"And?"
"It takes the edge off." A pause. He picks up his coffee. "I'll be fine."
I reach for my wine glass and take a long sip.
We stay another hour. My dad makes coffee and Cian argues about something on TV and Declan sits with his mug and says about six words total, which is standard, and I am a completely normal person at a completely normal family dinner and nobody knows anything.
I hug my dad goodbye at the door. Cian says he'll text me. Declan says goodnight from the hallway, briefly, and I saygoodnight back and I do not make eye contact for longer than is reasonable and I get out.
I replay the kitchen on the drive home. I remember how that kitchen felt like a different climate than it ever has before, and my mom was right, it is a different climate, she just didn't know the half of it.
I start the stream as soon as I get home.
BrattyBaby drops into the chair and the filter comes up and the voice shifts and approximately forty people say hello in the chat. The chat fills up fast.
DarkWatcher45 tips immediately. No message. Just the number and the silence after it.
I acknowledge it without breaking stride. Cool. Unhurried.
"DarkWatcher. Right on time."
4
Declan
Ronan is on his second beer when he gets to it.
He approaches things obliquely. Thirty years means I can hear when he's circling something. A rhythm in his speech, the pauses slightly longer than they need to be. He talks for twenty minutes about the gutters, a client's planning application, and whether Cian is going to make a decision about his apartment situation. All real conversation. All preamble.
I let him build it. He knows we can talk about anything. We’re more like brothers than friends after all these years.
He picks up his beer. "Something's up with Billie," he says.
I wait.
"She's not sleeping. Says she is, but." He turns the bottle in his hand. "Cian noticed it too. She's distracted. Not in a bad way, exactly, just, uh, somewhere else. Like she's got something going on she's not telling me about."
He looks at the garden. The quiet of a man who raised two kids alone and learned early that the things they don't tell you are the things that matter.
"Could be work. Could be a guy. Could be some online thing. You know how they are at that age, everything's online now." He shakes his head. "She won't talk to me about it. Says she's fine."
"She's twenty-one," I say. "She's smart. She'll figure it out."
"Yeah." He doesn't sound convinced. "I just worry."
"I know." I don’t really know, I never was married and never had kids of my own. But Cian and Billie are the closest thing family I have, so I worry too. I know she’s smart and she can handle herself, but I let Ronan talk until he feels better, because that’s what friends do.
***
The notification comes in twenty minutes after I walk through the door.
New upload. Private tier. Not the usual mass notification— this one is flagged for top-tier subscribers only. Direct delivery. The platform's way of marking content that was made for a smaller audience.
I see it the way I see all her notifications: immediately, before I've decided to look. Eleven seconds between the badge appearing and my thumb opening it.
Her private content follows a pattern. Wednesdays or Thursdays. Always dark. Always close. The camera angled on her body from the collarbone down, framed so tight there's nothing identifiable. No face. No background. Just her body and her voice in low light. She built the frame to keep herself anonymous and she's been disciplined about it every single time.
I have watched every single one.
