Chapter 11
Eleven
Fin spent the day doing yard work. The lawn needed mowing and the back hedge was getting a little unruly.
Between all the male Murphy cousins in Ballyshannon, his mother had never had to do these jobs herself.
She took care of the smaller stuff, keeping her garden neat and ordered as she always had, but Fin was exceptionally grateful that the Murphy clan had stepped up in his father’s absence.
When he was finally done, he’d gone inside to find Sweeney on the phone again, talking with Veronica, keeping abreast of the situation.
From what he could make out, they didn’t want to reassign her just yet with the situation in such flux, but they hoped to know in the next day or so.
Even though she’d seemed cool with the delays last night, Fin could tell she was antsy about her schedule being upended.
A lot of people he knew would happily take a few unexpected days of R&R, but Sweeney was on the phone pressing her boss for another job.
If they’d been together for real, he’d be wondering about her motives for wanting to leave when given the opportunity to chill for a bit.
But he guessed it was because of their situation that she wasn’t too keen to hang around.
Leaving her to it, he had a shower then fixed some lunch for them both. Sitting to eat at the dining table, he scrolled to his Instagram account to confront the many requests he’d had via his Instagram for new followers—most of them women.
Fin had found Sweeney’s assertion—that it was him, not the photo, that was going off—ridiculous.
And those DMs she’d read out calling him fine and asking about his availability were some kind of aberration.
But the number of friend requests was staggering.
In the hundreds. Considering he usually got about a dozen a year, it was a lot.
‘How have all these people even found me?’ he bitched to Sweeney as he waded through the list, denying them all. His Instagram was set to private, so any new followers had to request access—which, considering this onslaught, was just as well.
Sweeney laughed as she sat opposite. ‘Women with a hot man in their sights can be very good at internet sleuthing.’
‘But my grid is supremely uninteresting. I mainly have it so Mum and the rest of the Murphy clan and my friends can see what I’m up to and keep in touch that way.’
Most of it chronicled his daily and rather mundane life in Dublin. Pubs, public transport views, weekend road trips, footy. No one was going to turn his life into a movie.
Poets were not going to write odes to his existence.
‘They’re not interested in your grid,’ Sweeney said, wiggling her eyebrows.
This whole thing seemed way too amusing for her and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. She was used to her posts going viral, but this was his life and he didn’t want to become an internet sensation or, god forbid, a meme.
And couldn’t Sweeney at least be fake annoyed that hundreds of women suddenly wanted to friend her fake fiancé? Which was such a weird thought he didn’t even want to give it space in his head.
Thankfully his mother chose that moment to call, ‘Yoohoo,’ as the screech of the front screen door being opened echoed down the hallway. Fin was glad for the distraction, even if she was half the reason he was having really fucked-up thoughts about his oldest friend in the world.
In they wandered, the two of them, looking cool as cucumbers as they smiled at their offspring. ‘We’re just out for a bit,’ Connie announced after the perfunctory hellos and what have you been up to’s. ‘Thought we’d go to the bakery for an afternoon pastry.’
‘They have such great coffee there since Maeve brought in that barista from Footscray,’ Ronnie added.
‘Thought you might like to join us.’ Connie smiled. ‘Our shout.’
Fin glanced at Sweeney, who raised an eyebrow at him.
‘I hear they do wedding cakes,’ he said as he returned his attention to the mothers.
They traded a guilty look and he narrowed his eyes.
‘Mum.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re supposed to be helping keep this contained and you’re going to a cake tasting? ’
‘It’s Marjorie’s fault,’ Connie jumped in, defending her bestie.
‘She did one for her daughter’s wedding last year and said it was the thing to do.
She arranged it as a surprise for us. And with Sweeney supposed to be gone, there didn’t seem to be any harm.
We could hardly say no. She’s suspicious enough. ’
‘Yes, Mum, you could have.’ It was Sweeney’s turn to shake her head. ‘No thanks, Marjorie. See? Easy. Or, if you wanted to be a bit vague, Let’s make it for another time, Marjorie, when we have an official date.’
Connie and Ronnie appeared suitably chastened. For a moment, anyway.
‘I know.’ Connie sighed as her gaze swept between Sweeney and Fin. ‘It’s just … it’ll probably be our only ever chance to do something like this. Maeve really does do excellent cakes. They’ve won ribbons for the last five years at the Royal Melbourne Show.’
‘And she serves champagne with the tasting,’ Rhonda added. ‘Not prosecco. The proper French stuff.’
