In two hours she’d be under fluorescent lights, checking vitals and changing dressings. Being steady for strangers theway she was steady for everyone. The way she’d been steady for Bridget every month that Natalie wasn’t here.
Natalie lifted her hand to Emma’s cheek. The skin was cool from the rain, warm underneath. Emma’s eyes closed briefly. Natalie felt the small muscles of her jaw move beneath her palm.
“You know I can’t offer you anything.” Her voice was quiet. “My life’s in LA. And I’m too old for you even if I could stay.”
Emma opened her eyes. The hazel looked darker in the tunnel light, more green than brown. Her expression wasn’t hurt or angry or surprised. It was patient and quiet—the look of someone hearing an argument they’d already considered and dismissed.
“You know that’s not true.”
Emma leaned in and kissed her. Slower this time. Her arms stayed at her sides—just her mouth, gentle and careful. Natalie tasted the goodbye in it. Emma’s lips were soft and cool. She lingered for one breath, two, then pulled back. Her eyes were bright and she didn’t look away.
They stood in the quiet.
Emma looked at the path outside, not at Natalie. Her jaw was set, the muscle working beneath the skin.
“Go ahead.”
Her voice was even. Almost.
Natalie understood immediately. Not a dismissal. Not anger. Emma at the absolute limit of what she could hold. Choosing to manage it with whatever dignity she had left rather than fall apart in front of the woman who was leaving.
She reached for Emma’s hand.
Just took it. Slid her fingers between Emma’s and held on. Both of them looked down at their joined hands in the grey light, Natalie’s thumb moving slowly across Emma’s knuckles. The skin was cool and smooth.
And then she let her hand fall.
“I wish things were different.” Natalie meant it completely. With every cell of her exhausted, rain-soaked body, she meant it. And she meant it in the way that changed nothing. The way that offered nothing.
Emma nodded. One small movement. Her eyes were bright, the hazel catching what little light remained in the archway, and she wasn’t going to cry. She had decided not to cry. The decision was written in every line of her face, in the set of her mouth and the angle of her jaw and the way she blinked once, slowly, and when her eyes opened again they were clear and dry and steady.
“Have a safe flight.”
“Goodbye, Emma.”
She turned. She walked out of the archway into the dripping stillness of the woods and the cool air hit her wet skin and she kept walking. Her feet found the path.
She didn’t look back. Looking back would undo her entirely.
The path curved ahead through the wet trees. The Volan rushed below and to the left, louder now after the downpour, the water brown and fast over the limestone. Drops fell from the canopy in slow, irregular intervals, landing on her shoulders, her arms, the crown of her head. Each one cold and precise. The green closed around her, that impossible saturated green that she would try to describe in LA and fail, that she would look for in the landscaped gardens of the Hollywood Hills and never find, that existed only here, in this ancient corridor of oak and ash and moss-covered stone.
Behind her, in the archway, Emma stood alone.
Natalie didn’t see what happened after. She would never know how long Emma held herself together after Natalie disappeared around the bend. What her face looked like when no one was watching.
Natalie knew only her own experience. The path beneath her feet, the cold air, the taste of Emma still on her mouth. The green woods ahead. The river below. Water dripping from the trees.
She kept walking.
5
4 YEARS AGO
Natalie’s grip relaxed on the steering wheel past Tuam. Her shoulders dropped as the motorway turned to regional roads with green fields and limestone walls. After the hardest year of her career—awards season running into shoots that left her exhausted—this drive felt like breathing again. Two months stretched ahead with no schedules. She would spend them with Gran in the cottage that had always felt more like home than anywhere in LA.
She kept thinking about Emma. It had happened all year, at odd times. During night shoots or between takes in her trailer. That kiss in the archway last summer stayed with her. The damp air, Emma’s mouth, the way everything in her had gone still. She had wanted her then, and still did. The memory made her pulse quicken. Emma was attractive in a natural way that had nothing to do with cameras or styling. But wanting changed nothing.
They had no future. Natalie’s life belonged in Los Angeles for at least the next decade. She had fought too long and too hard for this career, the roles that finally mattered, the recognition that filled the spaces her mother’s early death had left empty. Walking away from it now felt impossible. And at forty-five she was too old for Emma anyway. Coming out felt equally outof reach while her star kept rising. The industry still punished women for certain truths. It just wasn’t meant to be.
