Chapter 4
Natalie’s boots sunk into the damp earth as she traced the familiar path through Ashford’s emerald wilderness, a world away from her sun-baked Californian roots.
The air was a symphony of rushing water, whispering leaves, and the distant hum of midges, punctuated by the occasional cawing crow.
Above her, ancient redwoods stood like sentinels, a living testament to the Guinness family’s time here from more than a century ago.
The canopy filtered the afternoon into long shafts of gold that fell at angles through the oak and ash, catching the midges that drifted in slow clouds where the air was still.
Natalie watched one shaft move across the path ahead as a breeze shifted the branches above, the light sliding over the ground like something alive and searching.
She was noticing everything. The particular green of this place, so saturated it seemed to hum, a green that didn’t exist in California or on any screen she’d ever stood in front of. The sound of the river somewhere below them and to the left, running fast after the wet August.
Tomorrow she would drive to Shannon. This summer had gone faster than any of the others.
Emma walked beside her in shorts and a faded grey tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the fine hairs at her nape dark with sweat. The path narrowed around a fallen branch, and their bare arms brushed. Skin against skin, brief and warm.
They didn’t speak. The woods had always been the place where silence felt natural between them.
Twenty minutes could pass without a word and it never felt wrong.
But today something was different. Something heavier sat between them, unspoken—the knowledge that this walk was their last, that this summer, like the four before it, was ending.
The lake came to mind. Three weeks ago on the flat rock, sun drying her wet arms while Emma pulled herself out beside her, laughing at something Natalie had said. Water streamed from Emma’s hair and shoulders. The laugh was unselfconscious and full—someone who felt amusement without performing it.
The bonfire in Emma’s back garden in late July.
Woodsmoke lingering in her hair the next morning.
The wine going warm in their glasses while they talked about films Emma wanted to see and Natalie about actresses she’d love to work with in the future.
Stars appeared as the sky darkened from blue to black.
The turf shed. The snug at O’Shea’s. The morning she’d found Emma already in Bridget’s kitchen at half seven, the two of them chatting away like old friends.
Two months of this. Two months of being the version of herself that only existed here—the one who wore old shorts without makeup and got caught in the rain on the boreen.
The one who could sit in a pub for three hours without anyone asking for a photo, without the watching that happened in West Hollywood restaurants, that particular lean of recognition.
A few walkers on this path had given her second glances, the faint double-take she’d learned to notice and ignore, but here it meant nothing.
Here she was Bridget’s granddaughter. Here she was just Natalie, walking in the woods with Emma on a Tuesday afternoon in September.
Tomorrow she’d be back to her LA life. The table read for the Klein project in October, the script she still hadn’t finished because every time she opened it at the kitchen table, Bridget would set down tea and the afternoon would slip away.
The career she’d built across two decades.
As much as she loved being here every summer, she knew that she had to go back to LA.
There was too much there waiting for her.
Emma’s arm brushed hers again at a narrow turn. The warmth of it lingered two steps past the contact.
“I don’t know if we’re going to get back before the rain starts,” Emma said.
Natalie looked up. The light had changed and there was a mugginess in the air.
The gold was gone from the shafts between the branches, replaced by something flat and grey and pressing, as if someone had drawn a cloth across the sky.
A few seconds later, she felt it, the drop in pressure, the way the air went heavy and still.
Then the sound. Not rain yet. The canopy receiving it first, a rush overhead like a held breath releasing, thousands of leaves catching water at once.
The first drops found the gaps.
They looked at each other at the same moment. Through the lattice of branches above them the sky was the colour of wet slate.
Then it opened and the rain fell slowly at first, and then all of a sudden it was a heavy shower.
They ran. Not seriously at first, a jog, both of them laughing at the absurdity of it, the instantaneous drenching, the sky going from heavy to biblical in the space of ten seconds.
The rain came through the canopy in sheets. Natalie’s tank top stuck to her skin and the path turned to mud, each step sliding on the wet earth. Emma moved ahead, faster, her stride sure. Natalie followed.
They sprinted the last stretch. The ground dipped, the trees thinned, and the archway appeared—an old limestone tunnel, its entrance dark and moss-covered, half-hidden by ferns.
Emma reached it first and ducked inside.
Natalie was three steps behind, stumbling in from the rain.
For a moment neither of them could do anything but breathe.
The rain hammered outside. Inside the stone walls, the sound was muffled to a steady drum.
They stood in the archway.
The tunnel was narrow—six feet high, maybe less, four feet wide. Moss grew thick on the limestone walls. The air smelled of cold stone and earth.
They stood facing each other. There wasn’t room for anything else. Both breathing hard from the run, soaked through. Emma’s hair had come loose and stuck to her neck. Her tank top clung to her shoulders and ribs. Her cheeks were flushed.
Natalie knew she looked the same. There was no way to hide it. Just wet and wrecked and exactly as she was.
Neither of them spoke. They listened to the rain. Caught their breath. The space between them was maybe eighteen inches. Water dripped from the entrance behind her.
She watched the rain beyond the archway. Not looking at Emma. Because looking at Emma right now meant deciding something. They were too close, too exposed. For five years she’d avoided this. Now, in this tunnel with the rain sealing them in, that choice was harder to make.
Emma’s voice pulled her back. “I wish you weren’t leaving tomorrow.”
Natalie turned. Emma was watching her with those hazel eyes, green in this light, steady and clear and completely unguarded in a way that made Natalie’s chest tighten.
The flush from running was still high on Emma’s cheeks, but there was something else there now.
Something that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the eighteen inches of charged air between them.
“Me too.” The words came out quieter than she meant them to. Softer. She meant it. Meant it with every part of herself that had been holding back for five summers.
The rain hammered against the limestone. Their breathing steadied, and Natalie became aware of how close they were. The damp air carried the scent of Emma’s soap.
Emma’s gaze dropped to her mouth, then back up.
Natalie’s pulse quickened. She tried to rationalize it away—distracted attention, dim light, the intimacy that came from being trapped together in a narrow space. But her body knew better. Her breathing had gone shallow even though they’d stopped running.
She knew what she’d seen. For five years, she’d caught these moments when Emma’s careful boundaries slipped—the way Emma looked at her when she thought Natalie wasn’t watching, the way conversations went quiet when they stood too close, the way Emma’s laugh dropped lower when it was just the two of them.
“I’ll miss you.” Emma’s voice was steady, but Natalie heard the strain beneath it. This wasn’t a casual goodbye between neighbors.
Natalie opened her mouth to say she’d miss Emma too.
The words were right there, the same words she’d swallowed down every summer when the calendar turned to August and her flight back to LA loomed.
She could say them now and step back, let this moment slip past like all the others had.
Like that evening at O’Shea’s when Emma’s knee had pressed against hers beneath the table and she’d pretended not to notice the heat of it.
Like the afternoon at the lake when Emma surfaced from the water two feet away, droplets catching the sunlight as they rolled down her freckled shoulders.
Like all those summer nights standing at the gate between their houses, when she’d walk home and then stand in the dark hallway of her grandmother’s cottage, pulse racing, replaying every word and glance and accidental touch.
She could let this moment pass too. She should. It would be the responsible thing, the kind thing, the way she’d always done it before.
Instead, she leaned in.