin made more sense for someone with everything they own in a rucksack.
I flip it open and the pages fall to September of last year: goals written in neat columns, deadlines underlined twice. Submit Trinity application by 1 February. Request transcripts by 15 January. Write personal statement (emphasize resilience without sounding tragic). That last bit’s in brackets, a note to my future self about how to package trauma for admissions committees who want inspiring stories but not too much reality.
There’s a coffee stain on the November page from the night Declan caught me planning at the bar after closing and bought me a cup from the machine, didn’t ask questions. A torn edge where I ripped out a page in frustration when the scholarship I’d been counting on changed their eligibility requirements. Pencil marks in the margins. It feels obscene now, this evidence of hope. Like I’d been stupid enough to believe wanting something badly enough could make it real.
I hold the notebook over the flames, watching the pages curl and blacken. The wind tries to rip it from my grip, like even the Atlantic knows this is a mistake, but I hold on. The first page catches. That careful timeline dissolving into ash and smoke. Two years of planning gone in seconds.
The fire eats through September’s scholarship deadlines, October’s budget calculations, November’s backup plans. Each page burns with a different colour: blue ink turning green, pencil marks flaring white before disappearing. The coffee stain Declan left smolders longer than the rest, stubborn even in destruction.
I think about all those hours spent writing, revising, perfecting. Every word a small act of faith that I could be more than what this town decided. That somewhere beyond these cliffs, I could exist without everyone knowing my history before they knew my name.
The last page, August’s departure date circled three times in red, resists the longest. Then it catches, and the circle becomes a burning ring before crumbling into nothing.
The ashes scatter across the sand, indistinguishable from the rest of the beach’s debris.
The match flares orange against the darkness, and for one suspended moment I can see everything I’d written in such clean, confident strokes. “June: final exams.” “July: work double shifts.” “August 15th: leave.” The handwriting looks foreign now, like it belonged to someone else entirely: some naive bastard who actually believed the future could be controlled through careful planning, that wanting something badly enough made it real.
I touch the flame to the corner and watch that boy’s certainty catch fire.
The pages curl inward like they’re trying to protect themselves, but it’s too late. The ink bubbles and runs before disappearing completely. All those hours of revision, all those alternate routes and contingency plans, reducing to the same ash.
The pages blacken and twist, blue ink bleeding into smoke. Ten years of careful planning (scholarship deadlines, bus schedules, addresses of places that might take someone like me) curling into nothing. Every version of myself I’d constructed in those margins, every imagined conversation where I explained why I had to go, all of it ash now. The fire catches my face in orange light, and I understand: this is what happens when you let yourself believe in anything.
I’ll leave without a map now, without addresses or deadlines or careful preparation. I’ll leave with nothing but spite and whatever cash I can scrape together from the pub’s till. The difference is I won’t be running toward something anymore, I’ll be running from her, from this, from the person stupid enough to believe trust was possible.
I want to spit the words back at her, tell her she’s splitting hairs while my entire world’s gone to ash, but something in her voice stops me. She’s not offering platitudes or trying to fix anything. She’s just. Sitting there. Existing beside me while I bleed.
“Feels the same from where I’m standing,” I manage, flexing my damaged hand. The pain’s good, actually. Clean. Simple. Nothing complicated about split knuckles and bruised bone.
“I know it does.” She picks at a thread on her sleeve, that nervous habit she’s had since we were kids. “But if you decide everyone’s Niamh, you’ll end up alone. That’s what she wins.”
The logic’s sound. I hate that it’s sound. I hate more that she’s right here, risking association with me when the whole town’s probably already rewriting the story. Poor Keiran O’Malley, always knew he’d come to nothing, foster kids never work out, what did Declan expect? Niamh’s version will spread like oil on water, and anyone near me gets contaminated.
“You should go,” I tell her. “Before people start talking.”
“Let them talk.” She shifts closer instead of retreating, and I can smell her grandmother’s lavender soap, that scent that’s followed her through every year I’ve known her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Something cracks in my chest, different from the rage. Worse, maybe. Because anger’s easy: anger’s fuel. But this? This careful tenderness she’s offering? I don’t have defenses against that.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and it sounds like both warning and apology. “Soon as I can scrape together enough cash. I’m done with this place.”
She nods slowly, like she’s been expecting this. Maybe she has. “I know,” she says. “But you’re not leaving tonight. Tonight you’re just bleeding on me, and that’s alright.”
I can’t make my mouth form the argument. Can’t shape the words that would prove her wrong, because somewhere underneath the fury and the shame, I know she’s not. But admitting that feels like surrender, like agreeing that I’m the fool who chose badly instead of the victim of a place that eats its young.
“Doesn’t matter,” I finally rasp, though we both know it does. “Wrong person, wrong town, wrong life. It’s all the same poison.”
She pulls that cardigan tighter, her gran’s handiwork, all those careful stitches holding something together. “It matters to me,” she says, so quiet I almost miss it under the wind. “Because I’m still here. Siobhan’s still here. Declan’s still here. And if you paint us all with the same brush as her. The word comes out sharper than I mean.”Don’t make this about you.”
But it is about her, isn’t it? About everyone who didn’t betray me. About the difference between one snake and an entire garden. About whether I’m brave enough to know the difference.
I want to tell her she’s wrong, that one betrayal proves the rot goes deeper, that Niamh was just the symptom of a disease that infects this whole place. But my throat closes around the words, and what comes out instead is this pathetic, shuddering breath that tastes like salt and smoke and something breaking.
Not tears. I won’t give this town my tears.
But my hands are shaking, knuckles screaming where they met stone, and I can’t tell anymore if I’m furious or terrified or just so fucking tired of carrying all this weight. The distinction she’s drawn (wrong person versus wrong place) it matters. I know it matters. But admitting that means admitting I chose wrong, that I’m not just unlucky but stupid, and I don’t know if I can survive being both broken and foolish.
The silence between us stretches, filled only by the muffled sounds of normal life continuing without me. Brighid’s breathing, steady and patient. The distant crash of waves against the cliffs. My own pulse hammering in my ears like it’s trying to escape my body.
She shifts slightly, and I feel the worn wool of her grandmother’s cardigan brush against my arm: that small, accidental contact somehow worse than words.
“Maybe you’re right,” I hear myself whisper, the words tasting like surrender. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”
But it does matter. It matters that Niamh took every secret I’d trusted her with (the nightmares about my mam, the scars I’d explained, the desperate hope that maybe I was worth keeping) and she’d served them up to the town like entertainment. Now they all know. The foster kid with ideas above his station.
The first page catches immediately: a sketch of Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge I’d copied from a postcard, all careful pencil lines and hope. The flame eats through it in seconds, turning architecture into carbon. I watch the edges brown and curl, the paper folding in on itself like it’s trying to protect what’s written there. Too late for that.
Page after page ignites. Cities I’ll never see. Jobs I’d imagined having. A flat somewhere with a door that locks and nobody else’s key. Stupid things, really. A list of bands I wanted to see live, restaurants where you needed reservations, the kind of clothes people wore in those places. Evidence of wanting more than this.
The smoke thickens, acrid and wrong. Nothing like the romantic notion of burning bridges. This is just destruction, pure and simple. My eyes water from the fumes, and I tell myself that’s all it is. Not grief. Not the feeling of cutting off my own escape routes because if I can’t trust my own judgment about people, how can I trust these dreams?
There’s a page about halfway through, I know it’s coming before I see it burn. The one where I’d written about the kind of person I wanted to become. Not the specifics of career or location, but the feeling of it. Someone who belonged somewhere. Someone who’d earned the right to take up space. Someone people chose to keep, not because they were paid to, but because they wanted to.
That page burns slower, the ink bubbling and blackening. I watch every word disappear. The smoke alarm starts shrieking, and I don’t move to stop it. Let the whole pub hear. Let them all know I’m done hoping for anything better than this.
The notebook’s spine is the last thing to catch, metal spiral glowing orange before it collapses into ash.
