I met Ciarán before my sister did, on a wet Friday evening outside the Gaiety Theatre, when the rain was falling sideways and every taxi on South King Street already had a light turned off. I was twenty-four, carrying flowers for a friend who had just finished her first small part on stage, and he was trying to save a paper bag of chips from turning to mush. He offered me one like we had known each other for years. I laughed, took it, and that was the start of us.
For three months, he was everywhere. We walked through St Stephen’s Green on lunch breaks, drank bad coffee near Dawson Street, and sat on the steps by the canal when we had no money for pints. He was gentle in a way that frightened me. Not boring gentle, not soft. Just steady. If I said I was tired, he believed me. If I said I wanted to go home, he walked me to the bus and never made me feel guilty for leaving.
That kind of love should have been easy to accept, but I was not easy then. My mother had died the year before, and I had become the capable one in the family. My younger sister, Niamh, fell apart loudly. I fell apart privately, usually in the bathroom with the tap running. When Ciarán began looking at me as if I might be his future, I panicked. I told him I had been offered work in London and needed to go. The job was real, but the running was real too.
He asked me to stay. Not dramatically, not on one knee in the rain or anything from a film. We were sitting in Grogan’s with two glasses between us, and he said, “I think I could love you properly, if you let me.” I remember staring at the little rings of stout on the table because I could not look at his face. I told him I did not want proper love. I said it like a brave person. It was the most cowardly sentence I had ever spoken.
I went to London. We kept in touch for a while, then less, then not at all. Life did what life does. It covered the sharp things with ordinary days.
Three years later, Niamh rang me and said she had met someone. I knew before she said his name. I do not know how. Maybe because Dublin is small, or maybe because certain names wait inside you. “His name is Ciarán,” she said, all bright and breathless. “You’d love him.”
I sat on the edge of my bed in London, holding the phone to my ear, and felt something in me go very quiet. I could have told her then. I could have said he had once held my hand under a table on George’s Street, that he knew how I took my tea, that he had seen me cry outside a Luas stop and kissed the top of my head like it was the most natural thing in the world. But Niamh was happy. Properly happy, maybe for the first time since Mam died. So I said, “Tell me about him.”
They were engaged within a year. When I came home for the wedding, Dublin looked unchanged and completely different. The same grey light on the Liffey. The same women hurrying across O’Connell Bridge with paper bags and umbrellas. But I was different walking through it. I had spent years pretending I had not left anything behind, and now the thing I left behind was marrying my sister in a church in Rathmines.
The night before the wedding, I found Ciarán outside the hotel near Merrion Square, smoking though he never used to. He looked older, but not in a bad way. More settled. We stood there with the traffic hissing by on wet roads.
“She knows,” he said.
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“Not everything
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