Chapter 21
Skye
The silence that followed Brigid's revelation lasted long enough for the sounds of The Blackthorn to begin creeping back into the space around us.
Somewhere near the bar, glasses touched as someone cleared a table, a burst of laughter rose from the front of the pub before fading again, and the fire gave a soft crack as another piece of wood shifted beneath the grate.
None of those ordinary sounds seemed to reach Irish.
He sat beside me with one hand wrapped around his tea and the other resting against his thigh, his shoulders held so still that I could almost see the effort it took to keep from reacting.
I had watched him walk into monitored buildings, evade surveillance teams, face armed men beneath Croft House, and turn away from Dr. Helena Croft when chasing her would have meant abandoning someone who needed him more.
Very little seemed capable of knocking Callum O'Brien off balance.
One name had done it more effectively than a bullet passing inches from his shoulder.
Brigid looked between us, some of the color draining from her expression as she realized I hadn't known. "I thought—"
"Leave it," Irish said.
There was no anger in his voice, which somehow made the warning sharper.
Brigid's mouth tightened. She had known him too long to be intimidated by the man everyone else called Irish, but she also knew him well enough to recognize where the line sat. "All right."
I kept my promise and said nothing, which seemed to surprise both Irish and Brigid after everything that had already passed between us.
Irish glanced toward me once, quickly enough that anyone else might have missed it, but I had spent days learning the language of his silences and knew exactly what the look contained.
He was waiting for questions. Maybe even braced for them.
I could have asked why he had introduced himself as Callum when his first name was Rory, why Toxic knew and nobody else seemed to, or why hearing Brigid say the name aloud had stripped more color from his face than returning to the farmhouse had.
The questions lined up inside my head with irritating efficiency, but wanting answers did not entitle me to them.
He had already told me there were parts of Ireland he wasn't ready to explain, and I had promised myself I would stop treating every closed door as an invitation to force the lock.
Brigid apparently had fewer reservations about silence.
"Well," she said after another moment, settling back into her chair. "Now that I've managed to put my foot through something that clearly wasn't mine to open, somebody ought to eat before the stew turns cold."
Irish stared at her.
She stared back.
Then she pointed toward his bowl. "Eat."
A faint shift moved through his expression, equal parts irritation and resignation, before he picked up his spoon.
I hid my smile by taking another bite of my own meal and discovered it had cooled only slightly, still rich enough with beef, root vegetables, herbs, and whatever Brigid had done to the broth to make every supermarket version of stew I'd ever eaten feel insulting by comparison.
Brigid noticed my reaction and looked pleased. "See? At least the Scottish one appreciates proper food."
"The Scottish one has a name," Irish said.
"I know. Skye."
"You've known her twenty minutes."
"Long enough."
I glanced between them. "Should I be worried that we're already forming alliances?"
"You should be worried she cheats at cards," Irish said.
Brigid gasped. "That is slander."
"You marked the deck."
"Once."
"Four times."
"You were seventeen and unbearable. It was educational."
I looked at Irish. "You played cards with her at seventeen?"
"He and Eamon thought they were men because they'd discovered whiskey and poker in the same month," Brigid said before he could answer. "They were dreadful at both."
Irish closed his eyes briefly. "This is exactly why I didn't come here first."
"Because somebody remembers you before you became intimidating?"
The name Rory appeared in my mind before I could stop it, and something about even thinking it felt strangely intimate now that I understood he had deliberately placed Callum between that boy and the man sitting beside me.
I didn't know what the name represented yet, but I understood enough to see that Brigid wasn't looking at the biker who had crossed an ocean hunting an international religious organization.
She was looking at the young man who had probably sat in this same room years before, too loud, too stubborn, and convinced he understood more of the world than he actually did.
Brigid pointed her spoon toward him. "He wasn't intimidating then."
"That's difficult to imagine."
"He tried."
"I was perfectly intimidating."
"You were skinny."
"I wasn't skinny."
"You were all elbows and temper until about nineteen."
I laughed before I could stop myself.
Irish looked at me with betrayal written plainly across his face. "You don't have to encourage her."
"I'm learning valuable historical information."
"You're enjoying this."
