"What's the next move?" she asks.
I glance at the radio, then the phone.
"We wait. Give them a day to get comfortable. If the council wants to test me, let them. The first shot comes from their side."
Lena snorts.
"You know they'll send someone by midnight. Just to be sure you're really out."
"Good," I say.
"Let them try."
Niamh studies me.
"You think Keira's ready?"
"She's always been ready," I say, and it's almost a confession.
"She just never had the excuse."
We sit in silence, the three of us, the only sound the drip of rain on the window and the faint hum of the fridge.
Niamh pushes the newspaper across the table until it's in front of me.
"You want to keep this? For the scrapbook?"
I look at the headline, the photo, the name they gave me.
I shake my head, then tear the page down the center, right through the heart of it.
The pieces fall to the floor, and we watch them settle.
"Let's see what they do next," I say.
Niamh's eyes are shining now, and even Lena looks alive for the first time in months.
The morning after,the city is already two days ahead of itself.
The news of the split has grown legs and teeth, each retelling uglier and more inventive than the last.
I watch the rumor metastasize in real time, from a whisper in a pub to a full-blown crisis on the breakfast radio.
Every fifth call on the burner is an update from the ground?—
"They're saying she begged you to stay. They're saying you took a swing at her."
"O'Duinn's crew are shopping odds on how long until someone ends up in the canal."
"The girls in Phibsboro think you're on suicide watch."
Even the guards at the station are talking about it, betting cigarettes on which one of us will burn first.
Niamh is a switchboard for pain, and she delights in every scrap of evidence that the machine is running hot.
She catalogs each escalation, a running tally of who's spreading which story and why.
"Your man with the nose from the docks? He's telling everyone you left because the babies aren't yours."