The flame spreads to a page of sketched street maps. Routes through cities I’d traced from library books, memorizing escape paths before I’d even arrived. The paper blackens from the center outward, roads disappearing into void. My careful annotations about bus routes and cheap hostels bubble and vanish. All those hours in the library, hunched over atlases while other kids were at football practice or hanging round the chipper, reducing to smoke that makes my throat close.
There’s a page of job listings I’d torn from newspapers, folded so many times the creases have worn soft. Barista positions in Cork. Kitchen porter in Galway. Anything that wasn’t here, wasn’t this. The newsprint goes up fast, hungry flames eating through want ads and possibility. The smoke detector screams louder, and I hear Declan’s footsteps on the stairs, his voice calling my name with that careful concern that makes me want to put my fist through something else.
I don’t answer. Just watch another page catch. This one a list of bands playing festivals I’d planned to hitchhike to. The dates curl inward, months and years erasing themselves.
The first page to catch is universities, written when I was fourteen: the letters rounder, stupidly hopeful compared to the tight scrawl I use now. Trinity Dublin. Edinburgh. Manchester. Places that took scholarship students, places that might’ve taken someone like me. The names blacken and curl, edges glowing orange before crumbling to nothing. Trinity goes first, the word “Dublin” holding its shape for one defiant second before collapsing into carbon and ash.
I should feel something. Grief, maybe. Loss. But there’s just this hollow satisfaction watching it burn. Proof that hope was always combustible. That I was right not to trust it. The ink bubbles, fourteen-year-old Keiran’s careful research blistering into smoke, and I think: good. Better to burn it myself than watch it rot.
The smoke spirals up, grey and accusing, and I watch it twist toward the ceiling. My hand hovers near the window latch. One movement and the evidence disperses. But I don’t. Let it fill the room. Let it choke me. Let something physical manifest what’s happening inside my ribs. The detector’s red eye stares down, unmoved. Even the alarm won’t bear witness. Just me and the quiet burn of everything I used to want.
The Atlantic I’d sketched, careful shading where light hit the waves, the exact curve where water met sky, twists into something unrecognizable. Two summers ago I’d believed you could capture beauty and still leave it behind. Spent an hour on that horizon line, getting the perspective perfect, like precision mattered. Now those cliffs fold inward, the endless water I’d drawn becoming grey smear. At least it’s honest. At least now it looks like what hope actually does when you let the wrong person see it.
Manchester burns brightest. Three pages dedicated to it, because I’d found a forum where Irish lads talked about kitchen work in the Northern Quarter, actual wages listed, actual addresses. I’d screenshot everything on the library computer, transcribed it by hand so I’d have it even without internet. Names of managers who hired without asking too many questions. Which hostels let you pay weekly. The 43 bus from the airport. I’d memorized the street grid like it was already mine, traced routes between restaurant districts and cheap accommodation until I could navigate a city I’d never seen.
The paper catches fast, my handwriting disappearing into orange. All those hours in the library, hunched over the computer in the back corner where Mrs. Hennessy couldn’t see the screen. Copying down information like it was scripture. Building an escape route one careful detail at a time.
Edinburgh had been the backup. I’d found the name of a social worker there who specialized in care leavers, written down her office address and phone number. Researched which neighborhoods were cheap but safe. Found three pubs that hired at seventeen if you could prove you’d worked bar before. Had Declan’s reference letter already drafted in my head, the one I’d never actually ask him to write because asking made it real, made it a betrayal instead of just survival.
The pages curl inward like they’re trying to protect themselves. Too late. Should’ve protected them better myself. Should’ve known that writing things down made them vulnerable, that the moment you let someone see your exit strategy they’ve got leverage. Niamh knew exactly what she was doing when she told the social services about my “concerning fixation on running away.” Reframed every careful plan as evidence of instability. Made my hope look like pathology.
The flames eat through Amsterdam last. I’d barely started researching it. Now I never will.
The photograph is last. I pull it from between the Manchester pages: the four of us at last year’s Lughnasa festival, arms linked like we’d never let go. Siobhan’s anxious smile. Brighid’s genuine one. Me in the middle, looking almost relaxed. And Niamh, her head tilted toward mine like we were sharing secrets. We were. That was the problem.
I hold it over the flames and watch the emulsion bubble. Niamh’s face goes first, features melting into black. Fitting. Then Siobhan’s, then Brighid’s, and I feel something twist in my chest because they didn’t deserve this, didn’t betray me, but they’re collateral now. Everything from before has to burn.
My own face curls last, that stupid trusting expression dissolving into ash. Good. That version of me was weak. Thought sharing dreams made them safer. Thought friendship meant something beyond temporary alliance. Thought being vulnerable was brave instead of just being a fucking idiot.
The fire’s making me stronger. Has to be. Because if it’s not making me stronger, it’s just making me alone, and I can’t afford to think about that yet.
His hands shake as he feeds page after page into the flames, cold, fury, something fundamental fracturing that won’t set right again. Each sheet represents hours stolen from sleep: job listings copied at the library, hostel addresses in his careful block letters, Fionnuala’s Dublin contact who helps kids like him find footing. All of it compromised. All of it turned into ammunition for the town’s gossip machine.
The shaking intensifies, becomes something his body’s doing without permission, and Brighid’s hand lands on his shoulder but he can’t feel it through the static of rage. Can’t feel anything except the heat on his face and the cold certainty that trust was always just another word for target.
The cardboard buckles, constellation lines bleeding into each other. He’d spent three months perfecting those maps, cross-referencing bus schedules with hostel vacancies, plotting trajectories like he was launching himself into orbit. Now they’re just smoke signals announcing his humiliation. Dead stars, dead dreams: same difference. The light was always a lie.
The ash tastes like freedom on his tongue, bitter, final, absolute. He doesn’t need Declan’s worried glances or Fionnuala’s careful questions. Doesn’t need Brighid’s hand on his shoulder, warm and steady as an anchor he’s about to cut loose. The maps are memorized. The bus schedules run through his veins like blood. What he needs now is distance, and the ruthlessness to take it.
I start cataloging the ways I’ve made myself vulnerable. The stories I told Declan over late-night inventory counts, thinking his laughter meant safety. The college brochures I left open in the pub’s back office, dreaming out loud like a fucking eejit. Every shift where I stayed late, proving I was useful, proving I was worth keeping. As if worth was ever the issue.
Brighid knows about the scar on my ribs from the Hennessys’ house, the one that didn’t heal right because I was afraid to see a doctor. Siobhan knows I still check under beds before sleeping, a habit from the place where her brother hid things. Even Fionnuala, with her professional distance, knows which anniversaries make me disappear into myself.
I’ve been walking around with my chest cracked open, heart on display like some desperate museum exhibit. Here, look: a boy who still wants to believe in kindness. Christ, no wonder Niamh found it so easy.
The worst part isn’t the betrayal itself. It’s realizing I’d do it again tomorrow if I thought it might earn me belonging. That hunger doesn’t die just because you’ve learned it’s dangerous. It just makes you hate yourself for still feeling it.
So I’m done feeding it. Done pretending that if I’m just good enough, helpful enough, quiet enough, someone might choose to keep me for reasons beyond convenience or pity. The town’s been teaching me this lesson my whole life; I was just too stubborn to learn it.
From now on, everything stays locked down. No more stories that can be twisted. No more dreams that can be mocked. No more hoping that this time, this person, this place might be different. I’ll work my shifts, save my money, and when I leave, I’ll leave clean. Owing nothing, owed nothing, remembered by no one who matters.
It’s not bitterness. It’s just finally learning to read the room.
The realization settles like sediment: Declan’s jokes aren’t warmth, they’re deflection: keeping me at arm’s length while seeming close. Fionnuala’s boundaries aren’t professionalism, they’re self-preservation. She’s seen too many kids like me disappear to invest fully. And Brighid’s questions, gentle as they are, come from someone whose roots go four generations deep. She asks because she’s curious about the foreign country of not-belonging, not because she could ever truly understand it.
I don’t blame them. That’s the thing that makes my chest ache. They’re not villains in some tragic story. They’re just people doing what people do. Protecting what’s theirs first. Declan protects his pub and his reputation as the good foster parent. Fionnuala protects her professional boundaries and sanity. Brighid protects her family, her place, her future here.