"Immensely."
Brigid leaned closer to me. "Would you like to hear about the sheep?"
Irish's spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. "No."
"I wasn't asking you."
"What sheep?" I asked.
He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like a prayer for patience.
Brigid's smile widened. "There was a field behind the old Kelly place with a stone wall high enough that any sensible person would've gone around it. Naturally, these three idiots decided the fastest route home was straight through the field."
"Three?" I asked.
"Rory, Eamon, and Finn."
The name Finn changed Irish instantly. His amusement didn't disappear, but it softened around something older.
Brigid saw it too and gentled the story without making the change obvious.
"Finn was younger and desperate to do anything his brother did, which meant the poor child spent half his life running behind boys whose legs were twice as long as his.
They climbed the wall, landed in the field, and discovered that old Mr. Kelly had moved a ram in with the flock. "
I was already smiling. "Oh no."
"Oh yes. Eamon made it over the opposite wall first. Your man here was right behind him until he realized Finn hadn't made it."
I looked toward Irish.
He was staring into his tea now.
Brigid continued, her voice quieter. "So he went back."
The humor stayed in the story, but something warmer had slipped beneath it.
"What happened?"
"He grabbed Finn and tried to outrun the ram while carrying him. Didn't work particularly well. The two of them ended up in a ditch, Finn laughing so hard he could barely breathe while Rory threatened to leave him there if he told anyone."
Irish looked up. "And somehow you knew before we got home."
"Finn told me."
"Of course he did."
"He told everyone."
I laughed. "I like Finn already."
Something passed through Irish's face so quickly that the laughter caught in my throat. There it was again, the collision between love and grief that seemed to live beneath every memory he carried from this place.
"You would've," he said.
The answer was simple, but it told me more about Finn than any explanation could have.
Brigid watched him for another moment before turning toward me. "Finn worshipped him."
"Brigid."
"I'm not embarrassing you."
"You're trying."
"I don't have to try."
She looked back at me. "Maeve was the sensible one."
Irish snorted softly. "Maeve liked people thinking she was sensible."
"She was a schoolteacher. It came with the territory."
"She once put frogs in Father Donnelly's desk."
Brigid's mouth dropped open. "That was her?"
Irish's expression changed into something so close to the man I'd seen laughing with Raze and Storm that my chest tightened. "You blamed me for ten years."
"Because you took the blame!"
"She bribed me."
"With what?"
"Her motorbike for a week."
Brigid stared at him for two full seconds before bursting into laughter.
I joined her, and even Irish eventually shook his head with a quiet laugh of his own.
The sound drew glances from two people near the bar, both older men who had been pretending not to watch us since we arrived.
One smiled when Irish laughed, and I realized that everyone in this room probably carried a different piece of him.
Not Irish. Not even Callum. The young man who had grown up here had existed in dozens of ordinary memories that continued whether he returned or not.
Brigid wiped beneath one eye. "Your poor mother never knew."
"She knew."
"Siobhan knew?"
"Mam knew everything."
Brigid's smile softened. "That she did."
The warmth surrounding his mother's name changed the table again, though this time Irish didn't retreat from it.
He stared toward the fire as Brigid told me about Siobhan O'Brien bringing enough food to every village fundraiser to feed twice the expected crowd, arguing with anyone who tried to help clean her kitchen, and once walking nearly two miles in a storm because Finn had forgotten his schoolbag and she refused to let bad weather excuse laziness.
Irish corrected details whenever Brigid exaggerated, which was often, and each correction revealed another tiny piece of a family I had previously known only through the shadow their absence cast over him.
Declan appeared more carefully in the conversation.
Brigid described him as stubborn, intelligent, impossible to rush, and incapable of walking past an old building without wondering who had put the stone together and whether they'd done it properly. That caught my attention immediately.
"So that's where it came from," I said.
Irish glanced toward me. "What?"
"Your tolerance for me talking about buildings."
"I wouldn't call it tolerance."
Brigid smiled. "Declan loved old places. Churches, estates, farmhouses. He always said buildings remembered what people forgot."
The sentence settled over me differently after everything we had uncovered.
Irish heard it too.