“Right.” Trish straightened, businesslike again. “Will I pull two more?”
Emma hesitated, her fingers tapping lightly against the empty glass. “Let me just check with Natalie first. She might want to switch to something else.”
She slid off the bar stool and walked around the partition into the snug.
But it was empty.
Natalie’s glass from the last round sat on the table, the cream lacing the inside where the Guinness had been.
She looked back through the gap toward the bar. Scanned the room. There was no sign of her.
The door to the ladies’ was down the short corridor past the bar. Emma walked to it and pushed it open. Two empty stalls, both doors ajar.
She came back to the bar. Trish was pulling a pint for Séamus’s wife.
“Trish. Did you see Natalie leave?”
Trish frowned, the pint glass held at an angle under the tap. Her eyes went to the door, then back. “No. I was facing you the whole time. I’d have seen her come back through. She must have gone out the side.” The side door that opened onto the narrow lane behind the pub, the one the smokers used. “Maybe she stepped out for air?”
Emma was already moving.
12
The lane was dark, the only light coming from the occasional farmhouse window and the pale wash of the moon between clouds. Natalie walked fast, her boots scuffing against the gravel, the sound sharp in the quiet. She didn’t want to think about what she’d just seen—Trish’s hand on Emma’s, the way Emma had leaned in, the quiet intimacy of their conversation. It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
But it did.
The last week had been a strange, suspended thing. Grief had come in waves, yes—opening a drawer to find Bridget’s handwriting on a scrap of paper, catching the scent of her rose soap in the bathroom—but there had been laughter too. Long evenings in Emma’s back garden, the fire pit casting flickering light over their faces, wine glasses catching the glow. Emma’s smile, the way it still did something reckless to Natalie’s stomach.
She had no right to care. Not after the way she’d left things five years ago, not after the careful distance she’d maintained this past week, treating Emma like a neighbour instead of the woman who’d kissed her senseless in the woods.
The memory came without warning—Emma’s mouth on hers under the archway—like it always did. Emma’s lips finding hers again and again.
Her grandmother’s house was just ahead, its windows dark. She slowed, fingers curling into her palms. She didn’t even want to count how many times she’d revisited that kiss in her mind—the weight of Emma’s body against hers, the way her lips had felt. But then reality always crashed in. The role she was playing now, the press tours, the awards season looming. She wasn’t out. She didn’t know if she could be. The thought of facing the world like that—exposed, raw—made her throat tighten.
A voice cut through the dark.
“Natalie.”
Natalie kept walking.
“Natalie,wait.”
Natalie stopped and turned to face Emma in the moonlight.
“Hey. Is everything okay?” Emma asked.
“I’m fine. Just tired. You didn’t have to leave.”
“You left without saying anything.”
“You were talking to Trish. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
The words came out smoother than she felt. Emma was studying her face, and her gaze lingered until the quiet between them thickened like summer air before a storm. Natalie forced herself to hold still under it, to keep her expression pleasant and neutral.
“We were just talking about?—“
“You don’t owe me an explanation.” Natalie’s smile felt brittle at the edges. “Trish seems nice. Why wouldn’t you be interested in her?”
