Gran’s fingers tapped lightly against her mug. “She met someone,” she said. “Another nurse at that hospital in Sydney. From the way Emma writes about her, she seems to be happy.”
The words landed one after another, each one pressing the air from Natalie’s lungs. She sat very still while her grandmother spoke, the tea cooling untouched between them. Emma had met someone. The phrase echoed in the hollow spaces behind her ribs, bringing with it the first cold touch of a question Natalie did not want to ask herself. Had the kiss in the archway mattered to Emma at all? Or had it been just one more thing that happened in a life already pointed elsewhere, a summer fling easily left behind when something better appeared? The thought stung more than it should have. Natalie had spent eleven months convincing herself the kiss had been a mistake, a moment of weakness best forgotten. Now the possibility that Emma hadalready forgotten it felt worse than any rejection she could have imagined.
She felt the tightening in her throat first, that familiar, involuntary clench of muscle before her thoughts could even form. Emma had met someone. Emma was happy—with someone else, on the other side of the world.
Natalie swallowed against the tightness, her fingers pressing harder into the warmth of her mug. She was holding it and the heat was seeping into her palms and she was thinking about the archway. The rain hammering the canopy. The cold limestone against her back. Emma’s mouth, warm and certain, and the way her hands had tightened on Natalie’s hips like she’d been waiting for permission to do exactly that for a very long time. Emma’s breath catching. Her eyes afterward, that shifting hazel, wide and open and asking a question Natalie hadn’t been able to answer.
“Good for her,” Natalie said.
The words came out right. Steady and warm, exactly what a friend would say. She meant them. Emma deserved sun and good wages and a woman who could hold her hand in public without thinking about it, without worrying who might see.
“I doubt she’ll come back,” Gran said. “Once they go that far, they don’t usually come back. Why would they? The weather’s better, the pay’s better.”
Natalie lifted the mug to her lips and drank. The tea was hot and strong and exactly right, the way Gran’s tea always was, but something in her throat made it hard to swallow.
Her grandmother kept talking, her voice softening around each word like worn fabric. “I wonder if acting runs in the family,” she mused, gazing at the window where the morning light made patterns on the worn table, “because I don’t know how I kept it together when Emma came over to say goodbye.”
Natalie pressed her lips together. She watched her grandmother’s hands, those weathered, capable hands that had kneaded bread and planted roses and now trembled slightly around the china, and understood this wasn’t just about her own jagged grief.
“She was like another grandchild to me,” Gran continued, her words measured as if she was sorting through a lifetime of memories, weighing each one. “A friend more than a neighbor, really. Always just... bopping in and out, whether it was for a quick cup of tea before she left for work or to bring over dinner for me. She never announced herself, just appeared at the door like...” She trailed off, her eyes suddenly bright, and Natalie saw how much it cost her to finish the thought: “Like she belonged here.”
Natalie’s throat tightened. She remembered the way Emma would move through this kitchen with an easy familiarity, opening the right drawers without looking, knowing which cupboard held the sugar bowl before Gran could point. “I know,” she managed, her voice rougher than she intended. “She was always so good to you, wasn’t she?”
Gran nodded, her white hair catching the light as she lifted her mug. “She was,” she said simply before taking a sip, the words disappearing into the steam rising from her tea like a quiet confession.
Emma was gone. Emma had been gone for months, had been gone the whole time Natalie had been thinking about her, the whole time she’d been preparing for a conversation that was never going to happen, the whole time she’d been holding the memory of that kiss like a private talisman, something she could turn over in her mind in the quiet hours, something she could feel guilty about and grateful for in equal measure. And Emma had kissed her and then she’d gone to Australia and metsomeone else, someone she could actually have, someone who wasn’t famous and closeted.
The kiss hadn’t mattered. Not to Emma. Or it had mattered but not enough. Not enough to change anything. Not enough to make her wait. And why would it have been? Natalie had told her that she couldn’t offer her anything.
The exhaustion settled into Natalie’s bones. The adrenaline that had carried her through the flight and drive from Shannon had evaporated, leaving her hollowed out and heavy. She would still enjoy these weeks with Gran—the quiet mornings with tea, the drives down narrow boreens where hedgerows brushed the car windows, the discovery of coastal paths or hidden beaches. But the anticipation that had hummed beneath her skin since booking her ticket was gone. The private fantasy of seeing Emma’s face when she walked through her grandmother’s door, of falling back into their rhythm, of maybe having the courage to say what had gone unspoken for five summers—gone.
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. How was she supposed to walk these paths without thinking of Emma? How was she supposed to sit in O’Shea’s without listening for her laugh? The village had always been her refuge, but now every stone wall and woodland trail would remind her of Emma’s absence.
Natalie closed her eyes. Forgetting wasn’t possible. The only question was how much it would hurt to remember.
6
PRESENT DAY
The canopy filtered July light through oak leaves, casting shifting patterns on the path. Natalie walked slowly, her calves aching from the uphill climb near the limestone cleft. The air smelled of decomposing wood, wild garlic, and minerals from the river running somewhere to her left.
She’d been back a week. Her body had adjusted to Irish time after she’d woken at four in the morning for the first few days. She’d spent those jetlagged days drinking Gran’s tea and dozing in the front room while her grandmother watched from her chair by the window.
The Sanders project still occupied her thoughts. She’d finished twelve interviews in four days before flying out, each one asking the same question: do you think this is your year? They meant the awards. She’d given gracious, deflecting answers twelve times, but alone here she could be honest. The performance had been good. She’d found something in those final scenes that left her sitting in her trailer afterward with shaking hands and ruined makeup. She knew the camera had caught it. Whether that would be enough to survive awards season politics was another matter.
The archway appeared ahead, a limestone tunnel with ferns growing from cracks in the mortar. The stone was dark with moisture. The temperature dropped as she approached. Her footsteps changed from soft earth to rock.
She didn’t slow down. That had been the victory, five years ago. She’d come back that first summer without Emma and walked this path on the second day, before she could avoid it, before the avoidance became permanent and shrank her world by one more place she couldn’t go. She’d walked through the archway with her jaw set and her hands in her pockets, and the memory had hit her—Emma’s mouth on hers, the rain outside, Emma’s fingers on the back of her neck pulling her closer—and she’d kept walking. Out the other side. Into the light.
Five years had changed it. The memory still surfaced every time. But it had softened. The sharp edges had worn down the way the limestone wore down, season by season, until what remained was something almost warm. They’d had that kiss. She and Emma had stood in this dim, cool space and been honest with their bodies in a way they’d never managed with words, and that had been real. Nobody could un-make it.
The what-ifs were harder to hold gently.
What if she hadn’t said what she said. What if she hadn’t delivered that careful, responsible little speech about not being able to offer Emma anything. What if instead she’d said, I don’t know what this is but I don’t want it to stop. What if she’d missed her flight. What if that was supposed to be the start of something?
What if they’d figured it out the way millions of ordinary people figured it out, imperfectly and long-distance and with too many time zones between them but together.
Maybe Emma wouldn’t have gone to Australia. Maybe Emma would have gone anyway but come home in July. To be withher. Maybe they’d have crashed and burned spectacularly, but at least they’d have known.
