Page 46 of The Irish Goodbye

“What? No,” Niall said defensively.

“You said the word vanquish. You said Aragorn, son of Arathorn. Oh my god, Niall, I did not have you pegged for a fantasy nerd!”

“Lots of people like those books,” he protested. She was beaming at him.

“This is amazing,” she said. “I’m not making fun, I swear. I just never would have guessed.”

Niall shoved his hands in his pockets and gazed out at the water. “Being up here by myself, I felt I could be anyone or anywhere. I could be in King Arthur’s court or Middle Earth. When you grow up in such a small place, everybody knowing everybody, everyone in each other’s business … it was my own little escape, I s’pose. To feel part of something bigger. To imagine I could go on a grand adventure.”

Cordelia’s smile faded and her expression turned thoughtful. “I love that,” she said. “Growing up in New York, you’re always part of something bigger. But it can feel like you might get swept away by it. Or left behind.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “I wish I’d had a place like this to come to. It’s healing.”

She opened her eyes. They were more green than brown today, he noticed.

“I was going to propose to Deirdre here.”

Shit. Why had he said that? Why had he brought fucking Deirdre into this moment? Cordelia’s eyebrows rose up her forehead.

“Oh.” She looked around awkwardly, then started tracing a pattern of lichen on the stones. “That must have been some proposal. Very romantic, I imagine.”

“It wasn’t,” he said quickly. “Because I didn’t. She didn’t like it here.”

“She didn’t like it?” Cordelia yelped. “But it’s so …” She struggled for the right word. “Timeless.”

“It’s also cold and windy,” Niall said. He remembered that day vividly. It was the first (and last) time he’d ever brought Deirdre home to Inishmore, and he did it so that he could propose to her here on this very cliff. He remembered the ring burning a hole in his pocket, remembered eagerly waiting for Deirdre to be struck by the untamed beauty of the cliffs so he could drop to one knee and surprise her. “I thought she’d love it like I do. But she just complained on end that her hair was getting wet and her legs were killing her from the walk, and it looked like Dún Aengus only colder anyway.”

“What?” Cordelia cried. “It’s nothing like Dún Aengus.”

He nodded. “I know. But that’s what she said. So I didn’t even try.” His throat constricted at the memory, the disappointment that had washed over him, the brave face he’d had to put on so she wouldn’t suspect anything. “I waited until we got back to Dublin and proposed in some posh restaurant she’d been wanting to go to.”

Cordelia’s lips pulled together in a frown and her nostrils flared. She looked like she was trying very hard not to start shouting. It made Niall’s chest ache in a tender sort of way.

“Guess it didn’t matter in the end, did it,” he said. The waves were smashing against the steep faces of rock, sending up huge sprays and churning bright blue in the coves. He loved that no matter how cloudy or rainy, the cliffs always had swirls of turquoise at their base.

“I didn’t want to come back home, you know,” he said quietly. “Me mam said Da needed help with the pub, but I’m pretty sure she was only worried about me, staying at a friend’s flat with no place of my own. I’m glad I came, though. I needed to get away. From Dublin, from all the streets and parks and pubs that reminded me of her. Everything there seemed to be stamped with Deirdre. Every alley haunted me with her face, every strain of music reminded me of her. Even places we’d never been to, it would be like, oh I could imagine takin’ her there. Sorry,” he said, flushing. “You don’t need to hear about this.”

“No, it’s okay. I was kind of feeling the same way.” Cordelia moved to sit on an outcrop of stone. “In New York, everything reminded me of my father. I felt so stuck. I would walk the streets of the city, sometimes for an entire day, trying to find a place where I wouldn’t be reminded of him.” She cocked her head. “But now I wonder if I should have been doing the opposite. Searching out the places he used to love, the spots in the city where he would linger the most in my mind. Maybe I can do that when I go back. I think I’ve been so afraid to let go of him, but also afraid to really face that he’s gone. Being here, it’s like I have the space to process it all. He can be distant and close at the same time. There’s no pain in the memories.” She patted the rock. “He would have loved this spot, I’m sure of it. Very evocative. Very Shakespearean.”

“It is that,” Niall said. He sat beside her and for a while they listened to the waves and watched the clouds swirl across the sky. Niall felt as if the world had shrunk to this one cliff and they were the only two people left on it. He shot Cordelia a surreptitious glance to see if he could read her face and wondered how he had ever thought her merely pretty. Her hair was like honey flowing over her shoulders, her high cheekbones tinged with the palest pink, her full lips pressed together in a line. Her eyes were ever so slightly narrowed and she was turning her head a fraction of an inch one way. She shifted her weight infinitesimally to the left, then lifted her camera to her eye.