And me? I was the only gobshite in the equation who thought mutual survival was possible. Who believed that mattering to someone meant mattering as much as they mattered to themselves.
That’s the lesson, then. Not that people are cruel, but that I’m not central to anyone’s story but my own.
The freedom in this is unexpected. No grand gesture means no failure to live up to. No goodbyes means no one can talk him out of it, no tearful scenes where Declan’s hurt bleeds through the jokes, no moment where Brighid’s eyes make him question everything.
He’s done being the supporting character in their redemption arcs, Declan proving he’s a good foster parent, Fionnuala racking up her success statistics, Brighid learning about the world through his damage. They’ll have their stories about him after. The troubled kid who left. They always knew he would. Such a shame, really, but what can you do?
Let them have those stories. He’ll be too far gone to hear them.
The performance comes easy now. He’s been rehearsing versions of it since he was seven. Grateful. Improving. Fine. The words taste like nothing anymore. He’ll pocket tips, delete photos, burn letters. Declan will notice the distance eventually, but he’ll blame himself, not see the plan. That’s the trick: people see what confirms what they already believe about you.
The system taught him detachment before it taught him to read. Every social worker’s sympathetic smile, every “temporary” that became permanent, every time he learned a new family’s rules. They were all dress rehearsals for this. He’s not broken. He’s prepared. The difference matters, even if no one else will see it. Especially if no one else sees it.
The water runs clear now, but he keeps his hands under the stream anyway, watching the way the overhead bulb catches in the droplets. His knuckles throb in time with his pulse. A dull, insistent reminder that he’s still tethered to this body, this moment, this fucking town. He flexes his fingers experimentally. The split skin pulls but doesn’t bleed again. Good. He can work tomorrow’s shift if he keeps them moving.
There’s a knock at the door, soft, tentative. Declan’s concerned knock, not his cheerful one.
“Grand,” Keiran calls out, voice steady. “Just cleaning up.”
A pause. “Need anything?”
Distance. Silence. A time machine.
“No. Thanks.”
He hears Declan’s weight shift in the hallway, the floorboard that always creaks under the landing carpet. Waiting. Hoping Keiran will open the door, will talk, will let him perform the role of concerned guardian he’s so desperate to play. The silence stretches until it snaps, and finally, finally, footsteps retreat down the stairs.
Keiran dries his hands on his jeans, leaving faint rust-colored smears. The toilet paper sits in a sodden pink mass in the sink. He should bin it, but instead he stares at it, this evidence of his own stupidity. Punching stone. Christ. Like that would change anything. Like Niamh would suddenly feel guilty, like the town would suddenly care, like violence against inanimate objects ever solved a single fucking problem.
But his hands hurt now, and that’s something. A distraction from the other pain, the one that doesn’t have a location he can point to. The one that started the moment he realized trust was just another word for ammunition you hand someone else.
He wraps his knuckles in fresh tissue, winding it tight enough to hurt. There. Something he can control.
The duffel bag drags across the floor with a sound like resignation. He pulls it out from under the bed, unzips it with hands that shake less than they should. The sorting happens in silence, each decision final. Jeans that fit. Two jumpers. The jacket. Documents folded in plastic. Birth certificate, care records, the paperwork that defines him in the state’s eyes. The envelope of cash goes in last, three months of pulling pints and smiling at tourists who think his accent is charming. Two hundred and forty euros. Not enough, but it’ll have to be.
Everything else gets piled by the door. The books Declan bought for Christmas, spines still uncracked because reading them felt like accepting something. Brighid’s sketch of the cliffs, the one she spent weeks on, the one that’s too good and too true. The concert ticket from Galway, when they’d all piled into Siobhan’s mam’s car and felt, for one night, like normal teenagers. He should feel something, looking at these pieces of a life he almost had.
He doesn’t.
Sentiment is weight. Weight slows you down. And he needs to be fast now.
The notebook’s ashes are still in the metal bin by the window, grey and fragile as moth wings. He should empty it, eliminate the evidence, but his hand hovers over the remains instead. Fragments of his own handwriting are still visible in the char: the loop of a D for Dublin, the tail of a y from something he can’t remember. Ten years of architecture sketches and careful plans, all those midnight drawings of buildings he’d never construct. A flat with windows that actually opened. Friends who chose him.
He’d written those dreams like they were blueprints, like wanting something badly enough could make it structural, load-bearing, real.
The ash crumbles when he breathes too close.
He studies that stranger in the glass: the one with Niamh’s lesson carved into his expression. This is who survives, he thinks. The version that doesn’t bleed where people can see. She taught him the town’s real currency: information weaponized, intimacy archived for later use. He should thank her, probably. Instead he watches himself disappear into someone harder, colder. Someone who’ll make it out.
The zipper catches halfway. His hands won’t steady enough to work it free. He stares at them. These traitor hands that still shake, that punched stone, that once wrote dreams in careful script. The duffel gapes open like a mouth, half-swallowing his future. He forces the zipper closed through sheer will, sealing everything inside. There. Done. Ready. The lie tastes like blood and toilet paper.
I find her in the girls’ bathroom on the second floor: the one with the broken lock that nobody uses anymore, the one that smells of mildew and broken promises. I know she’d be here the way she knows I’ve got my bus ticket already purchased, hidden in the lining of my jacket. Some things you just know about people when you’ve been mapping each other’s escape routes for years.
She’s wedged herself between the sink and the wall like she’s trying to make herself small enough to disappear. Her knees are pulled tight to her chest, and she’s breathing in these sharp, hitching gasps that sound like someone drowning on dry land. The sound of it does something to my chest, makes it hard to pull in air myself.
I don’t ask if she’s alright: stupid question when someone’s clearly not. Don’t ask permission to stay, either. Just slide down beside her on the grimy tile floor, my shoulder pressing against hers. The contact seems to do something, anchor her slightly. Her breathing shifts from full panic to merely ragged, like a car engine trying to catch.
The fluorescent light above us flickers and hums. There’s graffiti on the stall door across from us. The tap drips steadily, counting out seconds we’re both trying not to count.
Her fingers find my wrist and grip hard enough to hurt, nails digging crescents into my skin that I know will last for days. I don’t pull away. This is what she needs: something solid to hold onto while her world tilts sideways. I can be that, at least. I can be solid for her even if I’m about to become smoke.
Minutes crawl by, measured only by the steady drip of the tap and the fluorescent buzz overhead. Her breathing gradually shifts from those sharp, drowning gasps to something slower, more controlled. Still ragged, but survivable. I count her breaths without meaning to the way I used to count the seconds between lightning and thunder when I was small enough to be afraid of storms.
When she finally speaks, her voice comes out scraped raw, like she’s been screaming though she hasn’t made a sound: “The group chat’s been silent for three days.” She swallows hard. “Three days, Keiran. We used to send hundreds of messages. Stupid stuff, important stuff, just… constant. And now it’s just: nothing. Like we’ve all forgotten how to talk to each other.”
I feel her nails dig deeper into my wrist, anchoring herself. The pain is sharp and specific, something real to focus on. I let her hold on as tight as she needs.
“Mam keeps asking why Brighid doesn’t come around anymore,” she continues, words coming faster now, spilling out. “Why the house feels so quiet. Whether I did something wrong to drive everyone away.”
“And I can’t tell her the truth,” Siobhan says, voice breaking. “Can’t explain that we’re all just… disintegrating. That you’re leaving and Brighid’s furious and I’m,”
She stops, presses her free hand flat against her sternum like she’s trying to hold her ribs together from the outside. Her knuckles go white with the pressure.
“Change feels like drowning,” she whispers. “Like everything solid just turns to water under your feet and you’re kicking and kicking but there’s no bottom to find. No ground. Just… falling through nothing.”
The fluorescent light flickers. Her grip on my wrist tightens until I can feel my pulse trapped beneath her fingers.