‘Mum, you own a bar,’ Fin said, exasperated. ‘If you want French champagne, you can just get it in.’
‘Well.’ Rhonda huffed out a breath. ‘We can’t back out now—Marjorie paid for it and Maeve is expecting us.’
‘Fine. You guys go do what you gotta do. But you’re not dragging us into this.’
The mothers looked at them with a veritable gamut of emotions flashing across their faces, from frustration to exasperation to pleading.
‘It’ll be strange if we go without at least one of you,’ Connie said, her gaze morphing from pleading to begging as she fixed it firmly on her daughter. ‘What will Marjorie think?’
Several long beats of silence passed between mother and daughter, and Fin thought Sweeney was going to cave.
There seemed to be a lot of unspoken something going down between them in this loaded moment that Fin didn’t really understand.
Then, suddenly, Sweeney folded her arms and said, ‘Who cares what Marjorie bloody Weaver thinks?’
‘Seriously, you two.’ Rhonda’s eyebrows drew together in a cranky frown as she shoved her hand on her hip. Fin half expected her to stamp her foot. ‘You do know all the Murphys are gossiping about your lack of presence around town on the WhatsApp group.’
No, he did not. Fin had thankfully not accepted the invitation to the family chat.
As if to demonstrate her point, his mother produced her phone, her thumbs sliding across the screen.
Fin shuddered thinking about what was coming next.
Clearly finding what she wanted, Connie started to read.
‘Anyone seen Feeney about? And another one. Who’s spotted the happy couple?
Oh, and this one. Fin and Sweeney are engaged, right, we didn’t all have a collective fever dream? ’
‘Well, somebody had a fever dream,’ Fin muttered, staring at them mutinously.
‘Darlings,’ Rhonda said on a sigh that sounded as if it had been drawn from the very dregs of her patience. ‘You’ve been here for a week and, apart from that one time at the lake and the footy grounds, no one’s seen you anywhere.’
‘Mum.’ Fin was also running out of patience. ‘We haven’t been anywhere else.’
‘Why does the family even give a shit?’ Sweeney demanded, looking between the two matriarchs. ‘I mean, seriously, neither of us live here anymore.’
‘Because that’s what families do,’ Ronnie asserted. ‘They give a shit. This one does, anyway. And it doesn’t matter whether you live here or not, are blood or not.’
‘Also,’ Connie added, ‘it’s a very small town and you two are the fairy tale.
’ She spoke calmly and slowly, as though she was explaining the Dewey Decimal System to a toddler.
‘You’re two small-town kids, best friends since birth, who left town to make it big, and who have suddenly realised they’ve been in love with each other all along. ’
Fin blinked. Great … he and Sweeney were fucking romance novel tropes. ‘But—’ He stared at them both pointedly. ‘None of that is true.’
‘They don’t know that, though, do they? And you two skulking around indoors is only feeding the speculation.
Which is why you have to be seen out and about a bit,’ Connie insisted.
‘Like how the royals release pictures of their progeny and significant life moments to slake the paparazzi and public thirst so they can have some semblance of a private life. Normalise Feeney, then everyone will quickly forget about it.’
‘Don’t you think,’ Fin asked, ‘you might be slightly overstating things?’
Ignoring the question, his mother gave him a reproving look. ‘They keep asking us where you are.’
Fin almost laughed out loud at her affront. ‘Oh, I’m sorry that your lie is inconveniencing you.’
‘Fin.’ There was that you’re not too old to spank tone again.
‘Tell them we’re making you a grandbaby,’ he said drily.
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Don’t even joke about that, young man.’
Okay … that was her you’re not too old to spank tone.
‘We’re just saying it’s weird, is all,’ Connie clarified calmly.
Sweeney cocked an eyebrow. ‘Weirder than the fake engagement you foisted upon us?’
‘We really are sorry,’ Connie apologised again. Beside her, Rhonda nodded vigorously. ‘But now we’re stuck with the situation and all we’re saying is, would it kill you to get out a little while Sweeney’s still here?’
Fin shook his head. ‘If the family want to gaze upon all our Feeney wonder, they can find us at the footy club every afternoon at four, although if Sweeney gets her work sorted then I suppose it’ll just be me.’
The thought gave Fin pause. Aside from the weirdness and stress of being forced into this situation by their mothers, it had been fun hanging with Sweeney again. He really hoped it wasn’t so long in between drinks for them after this.