“title”:”I Was His Secret for Three Years”,”excerpt”:”A Dublin woman finally asks the man she loves to choose between secrecy and truth, and discovers what kind of love can survive daylight.”,”content”:”
The first rule was no photographs.
Not that Eoin ever called it a rule. He said it lightly, the way people in Dublin say the weather is grand while rain crawls down the back of their neck. He would put his hand over my phone and smile. “Let’s keep this one for ourselves, Laura.”
At the start, I found it romantic. We met in Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, both reaching for the same battered copy of Seamus Heaney. He had paint on the cuff of his coat and a voice made for reading menus slowly. I was thirty-two, newly promoted at a small architecture firm near Merrion Square, and so tired of men who announced themselves before they had anything to say.
Eoin was different. He listened. He remembered that I took my coffee black, that my mother had died in October, that I hated carnations because funeral homes seemed to love them. On our third date, in a quiet corner of Kehoe’s, he told me he had been separated for nearly a year. “It’s civil,” he said. “Mostly. There’s my son, Finn. He’s nine. I’m trying not to make his world any messier.”
I admired him for that. I mistook caution for kindness.
For three years, I was Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays. I was the spare toothbrush behind the cleaning products, the dress folded at the bottom of his gym bag, the woman he kissed on side streets but never on Grafton Street. He knew which pubs to avoid because his sister drank there, which restaurants were safe because his colleagues were too mean to pay for them, which weekends he could invent a conference in Cork and sleep beside me until morning.
“Soon,” he would say, when I asked when I might meet Finn, or his friends, or even the mythical sister with the dangerous pub habits. “When the paperwork is finished.”
The paperwork finished after eighteen months.
“After Finn’s communion,” he said then.
After the communion came his mother’s heart scare. After that came his ex-wife’s new job, which required delicate conversations. There was always a gate ahead of us, and Eoin always had the key, and somehow it never turned.
I should tell you I was foolish. I was. But foolishness is not always loud. Sometimes it is a woman washing two wine glasses at midnight and telling herself patience is a virtue. Sometimes it is a man pressing his forehead to yours and whispering, “I love you,” with such grief in his voice that you forgive him for the room he will not let you enter.
My sister Maeve did not forgive him. “He’s either married, ashamed, or dead,” she said one Sunday in her kitchen in Phibsborough, while her twins painted the table with yoghurt. “And since you claim he texts you, I’m ruling out