I open my mouth, some speech about necessity, about survival, about how this isn’t personal, but then I actually look at her. The dark circles like bruises. Nails bitten past the quick. How she’s folded herself into this corner like she’s apologizing for existing.
And I see it. See myself through her eyes: not the brave one escaping, just another person choosing to leave. Another name added to her list of people who walked away.
The truth lodges behind my sternum like swallowed glass. I’ve spent weeks becoming someone who could leave. Burning journals, severing ties, building calluses over soft places. But her fingers are still denting my forearm, and I can’t unknow this: my escape is her abandonment. Both truths exist. Both matter. The math doesn’t balance, and pretending otherwise is just another kind of cowardice.
My throat closes around the response I’d prepared. Something about necessity, about survival, about how staying would kill me by inches. But those are arguments for someone who’s fighting me, and Siobhan isn’t fighting. She’s just seeing me clearly, which is somehow worse.
“I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” I manage, and immediately hate how inadequate that sounds. Like I’m apologizing for the weather.
“I know.” She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, a gesture so familiar it aches. “You’re not doing it to me. You’re just doing it. That’s what makes it so shit, actually. I can’t even be properly angry.”
The fluorescent light buzzes overhead, casting everything in that institutional pallor that makes everyone look slightly ill. There’s graffiti on the stall behind her: someone’s declaration of eternal love that probably lasted three months. The whole room smells like industrial soap and desperation.
“You could be angry,” I offer quietly. “I’d understand that.”
She laughs, but it’s waterlogged. “What good would that do? Make you stay out of guilt? Make myself feel worse?” She shakes her head. “I’m tired of feeling worse, Keiran. I’m tired of my brain making everything into a catastrophe. But this (you leaving) this one’s actually happening. It’s almost a relief to be anxious about something real.”
The honesty of it winds me. This is what I’m walking away from: someone who knows me well enough to be devastated and still refuses to weaponize it. Someone who’s drowning in her own fear but still trying to throw me a lifeline made of understanding.
“You’re one of the bravest people I know,” I tell her, meaning it completely.
“Then you don’t know very many people.” But she’s almost smiling when she says it.
“I know more than you think,” I say, and watch her register the truth of it. That I’ve been cataloguing exits since I arrived. That every conversation lately has been a rehearsal for absence.
She pulls back enough to look at me properly, and I see myself reflected in those anxious green eyes. Not the person I’m trying to become, but the one I actually am. Her fingers loosen their death grip on my jacket, leaving wrinkles in the worn leather.
“I’ve known for months, probably,” she continues, steadier now. “The way you memorize bus schedules like prayers. How you’ve been touching everything lately: the bar top at the pub, the stone walls on the coast road. Like you’re trying to take it all with you.” She swallows hard. “You’ve been saying goodbye to everything without saying it out loud.”
The accuracy of it steals my breath. I thought I was being subtle, but Siobhan’s anxiety makes her hyperaware. She’s been watching me prepare to abandon her in real time, and she never said a word.
I’ve been so focused on making myself sharp enough to cut free that I forgot leaving is supposed to hurt. That grief doesn’t make you weak. It makes you honest. The tears I’ve been swallowing for months sit heavy in my throat, and for once I don’t force them down.
“I don’t know how to do both,” I admit, voice cracking. “How to be sad and still go.”
“You just do.” She leans her head against the tile wall, exhausted. “You feel it and you leave anyway. That’s what makes it brave instead of just… running.”
The distinction matters more than I want it to.
The realization settles in his chest like a stone finding the bottom of a well. All those nights practicing indifference in the mirror, rehearsing goodbyes until they sounded casual. He thought leaving required becoming someone who didn’t care. But Siobhan’s looking at him like caring is exactly what makes it count: like the hurt is proof it mattered at all.
“It’s not fair to you,” I say, and the words come out rougher than I meant. My freedom costs her stability. Both things true, both things mattering in ways that don’t cancel each other out. The unfairness sits between us like something physical. Acknowledging it doesn’t fix anything, but it’s the first honest thing I’ve managed in weeks. Maybe honesty is all I’ve got left to give.
The pub smells different after closing. Less like possibility, more like what it actually is. Old wood and spilled dreams and three generations of MacBrides convincing themselves this place meant something. I push through the door and Declan doesn’t even look up from the bar he’s wiping, just keeps those circular motions going like if he polishes hard enough he can buff out what’s coming.
“Declan,” I say, and my voice cracks on it. Sixteen years of practice reading rooms and I still can’t get a handle on this one.
He sets the cloth down. Doesn’t throw it, doesn’t slam it: just places it with the kind of care you use when your hands need something to do besides shake. “Right so,” he says, and there’s already resignation in it. “Let’s have it then.”
The words I’ve been rehearsing scatter. I’m left with just the truth, unvarnished and sharp. “I’m leaving. Not someday, not eventually. Three weeks from Tuesday, half-six bus to Galway.”
His jaw works. “Go on.”
“I’ve money saved. Eight months of tips and the weekend shifts. There’s a program” I’m babbling now, filling silence with logistics because the actual conversation is too big. “I applied in January. Got accepted last month.”
“Last month.” He says it flat.
“I wanted to be sure before,”
“Before you told the man who’s been housing you?” There’s heat in it now, finally. “Before you mentioned it to your. We both know he can’t finish that sentence. Your what? Foster parent sounds clinical. Guardian sounds presumptuous. We’ve never sorted what we are to each other.
“I’m telling you now,” I say, and it comes out smaller than I meant.
The money first. I tell him about the envelope in my jacket lining, how it’s grown thick enough I can feel its weight when I move. The bus schedule next. Half-six to Galway, changes at Ennis, arrives by nine if the roads are clear. I’ve got the timetable memorized like scripture, every minute accounted for.
“There’s this program,” I say. “Youth services, transitional housing. I applied back in January.”
His face does something I can’t parse. Too many emotions fighting for space: surprise that isn’t surprise, hurt that looks almost like pride, resignation settling over it all like dust.
“How long have you known?” I ask, though I’m not sure I mean about the program or about me leaving in general.
He laughs, and it’s the saddest sound I’ve heard from him. “Since you stopped leaving your things around the flat. Since you started looking at places like you were memorizing them.” He meets my eyes. “You’ve been saying goodbye to the town for weeks, Keiran. Just not to any of us.”
The table between us holds three pints he’s poured but neither of us has touched. His hands keep moving: straightening beer mats, tracing the carved initials, anything to keep busy while he talks.
“Dublin felt like breathing for the first time,” he says. “Then Da stopped ringing. Mam would call in secret, crying about how I’d chosen books over family.” He looks at the bar, the brass taps his grandfather installed. “I came back thinking I could prove them wrong. That I could be both. The son who left and the son who stayed.”
His laugh is hollow. “But you can’t unbreak something by breaking yourself instead.”
The wet shine in his eyes catches the lamplight. “Don’t do what I did, Keiran. Don’t come back because you feel you owe it.”
I don’t know how to leave without it being a betrayal. The words scrape coming out, raw in the quiet. Without it meaning I didn’t care enough to stay.
Declan’s quiet a long moment, turning his glass. “Leaving isn’t the betrayal,” he says finally. “Disappearing is. There’s a difference.”
He pulls out his phone, starts typing. “People to call. Forms to file. Ways to leave that don’t require erasing yourself.” He looks up. “Let me help you do this right.”
The offer sits between us like something fragile. My throat’s tight with the old reflex (no, I’m grand, I’ll manage) words I’ve worn smooth as river stones. But Siobhan’s face flashes behind my eyes, her gasping we’re allowed to be sad, and I realize my self-sufficiency has just been another way of being alone.
“Okay,” I say, voice cracking. “Yeah. Thank you.”
Declan’s hand finds my shoulder, solid and warm, and we’re both crying now, not bothering to hide it.
The folders have weight. Not just paper but the weight of someone believing I might fill them out. That I’m worth the filing system.
“You did this for me?” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“I do this for everyone.” Fionnuala’s tone is professional, but her fingers tap the Claddagh ring she always wears. “The difference is whether they use it.”
