Natalie stood in the dark between the two gates, the warmth from Emma’s touch still ghosting across her forearm. Her flight to Los Angeles left in six weeks. Not home—Los Angeles. The distinction hit her like cold water. She had never thought of it that way before, had never let herself make that separation. Los Angeles was where she lived, where she worked, where her life was built with careful precision. But home. Home was something else entirely.
The word settled somewhere deep. Home was being here with Gran, the kettle boiling, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. It was the woods behind the garden and the sounds of the river and the birds. It was how easy her life was here.
Her throat tightened as she realized how fast this trip was already going. She just had to enjoy every day she had here.
She turned toward Gran’s cottage, toward the yellow light still glowing in the kitchen window, and went inside.
4
Natalie’s boots sunk into the damp earth as she traced the familiar path through Ashford’s emerald wilderness, a world away from her sun-baked Californian roots. The air was a symphony of rushing water, whispering leaves, and the distant hum of midges, punctuated by the occasional cawing crow. Above her, ancient redwoods stood like sentinels, a living testament to the Guinness family’s time here from more than a century ago. The canopy filtered the afternoon into long shafts of gold that fell at angles through the oak and ash, catching the midges that drifted in slow clouds where the air was still. Natalie watched one shaft move across the path ahead as a breeze shifted the branches above, the light sliding over the ground like something alive and searching.
She was noticing everything. The particular green of this place, so saturated it seemed to hum, a green that didn’t exist in California or on any screen she’d ever stood in front of. The sound of the river somewhere below them and to the left, running fast after the wet August.
Tomorrow she would drive to Shannon. This summer had gone faster than any of the others.
Emma walked beside her in shorts and a faded grey tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the fine hairs at her nape dark with sweat. The path narrowed around a fallen branch, and their bare arms brushed. Skin against skin, brief and warm.
They didn’t speak. The woods had always been the place where silence felt natural between them. Twenty minutes could pass without a word and it never felt wrong. But today something was different. Something heavier sat between them, unspoken—the knowledge that this walk was their last, that this summer, like the four before it, was ending.
The lake came to mind. Three weeks ago on the flat rock, sun drying her wet arms while Emma pulled herself out beside her, laughing at something Natalie had said. Water streamed from Emma’s hair and shoulders. The laugh was unselfconscious and full—someone who felt amusement without performing it.
The bonfire in Emma’s back garden in late July. Woodsmoke lingering in her hair the next morning. The wine going warm in their glasses while they talked about films Emma wanted to see and Natalie about actresses she’d love to work with in the future. Stars appeared as the sky darkened from blue to black.
The turf shed. The snug at O’Shea’s. The morning she’d found Emma already in Bridget’s kitchen at half seven, the two of them chatting away like old friends.
Two months of this. Two months of being the version of herself that only existed here—the one who wore old shorts without makeup and got caught in the rain on the boreen. The one who could sit in a pub for three hours without anyone asking for a photo, without the watching that happened in West Hollywood restaurants, that particular lean of recognition. A few walkers on this path had given her second glances, the faint double-take she’d learned to notice and ignore, but here it meant nothing. Here she was Bridget’s granddaughter. Here she wasjust Natalie, walking in the woods with Emma on a Tuesday afternoon in September.
Tomorrow she’d be back to her LA life. The table read for the Klein project in October, the script she still hadn’t finished because every time she opened it at the kitchen table, Bridget would set down tea and the afternoon would slip away. The career she’d built across two decades. As much as she loved being here every summer, she knew that she had to go back to LA. There was too much there waiting for her.
Emma’s arm brushed hers again at a narrow turn. The warmth of it lingered two steps past the contact.
“I don’t know if we’re going to get back before the rain starts,” Emma said.
Natalie looked up. The light had changed and there was a mugginess in the air. The gold was gone from the shafts between the branches, replaced by something flat and grey and pressing, as if someone had drawn a cloth across the sky. A few seconds later, she felt it, the drop in pressure, the way the air went heavy and still.
Then the sound. Not rain yet. The canopy receiving it first, a rush overhead like a held breath releasing, thousands of leaves catching water at once.
The first drops found the gaps.
They looked at each other at the same moment. Through the lattice of branches above them the sky was the colour of wet slate.
Then it opened and the rain fell slowly at first, and then all of a sudden it was a heavy shower.
They ran. Not seriously at first, a jog, both of them laughing at the absurdity of it, the instantaneous drenching, the sky going from heavy to biblical in the space of ten seconds.
The rain came through the canopy in sheets. Natalie’s tank top stuck to her skin and the path turned to mud, each stepsliding on the wet earth. Emma moved ahead, faster, her stride sure. Natalie followed.
They sprinted the last stretch. The ground dipped, the trees thinned, and the archway appeared—an old limestone tunnel, its entrance dark and moss-covered, half-hidden by ferns. Emma reached it first and ducked inside. Natalie was three steps behind, stumbling in from the rain. For a moment neither of them could do anything but breathe.
The rain hammered outside. Inside the stone walls, the sound was muffled to a steady drum.
They stood in the archway.
The tunnel was narrow—six feet high, maybe less, four feet wide. Moss grew thick on the limestone walls. The air smelled of cold stone and earth.
They stood facing each other. There wasn’t room for anything else. Both breathing hard from the run, soaked through. Emma’s hair had come loose and stuck to her neck. Her tank top clung to her shoulders and ribs. Her cheeks were flushed.
Natalie knew she looked the same. There was no way to hide it. Just wet and wrecked and exactly as she was.
