She leaned against the doorframe and felt herself start to relax. She’d already had four summers of this. Four summers of Emma being here in the mornings, easy and undemanding, someone who asked nothing of her except presence. And Natalie knew she’d never grow tired of them. They’d walked the woods together. Eaten dinner at this table. Talked about nothing important and everything that mattered in the gaps between. Whatever their age difference was, it had never caused tension—just an unspoken ease that Natalie had long since accepted as part of the rhythm of these summers.
They never stayed in touch during the rest of the year, but once Natalie arrived back in Kilvolan every July, it was like something clicked between them.
Natalie took the mug Emma handed her, their fingers brushing briefly. The tea was strong, just how she liked it—Emma remembered. She wrapped both hands around the warmth and leaned against the counter, watching as Emma moved to the oven.
The kitchen smelled of butter and warmth, the scones golden-brown. Emma pulled them out with practiced ease, her forearms flexing slightly under the weight of the tray. Natalie caught herself staring and took a quick sip of tea.
“You’re working today?” Natalie asked.
Emma nodded, wiping flour from her hands. “Yeah, but I’ll be back tonight. You should come by O’Shea’s later. Get your first pint of Guinness.”
“I will,” Natalie said, softer than she meant to.
Emma smiled, just a little, and for a moment, this kitchen felt like the only place in the world that mattered.
2
The rumble came while she was still holding the mug, the dregs of her second coffee gone cold. A low vibration through the kitchen floor, then the unmistakable clatter of turf tumbling off a trailer bed, that dense earthy percussion of hundreds of sods landing in a heap. Natalie didn’t need to look. Four summers of that sound had mapped it perfectly in her body. Michael Flaherty and his ancient Massey Ferguson, the trailer hitched with baling twine and faith, reversing up the side path to the shed and dropping the load the same way he’d done for Gran every July since before Natalie was born.
She set the mug in the sink and stretched her arms above her head, feeling the pleasant looseness of a body that had finally surrendered to this timezone. Three days it had taken. Three days of waking at four in the morning and drifting through the afternoons like something waterlogged. But the jet lag had broken yesterday, broken properly, and she’d slept until seven and woken to the sound of the kettle downstairs and the jackdaws arguing on the chimney pot and for the first time this trip her first thought hadn’t been about Los Angeles.
Her agent had called twice yesterday. Both times Natalie had stared at the screen, done the mental arithmetic of eight hours back, and answered with a clipped patience that she hoped communicated finality. There was nothing that needed her. Nothing that couldn’t wait until September. She’d said this clearly, using small words, and Marcia had made the sound she always made when she disagreed but knew better than to push. Hopefully that was the last of it. Hopefully the silence would hold now.
The back door opened and her grandmother came in carrying the empty peg bag, her movements careful but certain. One hand found the back of the kitchen chair as she passed it. Not leaning, just touching. A small negotiation with gravity that Natalie noticed and didn’t remark on.
“Michael is a gem.”
Natalie smiled. The warmth of it spread through her chest, the particular contentment of a thing arriving on schedule in a life that usually resisted predictability. Michael Flaherty would never see Gran without fuel for her fire. He’d been cutting and footing turf from Gran’s bog rights since Patrick died, probably before that, and he’d keep doing it until one of them was in the ground. That was how things worked here. Quietly. Without invoice or negotiation.
“I’m sure he’s glad he doesn’t have to stack it anymore.”
“That’s for sure.” Gran lowered herself into her chair by the window, the peg bag folded neatly on the table. Her hands, soil-stained from the rose beds this morning, settled on her lap. Those impossible hands. “You know I appreciate you too.”
“And Emma. I’ve never had to do the job alone.”
Gran’s mouth curved into something knowing. The kind of smile that lived in the muscles around her eyes more than her lips. “Speak of the devil.”
The back door was still open, the July air moving through the kitchen in a warm draught that carried the smell of fresh-cut grass and the darker mineral scent of the turf pile. Emma appeared in the doorway, backlit for a moment before she stepped inside. Hair pulled up in a ponytail, practical and out of the way. A black tank top and jeans that were clearly designated work clothes, faded at the knees, a small tear near the back pocket. Her arms were bare and already lightly freckled from whatever sun she’d caught in the days since Natalie had arrived. She looked like someone who had come to do a job. Like someone who had done this exact job enough times that she didn’t think about it anymore.
“Michael would never let you down, would he?”
The greeting landed in the kitchen with the ease of someone walking into her own house. Not quite that. But close. The familiarity of a person who knew which floorboard creaked, who didn’t need to be told where the glasses lived.
Natalie felt something settle in her sternum. A rightness. The coffee and the cottage and her grandmother in the chair and Emma in the doorway and the heap of turf waiting outside and nowhere, absolutely nowhere she needed to be except here. Two months of this stretched ahead of her, wide and unhurried as the bog in the distance. No scripts to learn. No calls to return. No version of herself to perform. Just this kitchen, these people, this work.
Emma leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms, her gaze sweeping over Natalie with the frank appraisal of someone sizing up a coworker.
“You’re not going to make me do that by myself, are you?”
Natalie was already pulling her hair back, twisting it into the kind of knot that would hold for exactly twenty minutes before gravity won. “When have I ever?”
“Just checking. You’ve gone soft on me. All that California sunshine.”
“I stacked the entire back wall last year while you were on a water break.”
“Hydration is important, Natalie.”
From her chair by the window, Gran spoke without looking up from the crossword she’d produced from somewhere. “Don’t either of you put your backs out. I’m not driving anyone to Galway.”
