Chapter 2
The rumble came while she was still holding the mug, the dregs of her second coffee gone cold.
A low vibration through the kitchen floor, then the unmistakable clatter of turf tumbling off a trailer bed, that dense earthy percussion of hundreds of sods landing in a heap.
Natalie didn’t need to look. Four summers of that sound had mapped it perfectly in her body.
Michael Flaherty and his ancient Massey Ferguson, the trailer hitched with baling twine and faith, reversing up the side path to the shed and dropping the load the same way he’d done for Gran every July since before Natalie was born.
She set the mug in the sink and stretched her arms above her head, feeling the pleasant looseness of a body that had finally surrendered to this timezone.
Three days it had taken. Three days of waking at four in the morning and drifting through the afternoons like something waterlogged.
But the jet lag had broken yesterday, broken properly, and she’d slept until seven and woken to the sound of the kettle downstairs and the jackdaws arguing on the chimney pot and for the first time this trip her first thought hadn’t been about Los Angeles.
Her agent had called twice yesterday. Both times Natalie had stared at the screen, done the mental arithmetic of eight hours back, and answered with a clipped patience that she hoped communicated finality.
There was nothing that needed her. Nothing that couldn’t wait until September.
She’d said this clearly, using small words, and Marcia had made the sound she always made when she disagreed but knew better than to push.
Hopefully that was the last of it. Hopefully the silence would hold now.
The back door opened and her grandmother came in carrying the empty peg bag, her movements careful but certain. One hand found the back of the kitchen chair as she passed it. Not leaning, just touching. A small negotiation with gravity that Natalie noticed and didn’t remark on.
“Michael is a gem.”
Natalie smiled. The warmth of it spread through her chest, the particular contentment of a thing arriving on schedule in a life that usually resisted predictability.
Michael Flaherty would never see Gran without fuel for her fire.
He’d been cutting and footing turf from Gran’s bog rights since Patrick died, probably before that, and he’d keep doing it until one of them was in the ground.
That was how things worked here. Quietly. Without invoice or negotiation.
“I’m sure he’s glad he doesn’t have to stack it anymore.”
“That’s for sure.” Gran lowered herself into her chair by the window, the peg bag folded neatly on the table. Her hands, soil-stained from the rose beds this morning, settled on her lap. Those impossible hands. “You know I appreciate you too.”
“And Emma. I’ve never had to do the job alone.”
Gran’s mouth curved into something knowing. The kind of smile that lived in the muscles around her eyes more than her lips. “Speak of the devil.”
The back door was still open, the July air moving through the kitchen in a warm draught that carried the smell of fresh-cut grass and the darker mineral scent of the turf pile.
Emma appeared in the doorway, backlit for a moment before she stepped inside.
Hair pulled up in a ponytail, practical and out of the way.
A black tank top and jeans that were clearly designated work clothes, faded at the knees, a small tear near the back pocket.
Her arms were bare and already lightly freckled from whatever sun she’d caught in the days since Natalie had arrived.
She looked like someone who had come to do a job.
Like someone who had done this exact job enough times that she didn’t think about it anymore.
“Michael would never let you down, would he?”
The greeting landed in the kitchen with the ease of someone walking into her own house. Not quite that. But close. The familiarity of a person who knew which floorboard creaked, who didn’t need to be told where the glasses lived.
Natalie felt something settle in her sternum.
A rightness. The coffee and the cottage and her grandmother in the chair and Emma in the doorway and the heap of turf waiting outside and nowhere, absolutely nowhere she needed to be except here.
Two months of this stretched ahead of her, wide and unhurried as the bog in the distance.
No scripts to learn. No calls to return.
No version of herself to perform. Just this kitchen, these people, this work.
Emma leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms, her gaze sweeping over Natalie with the frank appraisal of someone sizing up a coworker.
“You’re not going to make me do that by myself, are you?”