I pull the Trinity folder closer. The Access Programme. Kids whose transcripts aren’t patchworked across four schools. Kids who have adults who know about UCAS deadlines and personal statements.
“My grades are. She cuts through the excuse before I can build it properly.”You’re bright, Keiran. You’ve just been too busy surviving to prove it on paper.”
The Galway housing information shows studio flats with kitchenettes, shared houses with other care leavers. Monthly rent that makes my stomach drop until I see the subsidy information, the support worker contact details. There’s a structure here. A net.
“This one,” Fionnuala taps a listing, “has two lads from Limerick. Both aged out of care last year. Both working and studying.” She meets my eyes. “Both alive and okay and findable.”
Findable. The word lodges somewhere behind my ribs.
“I’ve been thinking I had to disappear,” I say slowly. “Like staying visible meant staying trapped.”
“Visibility is different when you choose it.” She slides the emergency contacts folder forward. Her mobile number is listed first, Declan’s second. “When people know where you are because you told them, not because they’re tracking you.”
I trace the edge of the folder, feeling the future reshape itself. Not escape into nothing. Departure toward something.
“I’ve been planning to hitchhike,” I admit, and hearing it aloud makes it sound exactly what it is. A teenager’s fantasy of disappearing. Romantic in the worst way, like I’m the hero of some story instead of just scared.
Fionnuala doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t do the social worker lean-forward that means a lecture’s coming. “That’s survival mode,” she says. “You’ve been in it so long you’ve forgotten there are other settings.”
She opens the housing folder wider. Actual photographs of studio flats with doors that lock from the inside, addresses where post could find me. Real places with coordinates, not just away.
“Running away means no one knows if you’re okay,” she says. “Leaving means people can visit. Means you can come back for Christmas if you want to.”
The difference lands like a blow. I’ve been planning to vanish because I thought that’s what freedom looked like. Untraceable. Unfindable.
But Siobhan’s face flashes behind my eyes. Her panic at everything dissolving, at me becoming a ghost story instead of a person who moved to Galway.
“If I tell people where I’m going.
I stare at the folders spread across her desk, my argument dying unspoken. Phone numbers written in Brighid’s careful hand. Siobhan’s research on anxiety support groups in Galway, printed and highlighted. Even Declan’s scrawled note on the back of a pub receipt: Ring me if you need anything. Seriously. Anything.
“They’re not trying to stop you,” Fionnuala says quietly. “They’re trying to keep you.”
The distinction cracks something open in my chest. I’ve been so focused on escape I couldn’t see the difference between people holding you back and people holding on. Between chains and safety lines.
“I thought.”I thought I had to choose between leaving and being loved.”
“No,” she says. “You just have to let them know which Galway bus you’re on.”
I can’t breathe properly. Two months. While I was memorizing bus schedules and counting tips, planning my vanishing act, Declan was: what? Writing references at the bar after close? Asking his university mates if they knew anyone hiring? Building me an exit that didn’t require burning everything behind me?
“He never said anything,” I manage.
“You never asked,” Fionnuala replies, not unkindly.
I stare at the post-it note, her number in neat blue ink. Personal mobile. Not the office line she gives everyone else.
“What if I fuck it up?” The words come out smaller than I mean them.
“Then you’ll know someone who’ll help you unfuck it.” She slides the folders across the desk. “That’s the difference between running and leaving, Keiran. One’s alone. The other isn’t.”
The house smells like generations: bread and turf smoke and something floral I can’t name. Bodies everywhere, perched on counters and chair arms, a toddler under the table with a toy car. The noise hits like a wave, three conversations happening at once, someone laughing, the kettle screaming. I freeze in the doorway.
Brighid’s fingers lace through mine. “Gran wanted to meet you properly,” she says. “Before.”
Before. The word hangs there, heavy with everything we’re not saying.
“Keiran!” A woman with Brighid’s eyes waves me toward a chair that appears from nowhere, the table expanding like it’s breathing. “Sit, sit. You’re too thin. Brighid, get him biscuits.”
I sit because there’s no refusing. The chair’s warm from whoever had it before.
“Leave the boy alone, Deirdre.” The grandmother, Máire, someone calls her, though two people are talking over the name, sets a chipped mug in front of me. The tea’s already milky, already sweet. She knows how I take it without asking.
Her hands are spotted with age, steady on the teapot. When she looks at me, really looks, I feel seen in a way that makes my chest tight.
“You’ve got the look,” she says. Not unkind. Just fact. “The leaving look. Had it myself at sixteen.”
“Seventeen,” her daughter corrects from the sink.
“Sixteen in my heart.” Máire waves this away. “The boat to Liverpool, 1964. Factory work. Sent money home every week and cried myself to sleep every night for a year.”
“Two years,” Brighid’s aunt adds, passing biscuits.
“Felt like forever.” Máire’s eyes haven’t left mine. “Homesickness like someone had scooped out my insides. You know that feeling yet?”
I don’t. But I’m terrified I will.
“But you came back,” I say, and it sounds like an accusation.
“I did.” Máire’s smile is complicated, full of things I don’t have words for yet. “Came back in ’82 with an English husband and a daughter who couldn’t speak Irish.” She gestures at Brighid’s mother, who rolls her eyes fondly. “The town talked. Still talks, probably.”
“They definitely still talk,” someone confirms, and laughter ripples around the table.
“Both were necessary,” Máire continues, her hand covering mine. Warm, papery skin. “The leaving and the coming back. You can’t know what you’re choosing if you’ve never seen the alternative. Your Declan,” She pauses, and I feel the shift in the room, everyone suddenly listening harder while pretending not to. “He understands that. He won’t hold you here.”
My throat closes. Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? He won’t hold me here, but I’m the one who’ll be doing the leaving. I’m the one who’ll carry that weight.
“Doesn’t make it easier,” I manage.
“No,” Máire agrees. “It doesn’t.”
I watch Declan in those photos. Twenty years younger, standing in front of Trinity College with his shoulders hunched like he’s bracing for someone to tell him he doesn’t belong. That same careful posture I recognize from mirrors. In later photos, the jokes start appearing in his eyes before they reach his mouth. Defense mechanism. Survival strategy. The same way I’ve learned to read rooms before entering them.
“He makes everything a joke now,” I say quietly.
“Because he knows how serious it all is,” Máire replies. “The ones who laugh loudest usually do.” She taps the photo. “He chose this smallness after knowing bigness. That takes a different kind of courage than leaving does.”
The photos shift. But something in his eyes changes too. The hunger dims. The belonging he’d chased turns into something quieter, more deliberate.
“He could’ve stayed in Dublin,” Brighid’s mother says, tracing the edge of a photograph. “Had offers. But he came home anyway.”
I stare at young Declan becoming the man who took me in, watching armor become bridge.
The night air tastes different walking back. Still salt and stone, but somehow less like a cage. Brighid’s shoulder brushes mine, deliberate.
“I’m not showing you that to make you stay.” Her voice is careful, measured. “Just so you know leaving doesn’t have to mean vanishing.”
She stops under the streetlight outside the chemist’s. “Gran left. Declan left. They’re still ours.” The word cracks open between us. “You can go and still. Doesn’t need to.
I can leave without erasing myself. Can be gone without being lost.
He keeps three of the books. Not all (that would be theft disguised as sentiment) but the ones where her handwriting fills the margins most densely. This is exactly like your situation with Declan, she’d written next to a passage about chosen family. Except you’re too stubborn to see it. He’d drawn a middle finger in response. She’d added a smiley face.
The books go in wrapped in a t-shirt, careful. Evidence that someone knew him well enough to argue with him in the margins of borrowed stories.
His fingers find the piece of sea glass in his pocket: the one Brighid pressed into his palm tonight, still warm from her hand. Green and smooth, all its sharp edges worn away by time and tide. “From the beach,” she’d said. “So you remember it’s still here.” He sets it on top of the books where it catches the lamplight.
The address he’s written for Declan sits on the desk, his handwriting more careful than usual. Not a promise, exactly. More like a door left unlocked. This is where I’ll be. If you want to know. The words he couldn’t say out loud, committed to paper where they can’t be taken back.
