In Dublin, Nora tries to bury her feelings for her best friend’s husband until one winter evening forces her to choose between desire and the person she wants to be.
The first time I realised I loved Cian Byrne, I was carrying a bag of oranges through Stoneybatter in the rain.
It was a ridiculous moment for a life to split in two. Nothing cinematic happened. No swell of music, no hand brushing mine across a candlelit table. Just me, soaked through my navy coat, watching him kneel on the pavement to retie the lace of my best friend Aisling’s boot because she was eight months pregnant and could no longer bend without making the sort of noise that frightened pigeons.
A bus hissed past. Rain trembled on the orange plastic bag in my fist. Aisling laughed and rested one hand on his shoulder for balance. Cian looked up at her as if the world had narrowed to her face.
And my heart, traitorous little animal, lunged toward him.
I hated myself immediately.
Aisling had been my best friend since we were eleven and both pretending not to be afraid on our first day of secondary school in Drumcondra. She had given me half her sandwich when I forgot my lunch, sat beside me at my father’s funeral, and once taken the blame for a broken window because she knew my mother couldn’t bear one more call from school. She was the first person I rang when I got a job, when I lost it, when I met someone, when that someone left.
And Cian was hers.
Not in the way a handbag is hers, or a flat, or a coat you can borrow if you ask nicely. He was hers because they had chosen each other. Because he knew she took her tea too strong and that she cried during ads with dogs in them. Because he kept her inhaler in his jacket pocket when they went out. Because on cold mornings, he warmed her side of the bed with his body before getting up to make coffee.
I told myself what I felt was loneliness wearing a handsome face. I was thirty-four, newly single, and living alone in a flat near Phibsborough where the radiator clanked all night like an old man complaining. Cian was kind, funny, decent. Of course I admired him. Of course I liked being around him. Everyone did.
Admiration, I said. Affection. A harmless crush.
Then I began choosing my clothes before seeing them.
I began remembering things he said and carrying them around for days. He once told me, over pints in Dublin, that he believed grief never left a person, it just learned the layout of the house. I thought about that sentence while brushing my teeth. While locking my bike outside work. While standing in Tesco, staring at yoghurts.
I hated him a little for being so easy to love.
After their daughter, Maeve, was born, I became useful. That was the word I clung to. Useful. I brought lasagne. I folded tiny vests. I held the baby so Aisling could shower. Their flat in Stoneybatter smelled of milk, laundry powder, and the sour panic of new parenthood. Aisling, usually bright as a match, moved through the rooms with her hair unwashed and her eyes bruised with exhaustion.
‘You’re saving my life,’ she told me one evening, leaning against the kitchen counter while I sterilised bottles.
‘Don’t be dramatic,’ I said.
‘I am dramatic. It’s one of my core values.’
We laughed. Then Maeve began crying in the bedroom and Cian came out, the baby tucked against his chest, his T-shirt damp at the shoulder.
‘She only wants Nora,’ he said. ‘She’s already got taste.’
Aisling smiled, but I felt the compliment land somewhere it shouldn’t. I turned back to the sink so no one could see my face.
For months, I survived by making rules.
Never be alone with him if I could help it. Never text first unless it was about Aisling or Maeve. Never drink too much in his company. Never look at his hands.
The hands rule was the hardest.
He had carpenter’s hands, though he taught history in a school in Rathmines. Broad palms, a scar near the thumb, nails cut short. He fixed shelves, prams, door handles, the loose leg on my kitchen table. One Saturday he came over because Aisling had asked him to hang a mirror for me.
‘She says you’ll try to do it yourself and die under a pile of plaster,’ he said at my door, holding a drill.
‘She knows me too well.’
It was raining again. In Dublin, my worst choices always seemed to arrive wet.
I made tea. He measured the wall above my mantelpiece. We talked about ordinary things: his students, my job at a small publishing office, the rising price of everything, Maeve’s new habit of yelling at spoons. For nearly twenty minutes I felt safe, adult, in control.
Then the drill slipped. He swore softly and nicked his knuckle. A bead of blood appeared, bright against his skin.
‘Here,’ I said, taking his hand before I could think.
I held it under the tap. Water ran over his fingers and mine. He stood close enough that I could smell rain on his coat.
‘Nora,’ he said.
Just my name. Quietly.
I looked up.
There are moments people later pretend were accidents because the truth is too ugly. But I knew what I was doing. I knew from the way his eyes lowered to my mouth that he knew too. The air between us filled with the life we could ruin.
I let go of his hand.
‘You should go,’ I said.
He stepped back as if waking from a dream he was ashamed to have had. ‘Yeah. I should.’
He left the mirror on the floor and walked out into the rain.
I sat on the kitchen tiles and cried until the room blurred. Not because something had happened, but because something nearly had. Because I had wanted it. Because if he had kissed me, I was not sure I would have stopped him quickly enough to remain the person I believed I was.
The next morning, I met Aisling for coffee near the Grand Canal. Maeve slept in the pram, one fist curled beside her cheek. Aisling looked better than she had in weeks. She wore lipstick. Her hair was tied with a green scarf I had given her years before.
‘Cian said he made a mess of the mirror,’ she said, tearing a croissant in half. ‘You should have seen his face. Like he’d failed the Leaving Cert.’
I forced a laugh.
She tilted her head. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Tired.’
‘You’re always tired lately.’
I looked at her then, properly. My Aisling. The girl who once put her school jumper over my knees when I bled through my skirt. The woman who had held my hand in the hospice while my father breathed like paper tearing. She was watching me with concern, not suspicion. That made it worse.
‘I need to tell you something,’ I said.
Her face changed before I spoke. Some part of her heard the crack in my voice and braced.
I could not tell her all of it. Not there, with the canal moving grey beside us and strangers queuing for flat whites. Cowardice dressed itself as mercy. I said, ‘I think I need a bit of space. From you and Cian. Not from you, exactly. Just… from the house. From being there so much.’
‘Why?