Natalie was already pulling her hair back, twisting it into the kind of knot that would hold for exactly twenty minutes before gravity won. “When have I ever?”
“Just checking. You’ve gone soft on me. All that California sunshine.”
“I stacked the entire back wall last year while you were on a water break.”
“Hydration is important, Natalie.”
From her chair by the window, Gran spoke without looking up from the crossword she’d produced from somewhere. “Don’t either of you put your backs out. I’m not driving anyone to Galway.”
Neither of them answered. They were already moving.
Natalie found her boots by the door, the ones that only existed in Kilvolan.
She braced a hand against the wall, forcing her foot into the stiff, damp-smelling leather.
They’d never see a studio lot; they belonged here, with the rain jacket and the wool jumper, and every July she stepped back into them, back into a version of herself she’d left behind.
Outside, the heap was substantial. The sods were piled against the shed in a dark, irregular mound, each one roughly the size of a brick but lighter, fibrous, the compressed memory of ten thousand years of bog.
The smell hit her immediately. Not unpleasant.
Rich, peaty, ancient. Like the earth itself had been opened and its breath released.
Under the July sun the heap radiated a warmth that was different from the air around it, a slow interior heat that belonged to a deeper season.
Emma had already gone to the side of the shed and come back wheeling the barrow, its tire half-flat the way it always was.
She parked it beside the heap and looked at Natalie and something passed between them that wasn’t a word.
A calibration. The quick, unconscious agreement of two people who had figured out the choreography years ago and didn’t need to rehearse.
Natalie went straight to the heap. Emma was already wheeling the barrow into position, its half-flat tyre groaning on the gravel.
They didn’t need to discuss it. The first year they’d tried it the other way around, but Emma’s lines were straighter and Natalie was faster at building the load.
The switch happened without a word and settled into muscle memory.
She grabbed the first two sods, their coarse texture rough against her palms. The satisfaction of it was immediate. Her shoulders engaged, her lower back found the work, and the sun pressed against the nape of her neck.
In Los Angeles she paid someone to clean her house, to tend the strip of native garden along the driveway, to maintain the pool she swam in three times a week for the precise purpose of maintaining the body that her career required.
Here, there was no intermediary between her and the task.
Just her hands and the turf and the accumulating blackness in the creases of her knuckles and the sound of Emma’s barrow wheels crunching over the gravel path.
Emma returned empty and Natalie loaded again. The barrow went. Came back. Went again. They fell into the tempo of it without speaking, the grunt and thud and creak of the wheel forming its own low music against the backdrop of the garden and the fields beyond.
Inside the shed, the stacking was close work.
When Emma was in there arranging the sods against the back wall and Natalie was passing armfuls through the doorway, they occupied the same narrow strip of shadow and their elbows found proximity that the rest of Natalie’s life would have called intimate.
Here it was just logistics. The shed was six feet wide and they were two grown women and the turf had to go somewhere.
Emma’s shoulder brushed hers as she turned to take the next load.
Neither of them flinched or adjusted. The space between them was just space, the contact just a consequence of the work.
But Natalie was aware of the charge in it, the same way she was aware of the shed’s low ceiling—a physical fact she had to accommodate without examining.
When Emma reached past her, their forearms aligned for a half-second, the fine hairs on Emma’s arm catching the light.
Natalie handed over the turf and stepped back, loading the next armful as if it were nothing.
Twenty minutes in and the sun was already hot.
A proper July day, the kind that happened maybe six times a summer in the west of Ireland and that the locals discussed with the same reverent disbelief they reserved for miracles and football results.
The sky was a washed blue, cloudless from horizon to horizon, and the heat sat on the garden like a hand pressed flat.
Natalie could feel it across her shoulders, gathering at the base of her spine where her shirt had started to stick.
A bead of sweat traced the line of her jaw and she wiped it with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear of dark peat dust along her cheekbone that she didn’t notice and wouldn’t have cared about if she had.