Chapter 3 #2
Emma smiled, small and real. “I nearly didn’t make it, you know.
The first six months were a lot harder than I thought they’d be.
The training was fine. It was the wards.
That first night everything went sideways at once.
Two emergencies and a patient who coded and I hadn’t a clue where anything was.
I stood in the corridor after and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
” Emma shrugged, one shoulder lifting and falling.
“Anyway. The last three years have flown by, but I wanted to celebrate. The only thing is…” She gestured vaguely at the snug, at the pub, at the night.
“Everyone I went through college with is in Boston or Sydney. Sarah’s doing agency nursing in Perth.
Aoife’s in Connecticut somewhere. Sean’s in New York. ”
She said it without self-pity. Just as a fact. The way you reported weather. But Natalie heard what lived underneath the words, and she thought of Emma coming home from a twelve-hour shift to a house where both parents had once been and were no longer.
Twenty-five years old. Her parents gone. Her friends scattered across the world. And she’d stayed. Not because she was trapped or too frightened to leave or lacking in imagination. She’d stayed because this was her home.
She studied Emma in the golden glow of the snug’s lamps, the way the light caught the warm chestnut strands of her hair where they brushed against her collarbone.
There was an effortless grace in how Emma held her pint glass, fingers loose around the curve of it, her whole body relaxed against the worn wooden bench.
No tension in her shoulders, no restless energy in her limbs—just complete, unthinking belonging.
Natalie felt something shift in her chest. It was admiration, she told herself firmly.
The kind you feel watching someone who knows exactly where they’re meant to be.
She let the feeling sit there, unexamined, and took another drink.
The music swelled from the main bar, but here in the snug it was just the two of them, and this moment that felt like it could stretch forever if Natalie let it.
“Well.” Natalie lifted her glass. “To three years. Congratulations.”
Emma’s smile widened. She touched her glass to Natalie’s. The sound was soft, almost lost under the music. “Cheers.”
A while later, Trish appeared in the snug doorway and collected their empties, balancing them effortlessly as she wove between tables toward the bar.
Emma watched her go.
A beat. Then another. The kind of looking that lingered past casual, that carried something not quite explained by gratitude or friendship.
Natalie noticed.
Emma turned back and found Natalie’s face and whatever she saw there made her smile, shorter this time, the colour rising in her cheeks.
“Right. So.” She took a breath. Looked at her pint, then her gaze flicked up to Natalie.
“You know how everyone has that one person when they’re a teenager?
The one that makes it all click? Well, that’s how it is if you’re gay, and you’re kind of late to realize that you’re not the same as everyone else. ”
Natalie said nothing. Just waited.
“Anyway, it was Trish. For me. I was about sixteen.” Emma’s lips pressed together around a smile that was half embarrassment and half something softer, something fond.
“She was behind the bar and she said something, I don’t even remember what, and I just thought.
Oh. That’s. That’s what that is then. I couldn’t wait until I eighteen, and I could sit up at the bar and…
I don’t even know. I was crazy enough back then to think I had a chance with her, I guess. ”
She said it lightly. As though it were a teenage crush, long past.
But it was also confirmation. Natalie had suspected—had read it in glances and absences—but had never heard it stated plainly.
Emma liked women, and she’d known since she was sixteen.
And her first crush had been a dark-haired woman, who was considerable older than her, with a sharp jaw and piercing eyes.
“Trish is a good looking woman” Natalie said, and her voice came out steady and warm. “Why wouldn’t you have had a crush on her?”
She stared at her drink for a moment.
She did not examine what she was feeling. She took a sip instead and let the cool weight of it settle in her chest, and she asked Emma if she was seeing anyone, and she said no.
The session ended just as Natalie was considering asking more questions. The music stopped, leaving only the ambient noise of the pub.
Natalie hadn’t looked at her phone all evening.
The realization hit her as she finished her glass.
Hours. She’d been sitting in this booth for hours without once checking it.