He zips the bag and it’s not heavy. Everything he owns fits in one rucksack, same as always. But the weight feels different now. Not the lightness of having nothing to lose. The specific gravity of things chosen, kept, carried forward deliberately.
The jacket settles on his shoulders and for the first time it doesn’t feel borrowed. Just worn. Broken in. His.
He’s still leaving at first light. Still taking the coast road north before the town wakes. But he’s leaving as someone, not as no one. The boy who wrote in journals and trusted people and got his heart broken isn’t something to bury. He’s just someone who’s still learning how to carry his own weight.
The photograph is from two years ago, before Niamh’s betrayal fractured everything. Five teenagers on the beach, sun-bleached and laughing, arms slung around each other like they’d never let go. Siobhan’s eyes are actually open in this one, not squeezed shut mid-panic. Brighid’s hair is wilder, unselfconscious. Even Niamh looks genuine, before she learned to weaponize vulnerability.
He nearly leaves it behind. Evidence of who he was when he still believed in permanent things.
But Siobhan’s words echo: We’re allowed to be sad about it. These people shaped him. The trust, the betrayal, the messy complicated love of it all. Erasing them would be erasing the parts of himself he’s only just learning to claim.
The photograph slides between the pages of his newest journal, the one he’ll keep writing in. Not hidden. Protected. These faces are part of his story, the beautiful and broken bits both. You don’t become someone by pretending you came from nowhere.
He’s taking them with him. Not as ghosts. As proof he was here, he mattered, he was known.
The list is crumpled, shoved in his jacket pocket from yesterday’s shift. Declan’s handwriting slopes drunk across the paper, bread, milk, something that makes you smile, and Christ, that last item is so perfectly, devastatingly him. Making a joke of sincerity. Hiding care inside comedy.
Keiran smooths the paper flat on the desk, flips it over. His own writing looks foreign next to Declan’s chaos: precise numbers, careful letters spelling out a Galway address. Not disappearance. Destination.
The beach stone, grey, worn smooth by years of tide, holds it in place. Solid. Deliberate. Impossible to miss.
He imagines Declan finding it. The moment of confusion, then understanding. Maybe relief that Keiran trusted him with a forwarding address. Maybe hurt that he’s still going.
Both can be true.
The mirror doesn’t lie anymore. These eyes learned to read exits before entrances, this posture learned not to expect permanence. But the boy looking back isn’t the one who arrived in Ballycragh three years ago, ready to disappear at the first sign of trouble. He’s someone who let people in. Who wrote things down. Who matters enough to leave an address behind instead of just absence.
The bag settles against my spine like it’s always belonged there. Not the desperate lightness of running, but the deliberate weight of choosing. I’ve packed the boy who wrote dreams in margins, the one who let Brighid see him cry, who held Siobhan through her panic. I’m not erasing him anymore. I’m just teaching him that home might be something you carry, not something that holds you still.
The envelope sits heavy in my hands, and I can feel every note through the paper: three generations of “just in case” money that saw the MacBrides through the Troubles, through the recession, through Declan’s father’s cancer. My throat closes up because I know what this cost him. Not the money itself, but the admission that I’m worth more than the pub’s safety net.
“Dec,” I start, but he cuts me off with a hand on my shoulder, grip firm enough to ground me.
“Don’t,” he says, and there’s none of his usual performance in it. No deflecting pun, no self-deprecating joke to make this easier. Just Declan, raw and real in a way I’ve rarely seen. “I spent twenty years proving I could come back and make it work. You need to prove you can leave and make it work. Different paths, same courage.”
The wind tries to steal his words, but I catch them. Hold them.
“I’m terrified I’ll fuck this up,” I admit, because if I can’t be honest here, at the edge of everything, then what’s the point of leaving?
“You will,” he says, and somehow that helps. “You’ll fuck up spectacularly. You’ll call me at three in the morning because you’ve spent your rent money on something stupid, or you’ve picked the wrong people to trust, or you just need to hear someone say your name who knew you before.” His eyes are wet, but his voice stays steady. “And I’ll answer. Every single time.”
I fold the envelope into my jacket pocket, next to the acceptance letter from the Galway program. Two pieces of paper that weigh nothing and everything.
“The road back,” I say.
“Is always there,” he finishes. “But you have to take the road out first.”
The notebook pages are worn soft from handling, each entry written in her precise, anxious script that gets smaller when she’s scared. She’s highlighted the bus times in three different colors (morning, afternoon, evening) like she’s been planning this for weeks. Maybe months.
“You researched this,” I say, and my voice cracks because I know what it costs her to imagine herself on those buses, anxiety whispering worst-case scenarios with every mile marker.
“I’m not losing you to distance,” she says, fierce despite the tremor in her hands. “I’ve lost enough to my own head.”
I take the notebook, careful with it because it’s more than information: it’s Siobhan choosing connection over the safety of isolation. It’s her saying she’s worth the discomfort of showing up.
“First weekend of every month,” I promise, and I watch something shift in her face. Not the erasure of anxiety, but the addition of hope alongside it.
She nods, tucks her hands back into her hoodie pockets, and for once doesn’t put her earbuds in. She’s here, fully present, and that’s its own kind of bravery.
The notebook falls open to a page where she’s drawn the route in careful pencil. Not just bus schedules but rest stops, places with bathrooms she won’t panic in, cafes with corner seats. She’s mapped her own anxiety into the journey, made space for it instead of fighting it.
“You did this for me,” I say, throat tight.
“For us,” she corrects, and there’s steel beneath the shake. “I’m done letting fear decide who matters.”
Brighid reaches over, steadies Siobhan’s hand with her own. Declan clears his throat, looks away at the horizon. We’re all learning the same thing: staying connected takes more courage than leaving ever did.
I look at them, really look, and see what I’ve been too afraid to notice: they’re not chains holding me here. Brighid’s hand finds mine, warm against the wind. Siobhan’s breathing steadies. Declan’s eyes are wet but his smile is real. This isn’t goodbye to everything. It’s hello to choosing what comes with me.
The whiskey burns clean: not the harsh pub pour that numbs, but the kind that wakes you up. Declan’s hands shake slightly as he passes the bottle, and I realize he’s never done this before, never learned how to let someone go properly. His father probably didn’t teach him. “To leaving well,” he says, voice cracking on the last word, and I taste salt spray and forgiveness in equal measure.
The journal weighs nothing and everything in my hands. I open it to the first page: the pub’s front window, rendered in careful pencil strokes that catch how the light pools on the worn floorboards at closing time. She’s drawn the way the brass taps lean slightly left, the crack in the mirror behind the bar that Declan keeps meaning to replace. Details I’ve stopped seeing because they’ve been there my whole life, or what passes for it.
I flip through slowly. The coast road at sunset, wildflowers named in her careful handwriting: thrift, sea campion, bird’s-foot trefoil. The corner booth where our group always sat, empty but somehow full of us. And then, Christ, there I am, sketched from across a table I don’t remember, my face doing something I’ve never seen in mirrors. I look peaceful. I look like I belong somewhere.
“When did you,” My voice catches on the words.
“All year.” She’s not crying now, but her eyes are bright with it. “Every time you weren’t paying attention. Every time you looked like yourself instead of someone planning an escape route.” She touches the journal’s edge, not quite ready to let it go. “I wanted you to have proof that you were real here. That we saw you.”
The leather is soft under my fingers, already warm from her hands. Inside the back cover, she’s written something in Irish. Her grandmother’s language, the one she’s been teaching herself from old letters. Beidh tú i gcónaí sa bhaile anseo. You will always have a home here.
I close the journal before the wind can catch the pages, before I can say something that makes this harder. She’s giving me permission to leave and to return. Both. The weight of it settles in my chest next to all the other things I’m carrying out of here.
The list is laminated. Of course it is, Siobhan would think of that, would imagine rain or spilled tea or my hands too shaky to hold paper steady. The plastic catches the light as she holds it out, and I can see the hours in it: the careful formatting, the color-coded sections, the notes in the margins written in her cramped, anxious script.
