Chapter 3
The knock came soft against the back door, three measured taps that carried through the stone walls of the cottage. It was almost nine-thirty at night, and there was really only one person it could be.
“That’ll be Emma.” Gran folded the paper with deliberate care, as if she hadn’t been nodding off between paragraphs. “Maybe she forgot something earlier.”
“I’ll go find out,” Natalie said as she got up and went into the kitchen.
She pulled the back door open.
Emma stood on the step in a navy blouse Natalie hadn’t seen before. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders. One hand rested against the doorframe. The blouse’s open neck showed her collarbone. Natalie looked, then glanced away.
“Hey. There’s music tonight at O’Shea’s.” Emma’s gaze was steady. “Do you want to come?”
“Yeah. Sure. Give me five minutes.”
Natalie called out to the front room, her voice sounding thin in the quiet of the house, letting her grandmother know that she was going out with Emma for a while. Then she went to her bedroom, the old floorboards groaning under her feet.
The change of clothes was fast. She pulled on a pair of dark jeans and a white v-neck top.
In the small, silvered mirror above the dresser, she worked on her hair, using her fingers to rake the loose waves back until they fell with a soft curl.
She reached for her bag, finding the tube of tinted balm and a mascara.
A little color on her lips, a sweep across her lashes, and she was ready to go.
It was so nice to leave the house without worrying about being on the front page of a magazine tomorrow.
She grabbed her bag, and moved toward the kitchen where Emma was waiting.
The boreen in July at half nine was something she couldn’t have described to anyone back home.
The light was still there, amber at the edges where the hedgerow met the lane, shadows stretching across the tarmac.
They walked without hurrying, their footsteps loud in the quiet.
Above the gap in the hedges, the sky was turning.
The blue deepened, the horizon bleeding pink and copper.
By the time they reached the main street, the sun had slipped below the treeline and left the village in a long dusk, the stone buildings warmed by the fading light.
The sound reached them before the door did.
A fiddle, she thought, and something rhythmic under it, a bodhrán maybe, the steady beat of it leaking out through the thick stone walls of O’Shea’s like a heartbeat through skin.
The street had people on it, a couple heading somewhere, an older man she half recognised standing outside with a pint, who looked up as they passed and nodded at Emma with the easy familiarity of someone who had been nodding at her since she was small.
Emma held the door, and Natalie stepped inside.
Nobody looked up when she walked in. One man glanced over and then back to his pint. The girl at the bar was watching the musicians. The couple by the window were leaning into each other, mid-sentence, mid-story, wholly uninterested in what had just come through the door.
Trish was behind the bar. Dark hair tucked behind one ear, she was polishing a glass without looking at it, her eyes on the door.
She caught Natalie’s gaze and said hello.
Then she reached for the tap, two pint glasses appearing on the counter, the dark stout beginning its slow pour before Natalie had taken three steps into the room.
Emma and Trish chatted while the pints were settling.
In the far corner, four musicians sat in a loose semicircle. A fiddle, an accordion, a wooden flute, and a bodhrán balanced on a young woman’s knee.
Emma paid for their pints, and Natalie followed her between tables and bodies. Emma nodded here, raised a hand there, moving through the room with the ease of someone who’d been coming here for years. People shifted without being asked.
The snug was empty. It was always empty when they needed it, as though the pub itself conspired to give them this pocket of privacy, this wooden booth with its high-backed seats and its half-door that closed the main bar’s noise to a manageable murmur.
The bench was dark wood worn smooth by decades of use, and Natalie slid in on the left side because that was her side, had been her side since the first summer Gran brought her here and said sit there, that’s where your grandfather sat and Natalie had sat there every time since.
Emma placed both glasses on the table, the Guinness still settling, the dark liquid resolving itself into black below a slow-forming head of cream.
The music from the main bar arrived muted through the snug’s wooden partition. The fiddle still audible, the bodhrán a heartbeat more felt than heard. Someone laughed, high and sudden, and then it folded back into the general warmth of voices and clinking glass and the session’s rolling rhythm.
She took her first sip of Guinness. The taste of it grounded her here, in this booth, in this evening.
She couldn’t believe she’d already been here for two weeks.
She wanted to savor it. Her time with her grandmother.
With Emma. Being a normal person who could walk into a bar without worrying about the consequences.
All of it. And there was no reason to think about September tonight.
Not with the music playing and Emma across from her looking soft and easy in the lamplight and the whole evening unscrolling ahead of them with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
“Do you have plans this summer?” Emma asked, settling deeper into the booth. “I know you like to see something different each time you’re here.”
“Yeah. I looked up Dog’s Bay a few weeks ago. I thought I might drive out for a day, leave early. I think it only takes an hour and a half, but I’m sure there’ll be places to stop along the way.”
“Dog’s Bay.” Emma’s face lit up, the kind of genuine pleasure that happened when someone mentioned a place she loved. “It’s out of this world. If you showed someone a photo, they’d think it was from some tropical island. Not Galway.”
“Hmm. And I watched a few clips and it’s never really that crowded, so that appeals to me too.
” Natalie brought her pint to her lips and took a long drink.
She tried to commit all this to memory. The music, the company, the delicious pint of Guinness.
“Would you like to come with me?” Natalie asked without really thinking about it.
“I’d love to.”
The words came without hesitation. As much as she loved spending time with her grandmother, she also savored her time here with Emma.
A friend who had absolutely nothing to do with her life in LA.
Because Natalie was a private person, it just seemed like everything about her life revolved around her work.
Yes, she had an amazing team and had worked with so many actors and actresses that she genuinely connected with, but it had been a long time since she’d known someone who wasn’t in someway involved with Hollywood.
“Can you do this in LA?” Emma asked suddenly. “Just go to a bar like this?”
The question landed with more weight than Emma had probably intended, and it was as if Emma had known what she was just thinking about.
“Not really. Not like this. I’d need to know the place, or be with someone who has security. Which I don’t really have. I’m famous, but not that famous.”
Emma’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’re definitely famous.”
Natalie smiled. “I know, but there’s several tiers above me.
The kind of people that shut down a street or a store.
Okay, maybe I’m easily recognizable, but I’m not world-famous.
But it’s not worth the risk, usually, to go to a bar.
Things can go wrong fast. Whether it’s a photographer or a drunk fan.
” Natalie took another drink. “Here, nobody cares. I’m just Bridget’s granddaughter who comes here every summer.
It’s one of the nicest feelings in the world.
To just exist here and not always be thinking three, four steps ahead. ”
The relief of saying it out loud surprised her. In Los Angeles, explaining why she couldn’t just go places required admitting to a level of recognition that sounded either like bragging or complaining, depending on who was listening. Here, with Emma, it was simply true.
The session shifted into something slower, a waltz, the fiddle dropping into its lower register with a sweetness that pressed against the chest. Trish appeared without preamble, two fresh pints in hand. She set them down in front of them.
“Thanks,” Emma said.
“How are you settling in?” Trish asked Natalie.
“Good. Yeah. It never takes long to get used to this. The relaxed way everything is here. Even driving on the other side of the road is something I’m getting more confident with.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Trish said before leaving them to enjoy their pints.
Emma finished her first pint and pushed her empty glass towards the center of the table. “Three years this week,” she said. Her eyes on the new glass, her thumb tracing a line through the condensation as the Guinness settled. “Since I qualified.”
“Three years.” Natalie set her own glass down. “Really?”