In Los Angeles that would have been impossible.
In Los Angeles her phone demanded constant attention, pulsing with notifications that each carried obligation.
Here it was a dead thing with nothing to say that couldn’t wait until morning or never.
The main bar had emptied to a handful of people. Trish moved behind the counter, wiping the wood, gathering glasses, cleaning the taps in the same sequence she’d done countless times before. The lights were already half-dimmed.
Emma slid out of the booth first, stretching her back with a sound close to a groan. Her arms reached overhead, lifting her blouse enough to show a strip of pale skin at her waist. Natalie looked, then looked away.
They crossed the main bar. Trish looked up from her wiping and caught Emma’s eye. Something passed between them too quickly for Natalie to read.
“Night, Trish.”
“Night. Get home safe.” Trish’s eyes moved to Natalie, and the nod she gave was warm and uncomplicated and carried nothing that required return beyond a nod of her own. “Night, Natalie.”
“Goodnight.”
And then they were outside. A few people were outside the chipper, sitting on the windowsill with a bag of chips or a burger.
As they left the village, Natalie looked up at the stars.
It was a clear night. The Milky Way stretched across the sky, surrounded by thousands more stars scattered in patterns Natalie had never learned.
She’d grown up in a city where three stars meant a clear night.
Here there were so many they blurred at the edges of her vision, the whole sky bright and deep.
She tilted her head back and breathed.
“Another thing you only get here?” Emma asked, stopping to look up.
“Yeah.”
They walked side by side, their footsteps falling into rhythm as they left the village of Kilvolan behind and turned down their narrow road with grass sprouting up in the middle of the lane.
Neither of them spoke.
Inside the pub, conversation had flowed easily, one story spilling into the next, the pints smoothing every transition until hours felt like minutes.
But out here in the dark, the air between them had changed.
Not uncomfortable. Not strained. Just different from what it had been inside, with the music and noise and other bodies around them.
Out here, it was just the two of them and the road and the silence.
Natalie stumbled. Her heel caught a loose stone, and her ankle turned.
Emma’s hand closed around her forearm, steadying her. The momentum brought them shoulder to shoulder.
Emma held on a second longer than necessary, her fingers firm against Natalie’s forearm. Then she let go, her hand returning to her side.
“Alright?”
“Yeah. I guess I’m not as sober as I thought I was.”
Emma made a sound—not quite a laugh, more like an exhale.
They kept walking. Natalie’s forearm was warm where Emma had touched her. She tried to file it away with everything else from tonight—her crush on Trish, the confirmation that she was interested in women. But the warmth remained.
Natalie was so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t realized how close they were to home. Emma’s home on the right, Gran’s on the left.
“Goodnight, Natalie.” Emma’s face was half-lit by moonlight. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for inviting me. And happy three years. I’m glad I got to celebrate it with you.”
A smile. Small, genuine. Then Emma turned and opened her gate. The hinges creaked—the same sound they’d always made, as familiar to Natalie as Gran’s kitchen door. Emma’s boots found the path and carried her into the darkness of her garden.
Natalie stood still and listened.
Footsteps on gravel. The scrape of a key. A wooden door opening. Then closing.
Silence.
Natalie stood in the dark between the two gates, the warmth from Emma’s touch still ghosting across her forearm.
Her flight to Los Angeles left in six weeks.
Not home—Los Angeles. The distinction hit her like cold water.
She had never thought of it that way before, had never let herself make that separation.
Los Angeles was where she lived, where she worked, where her life was built with careful precision.
But home. Home was something else entirely.
The word settled somewhere deep. Home was being here with Gran, the kettle boiling, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. It was the woods behind the garden and the sounds of the river and the birds. It was how easy her life was here.
Her throat tightened as she realized how fast this trip was already going. She just had to enjoy every day she had here.
She turned toward Gran’s cottage, toward the yellow light still glowing in the kitchen window, and went inside.