“I researched everything,” she whispers, and her voice is doing that thing where it gets small and fierce at the same time. “The bus from Galway stops running at eleven, but there’s a night service on weekends. The support group meets Thursdays. If you’re having a panic attack, there’s this breathing pattern,” She’s talking faster now, words tumbling over each other. “I know you probably won’t need any of this, you’re better at everything than I am, but I just thought. I take the list, hold it like the gift it is.”Thank you.”
She’s still terrified. I can see it in how she won’t quite meet my eyes, how her free hand is worrying at her hoodie sleeve. But she’s here anyway, helping me leave even though it’s killing her.
I feel the weight of her watching before I see her properly. Fionnuala stands where the stone wall meets the cliff edge, apart from the others the way she’s always apart: close enough to help, far enough to let me fall if falling’s what I choose. Her braid whips in the wind, and when our eyes meet, something shifts in her face. Not quite a smile. Something steadier.
She’s been building this for months, I realize. Every form, every phone call, every “have you considered” that I thought was just social worker talk. She was constructing an exit that doesn’t end in casualty or custody. The folder in my bag holds her expertise, but this look: this says she believes I’ll make it. And belief from someone who knows the statistics, who’s seen how this usually ends, is its own kind of miracle.
The wind tastes of elsewhere, but I’m here, properly here, maybe for the first time. Not performing gratitude or planning my vanishing act. Just standing with people who built me an exit that doesn’t require burning everything behind me. Fionnuala’s folder isn’t charity. It’s cartography. The difference between running blind and walking toward something. Between escape and departure. I’m choosing the latter, finally.
The words stick in my throat like stones I’ve been carrying too long. I look at Declan’s weathered face, Brighid’s fierce hope, Siobhan’s anxious solidarity, Fionnuala’s careful investment. They didn’t just tolerate my leaving: they engineered it. Made it possible instead of inevitable. “Thank you,” I manage, and it’s inadequate but true. For seeing someone worth building scaffolding around. For teaching me that departure isn’t abandonment when you carry people forward instead of cutting them loose.
I take the folder with hands that aren’t quite steady. The weight of it, organized tabs, highlighted sections, post-it notes in Fionnuala’s precise handwriting, feels like someone translated hope into bureaucracy. She’s done this on her own time, navigated systems that chew up kids like me and spit out statistics.
“The caseworker’s name is Aoife Brennan,” Fionnuala continues, and there’s something raw beneath her professional composure. “She was in care herself. Aged out at eighteen with nothing.” A pause that holds decades of broken kids. “She’ll meet you at the bus station. Not because you need minding, but because everyone deserves someone waiting when they arrive somewhere new.”
I flip through the folder. Rental agreements pre-negotiated, medical records organized, a list of food banks and free counseling services that doesn’t feel like charity when she’s the one offering it. There’s a handwritten note paper-clipped to the housing application: You’re not the first scholarship kid to be terrified. You won’t be the last. The difference is you’re going anyway.
“I can’t,” The words catch because I can’t repay this, can’t possibly deserve the hours she’s spent building me a future.
“You can,” she interrupts, and her voice carries the steel that makes social workers either quit or become legends. “You leave, you succeed, and someday when another kid is standing where you are now, you remember what scaffolding felt like.” She touches the Claddagh ring on her finger, an unconscious gesture. “That’s how we survive the system. We become the safety net we needed.”
The folder feels heavier now, weighted with obligation that doesn’t crush: it anchors. She’s not just giving me an exit strategy. She’s teaching me that escape and responsibility aren’t opposites.
The journal’s cloth binding is soft from age, her grandmother’s hands before Brighid’s. I open it and my throat closes because she’s written me into the town’s history like I was always meant to be there. Not the foster kid who cycled through houses, but Keiran O’Malley, connected to the fisherman who saved three children in 1847, to the teacher who defied the parish priest, to moments of courage I never knew I was inheriting.
“You think leaving means you’re nobody from nowhere,” Brighid says, and there’s steel beneath the gentleness. “But you’re from here. These stories, they’re yours. The leaving doesn’t erase that.”
My name appears in her careful script beside births and marriages, tucked into legends like I belong in them. She’s made me permanent in a way the foster system’s paperwork never could. This isn’t a cage of obligation. It’s proof that leaving and belonging aren’t opposites.
“You’re giving me roots I can carry,” I manage, and she nods like she knew I’d understand.
“That’s what love does,” she says simply. “It travels.”
Siobhan’s contribution comes wrapped in plastic like she’s waterproofing it against disaster: a laminated list of bus schedules, crisis hotlines, her own number written three times in different colors. “For when the anxiety gets bad,” she says, staring at the horizon instead of me. “Mine, I mean. So I know you’re okay.”
Her hands shake passing it over, this girl who’s mapped every worst-case scenario since we were fourteen, now choosing to trust a future she can’t control. It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen her do, braver than any of my running.
“I’ll text you,” I promise, and she nods once, sharp, sealing the pact.
“Every day,” she says. “Or I’ll assume you’re dead in a ditch.”
“Every day,” I agree, and mean it.
The envelope sits heavy in my jacket. Three thousand euros that Declan scraped together from lean months and leaner years. My throat’s gone tight, words stuck somewhere between my chest and mouth. This is what trust looks like when it’s not just spoken. This is permission to leave without burning the bridge behind me. This is what I never let myself hope for: a father who lets go without letting go completely.
The wind cuts through my jacket, sharp with Atlantic cold, but I’m burning inside. The envelope in one pocket, Fionnuala’s folder in the other: they’ve made leaving something different than I planned. Not escape. Not running. They’ve turned my exit into something I can return from. I’m not disappearing into the system’s statistics. I’m someone worth investing in. Someone who might actually come back.
The folder’s pages rustle in the wind, and I have to grip them tighter to keep Fionnuala’s careful work from scattering across the cliffs. Each sheet is annotated in her precise handwriting. Phone numbers with notes like “answers texts faster than calls” and “knows the housing system inside out.” She’s translated bureaucracy into something human, turned forms and procedures into actual people who’ve walked this road before me.
There’s a list of support groups in Galway, meeting times and locations already highlighted. Former foster youth who gather in a community center on Thursday nights, who understand what it means when you don’t have family photos or childhood stories that make sense. People who won’t ask questions that have answers like landmines. She’s given me a tribe I didn’t know existed, proof that I’m not the only one learning to build a life from scratch.
The emergency contacts are numbered. One through five, prioritized. Fionnuala’s name is third, which feels right. She’s taught me that help has an order, that you don’t burn your bridges by lighting them all at once. The first two numbers belong to people I haven’t met yet, crisis counselors who specialize in transition periods. The fourth is a housing advocate. The fifth is Declan, and beside his number she’s written “when you need home, not solutions.”
I flip to the last page and find a handwritten note: You’re allowed to fail at things. You’re allowed to come back. You’re allowed to need help. These aren’t permissions you have to earn. They’re rights you already have. Use them.
My throat tightens. Declan gave me money to leave. Fionnuala’s giving me reasons I’m allowed to return. Between them, they’ve built something I’ve never had before: a foundation that travels.
I take the phone from Brighid’s hand, and the screen blurs slightly before I blink it clear. October 12th: Keiran home for reading week. November 3rd: Bank holiday: check if K needs ride. July next year: *Arts festival. She’s color-coded them. Green for definite, yellow for tentative, nothing left unmarked or uncertain.
“You’re not disappearing,” she says, and there’s steel underneath the softness. Not begging me to stay, but refusing to let me pretend I’m dying instead of leaving. She’s mapped our friendship into months I can’t imagine yet, given it coordinates and commitments.
The town does something strange then. It doesn’t shrink exactly, but it… shifts. Becomes one place among others instead of the only place. Not a trap I’m escaping but a point I’m departing from, somewhere I can leave and return to. The difference sits in my chest like something almost comfortable. Galway is two hours up the coast. I’ve made distance mean abandonment for so long I forgot it could just mean distance.
