Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
Eamonn leaned back in his seat, his gaze searching my face. “You said—” But then he stopped, seeming to think about what I’d said, maybe running through our past conversations in his head the way I had. “I don’t understand. Then why are you here?”
The question was so unexpected, it landed like a punch to my gut. All I could do was repeat it, both to stall for time and because I genuinely didn’t know how he meant it. “Why I’m here?”
“I know you said you have your folklore research,” Eamonn said.
“And you’re traveling in general. Ireland is a beautiful country.
I get why anyone would want to come here.
But I figured you being with my brother, you being outside my garage…
At first I thought he’d sent you with some kind of, I don’t know, not a peace offering.
That doesn’t seem like him. Some sort of reconnaissance mission.
Or I thought maybe you came on your own, wanting to know more about his family. ”
“It’s just a coincidence.”
He huffed a laugh, like that was funny to him for some reason I couldn’t tell. “This whole time.”
Something in my stomach swooped, then sank all the way down.
It hadn’t occurred to me that one of the reasons Eamonn might’ve been helping me out, showing me around, was because he thought I had more of a connection to his brother than I did.
And even from this brief time we’d spent together, I knew that his relationship to Niall was important to him, despite it not being very good.
Maybe because it wasn’t very good—I could tell that Eamonn had a lot of baggage around his distance from his siblings.
“There’s no chance of me being your sister-in-law,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Right.” Eamonn’s voice was steady, his expression unreadable. It was impossible to know if he was angry or confused or disappointed or something else entirely. He didn’t even seem to be talking to me—it was more like he’d directed the word at himself, like he was grappling with something within.
He lifted his napkin to wipe his mouth, leaving the square of cloth on the table next to his empty plate. “I’m going to hit the jacks,” he said, and then got up and left.
His relative lack of reaction was more concerning to me than anything else.
The whole day suddenly swirled in my vision in one sickening kaleidoscope of images.
First meeting Eamonn at his shop, where he’d directed me to the bus.
Him throwing his sandwich at me, then offering to drive me to the embassy.
Him making that truly terrible pun when I was in the middle of freaking out, and then him taking me to lunch and showing me around the city, talking about James Joyce and god and his sisters.
I felt like a scam artist. Not that I’d done it on purpose—I was still stuck in a foreign country, with no money or passport or idea of how I got there or how to leave—but the end result was the same.
Instead of figuring my own shit out, I’d involved him at every turn. And either this was all real—in which case, he had his own life, and certainly didn’t need me to complicate it—or it wasn’t, and none of this mattered.
I slid down from my chair, hesitating only a minute over his jacket.
I really wanted to take it, both because I knew it would be cold out there and because I just wanted to have it.
His own discarded sweater had fallen off his chair in his haste to leave, and I picked it up, placing it on his seat without letting myself linger on how soft it was under my fingertips.
In the end, I left the jacket behind.