RUAIRÍ
The next morning, I return home to Wicklow with my wife.
We leave before the city is fully awake, the sky still the pale lavender of promise, and for once there is no escort, no convoy, no threat waiting in the rearview.
The road west cuts clean through the hush of farmland, past old stone walls and frost-kissed hedgerows that run in straight lines across the countryside like scars too deep to fade.
Here, the land rises gently, no longer jostling for space like in Dublin but unfolding open, slow, endless.
Fog hugs the fields in thick, low bands, softening the silhouettes of trees and farmhouses until they look painted on.
The occasional sheep moves through the mist like something half-imagined.
Even the birds are quiet, as if unwilling to interrupt the stillness.
Keira says nothing beside me, but her eyes are wide.
I see her hand drift toward the window once, not to adjust it, but to touch the glass, as if grounding herself in what she sees.
She's not used to land without boundaries, sky without scaffolding, a morning not shaped by someone else'sdemands.
For a woman raised as she was, this much peace could seem almost unnatural.
It takes less than an hour to reach the edge of the estate, where the gate is hidden behind a grove of ancient yews and marked by nothing but a weathered stone post.
The drive is gravel and earth, not paved.
It winds for nearly half a mile through dense woodland where the sunlight filters in slow, golden stripes through beech and ash.
Birds stir in the undergrowth.
A fox darts across the path ahead of us, its coat the color of rust and fire.
Somewhere deeper in the trees, I know the security teams are watching, but they remain unseen, as instructed.
And then the trees break.
The house rises at the crest of the hill like it grew from the soil itself, built of pale limestone that has weathered to silver-grey.
Ivy climbs one flank in a lattice of green, and narrow, mullioned windows catch the light like blades.
The main façade curves inward slightly, like a shield, and the eastern tower still bears the old Ogham carving no one has ever translated.
Behind the house, the fields roll away toward the river, and beyond them, low hills draw the sky close like folded arms.
Keira sighs and takes a deep breath in, and I do the same, inhaling gusts of woodsmoke, wet stone, and early apples from the orchard beyond the stables.
It is not grand in the way cities measure wealth, but it has the kind of power that cannot be bought.
I stop the car at the base of the front steps.
The staff does not emerge immediately.
No one rushes forward.
This is not a household ruled by panic.
When the door opens, it does so without sound.