Siobhan hasn’t said much, but she’s here: standing on the cliff edge despite how heights make her stomach drop, which is practically a blood oath. She hands me a folded paper, and I recognize her handwriting before I even open it: bus schedules highlighted in three colors, annotated with her meticulous panic-planning. Routes between Galway and Ballycragh with backup options, estimated costs, which drivers are sound and which are bastards.
“In case you forget the way back,” she says, voice barely audible over the wind.
I understand what she’s really saying: that she needs to believe there is a way back. That my leaving won’t erase me from her life entirely, won’t make me another person who promised to stay in touch and then dissolved into silence and distance. She’s given me a map home.
I don’t know what to do with this, Declan admitting he left, that coming back wasn’t surrender. My throat goes tight because he’s rewriting the story I’ve been telling myself: that staying means dying slowly, that returning means you failed at escape. He’s offering me a third option I didn’t know existed. Maybe leaving doesn’t have to be forever. Maybe home can be something you choose instead of something that chooses you.
Looking at them (Declan with his terrible jokes masking real pride, Siobhan fighting her anxiety to be here on the cliff’s edge, Brighid steady beside him) Keiran understands what Fionnuala meant about the difference between leaving and escaping. He’s still going. The bus ticket is real, the flat in Galway waiting. But he’s not burning bridges behind him anymore. He’s building a road that runs both ways.
Declan stands at the stone wall, one hand resting on the weathered rock like he’s steadying himself or the cliff or maybe both. He’s not looking at Keiran but out at the horizon where grey sea meets greyer sky, and for once there’s no deflection in his posture, no joke queued up to break the weight of the moment. The silence between them holds years. The careful distance of early placement, the gradual thaw, the thousand small kindnesses that neither of them knew how to name. Keiran wants to say something about gratitude, about the pub’s back room being the first place that felt like home rather than temporary lodging, about how Declan’s terrible puns taught him that safety could sound like laughter.
But the words stick in his throat, thick and unwieldy, so instead he moves to stand beside his foster father at the wall. Their shoulders don’t quite touch but the space between them feels intentional rather than careful, and when Declan finally speaks his voice is rough with something that isn’t quite sadness.
“Your ma would’ve liked this view,” he says, and Keiran’s breath catches because Declan never mentions her, never presumes to know what she would have wanted. “Fionnuala showed me the photo in your file once. She had your eyes. That same look like you’re measuring distances.”
Keiran’s vision blurs and he blinks hard against the salt wind. “I’m coming back,” he says, and means it in a way he couldn’t have months ago. “Not to stay. But to visit. If that’s,”
“You’d better,” Declan interrupts, and now there’s the ghost of his usual humor threading through. “Someone needs to keep the books honest, and your replacement can’t pour a proper pint to save his life.”
Brighid stands between them all, her wild hair whipping in the Atlantic wind, and she’s not crying though her eyes are bright with it. She’s the only one who could have orchestrated this: gathering them here without making it feel like an intervention or a funeral. Her grandmother’s cardigan flaps open and she doesn’t pull it closed, just lets the cold in like she’s practicing for larger absences.
When she finally looks at Keiran, there’s no plea in her expression, no last-minute bargaining. Just clear-eyed recognition of what he needs versus what she wants, and the grace to let those things exist separately. She’s spent months learning this distinction, he knows. How to love someone without making them responsible for your wholeness.
“You’ll send photos of terrible Galway coffee shops,” she says, and it’s not a question.
“Every single one,” he promises, and the future tense doesn’t feel like lying anymore. It feels like building a bridge instead of burning one, like understanding that some distances are measured in effort rather than miles.
I watch Declan’s profile against the grey sky. The man who took in a feral fifteen-year-old and never once asked him to perform gratitude. His silence now is the most honest thing he’s ever given me. The envelope burns against my ribs, and I know without reading it that he’s written the things his jokes usually protect: that he sees himself in me, that watching me leave reopens his own wounds about staying, that he’s terrified of failing me the way he feels he’s failed himself.
“You didn’t fail,” I say, because someone needs to.
His exhale is visible in the cold. “Neither did you, kid.”
The journals burned because he’d written himself too clearly, made himself a target. The friendships he’d wrecked before they could wreck him. Every careful disappearing act was rational: the system rewards ghosts, punishes those who need. But these people beside him know his case file and his heart both, and somehow that’s not ammunition. Survival kept him breathing. This (their hands steady against the wind) might actually let him live.
The wind tastes different when you’re not running. I think about Fionnuala’s folder: actual addresses, phone numbers, people who’ve walked this road before me. Galway has my name on a lease now, not just in my head. I’m not burning who I was to become someone else. I’m just… continuing. The cliffs will still be here. So will they. That’s the thing nobody tells you about leaving: sometimes the bravest thing is believing you can come back.
I watch Declan from the corner of my eye. The way he’s standing there like he’s at a funeral he’s trying not to ruin with his grief. His hands are buried in that ridiculous purple cardigan Aunt Maeve knitted, the one with the wonky sleeves, and for once he’s not making a joke about it. Not making a joke about anything. Just standing there, separate from us but not apart, giving me space while making sure I know he’s present.
The silence stretches between us like the road itself, and I can feel him fighting every instinct to crack wise, to deflect, to make this easier by making it lighter. But he doesn’t. He just watches me watching the horizon, and there’s something in his stillness that says more than his usual flood of words ever could.
I think about the envelope he pressed into my hands last week. The pub’s emergency fund, three years of careful saving, handed over without conditions or speeches. Just: “You’ll need this. No, don’t argue. Christ, you’re stubborn. Wonder where you got that.” Then that crooked smile that didn’t quite hide the shine in his eyes.
He’s giving me what he never got. I understand that now. When he left for university, it was with his family’s disappointment heavy as stones, their certainty he’d fail, their bitterness when he didn’t. He came back carrying all of that, trying to prove something that shouldn’t need proving. And now he’s standing here, deliberately breaking that cycle, letting me go clean.
The wind shifts, carrying salt and the smell of wild thyme, and Declan clears his throat. Doesn’t say anything. Just shifts his weight, and I know, I know, he’s telling me it’s okay. The leaving. The staying away if I need to. The coming back if I want to. All of it. Permission I didn’t know I was waiting for.
I look at Siobhan properly, maybe for the first time in weeks. She’s perched on that wall like a bird that might bolt, back to the hundred-foot drop like she’s proving something to herself. The earbuds are out: that’s how I know this is costing her. She uses them like a force field, a reason not to engage, and here she is, defenseless against the moment.
Her fingers are white-knuckled against her thighs, and I can see the half-moons her nails are carving into her palms. Classic Siobhan, turning anxiety inward, making her body pay for her mind’s chaos. But she’s not running. Not hiding in worst-case scenarios or catastrophizing my departure into abandonment. She’s just here, breathing through it, letting the fear exist without letting it win.
When she catches my eye, the smile she gives me is wobbly as a newborn lamb, but it’s real. Not the performance she usually offers, the “I’m fine” mask she wears like armor. This is her, terrified and present, offering me the gift of her undefended self.
It nearly breaks me. This small, enormous act of courage.
I feel her presence like heat from a fire you’re standing too close to. She’s holding that battered sketchbook against her chest like a shield, but it stays closed. Her knuckles aren’t white. She’s not gripping it like a lifeline.
“You’ll come back different,” she says, and the wind nearly takes the words, but I catch them. Not if you come back. Not don’t change. Just the simple truth that leaving transforms you, and she’s not asking me to stay the same to make it easier for her.
“That’s okay.” Her voice is steadier now. “We’ll all be different.”
And Christ, that’s the gift, isn’t it? Permission to become.
I turn to face them. “Thank you,” I manage, and my voice splits on the second word like green wood in fire. I don’t swallow it back. Don’t smooth it over. Let them see me cracked open and grateful, terrified and here.
We stand there breathing the same wind, four people who know too much about each other to pretend comfort but enough to stay. The sun bleeds gold across water that’s been here longer than any of our small dramas. Declan’s hand finds my shoulder, brief, certain. Siobhan’s shaking stops. Brighid doesn’t look away. And the road waits, patient as stone, leading both directions now.