Chapter 5
Natalie’s grip relaxed on the steering wheel past Tuam.
Her shoulders dropped as the motorway turned to regional roads with green fields and limestone walls.
After the hardest year of her career—awards season running into shoots that left her exhausted—this drive felt like breathing again.
Two months stretched ahead with no schedules.
She would spend them with Gran in the cottage that had always felt more like home than anywhere in LA.
She kept thinking about Emma. It had happened all year, at odd times.
During night shoots or between takes in her trailer.
That kiss in the archway last summer stayed with her.
The damp air, Emma’s mouth, the way everything in her had gone still.
She had wanted her then, and still did. The memory made her pulse quicken.
Emma was attractive in a natural way that had nothing to do with cameras or styling. But wanting changed nothing.
They had no future. Natalie’s life belonged in Los Angeles for at least the next decade.
She had fought too long and too hard for this career, the roles that finally mattered, the recognition that filled the spaces her mother’s early death had left empty.
Walking away from it now felt impossible.
And at forty-five she was too old for Emma anyway.
Coming out felt equally out of reach while her star kept rising.
The industry still punished women for certain truths. It just wasn’t meant to be.
That didn’t stop the wondering. Two months of living next door to Emma again.
Would they slip back into their easy summer rhythm, walks in the woods and quiet evenings at the pub?
Would either of them mention the kiss? Would Emma pretend it never happened, or had she carried it too?
Natalie doubted she could last more than a few days before the words spilled out.
She had thought about confessing it on the plane, rehearsing variations in her head like lines for a scene she would never film.
The pull felt stronger now, dangerous in its quiet persistence.
The boreen narrowed, hedges brushing the rental car.
She reversed neatly for a passing tractor, lifting one finger in the local salute.
Her chest warmed at the small ritual. Kilvolan always asked her to be present.
The cottage came into view, grey stone solid against the sky, rosebushes heavy with familiar pink blooms along the front wall.
She killed the engine and sat a moment in the quiet rush of the river below and riotous birds in the ash tree.
No sirens, no helicopters, just the low hum of this place that let her breathe.
The front door opened. Gran stepped out in her navy cardigan, white hair pinned in its neat bun, moving slower than last year but still upright.
Natalie met her halfway across the gravel, folding into thin strong arms that smelled of hand cream, bread, and peat smoke.
She pressed her face into her grandmother’s shoulder and inhaled deeply, the knot of the past year loosening further.
“Let me look at you,” Gran said, pulling back with weathered hands on Natalie’s elbows. Those piercing blue eyes, the ones Natalie had inherited, scanned her face with slow care. “You’re the image of her. More every year.”
Natalie blinked hard at the roses, throat tight. She studied her grandmother in return, grateful for another July together. These weeks were sacred. Nothing in LA could touch them.
“Come on in. You must be exhausted.”
Natalie followed her grandmother inside.
The scents hit her at once—roses from the windowsill and the yeasty smell of rising bread.
The heavy oak table stood scarred from decades of use.
Gran filled the kettle with steady hands and clicked the kettle on.
The sound of it coming to life filled the kitchen with its familiar rising hum, the first sound of every morning in this house for as long as Natalie could remember.
Her grandmother’s hands moved with quiet purpose, selecting the blue mug from the shelf, the one that had always been Natalie’s.
The one no one else was allowed to use. Natalie watched those hands, weathered and strong.
“Tea won’t be a minute,” Gran said, voice carrying the soft lilt that always made the years between visits disappear. “How was the drive?”
“The roads were quiet. I’m finally getting the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road.”
Gran made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s only wrong to you.”
Natalie smiled. “The other side of the road then.”
Her eyes moved to the window without her permission. The window that faced the boreen, and beyond the boreen, the low stone wall, and beyond the wall, the roof of Emma’s cottage. No car in the drive. The curtains were drawn.
She looked away before her grandmother could notice her looking, but the looking itself had already happened, and something in her chest had already tightened.
“I thought Emma would be here,” she said, keeping her voice casual. “Her car wasn’t out front.”
Gran didn’t turn from the counter. “Emma’s in Australia.”
The words hit hard. The distance felt impossible. Emma had mentioned college friends living there during their late-night talks at O’Shea’s last summer. Maybe she’d be back next week. August at the latest.
The kettle reached its boil with a sharp click that made Natalie flinch.
Gran poured the water over the tea bag in each mug, the steam rising in fragrant curls.
Everything about the moment should have felt perfect.
The mug waiting. The bread scent. Her grandmother’s steady presence filling the space with the kind of peace Natalie chased across continents and never quite caught anywhere else.
Yet her eyes kept returning to that empty spot where Emma’s car should have been.
Her grandmother carried mugs to the table. “Her friends from college had been out there a few years already. Aoife kept asking her to come. And with her parents gone these past years, there wasn’t much to keep her here. Young people leave. It’s the oldest story in the village.”
Natalie’s jaw tightened. Her mother had left at twenty-two with a scholarship and a one-way ticket, carrying the guilt until she died. “When will she be back?”
Gran lowered herself into the opposite chair with the careful slowness of her eighty-eight years. “I don’t know if or when she’ll be back.”
The simple line hit like cold water. Natalie’s stomach dropped so sharply she had to set the mug down before her fingers betrayed her with their sudden tremble. The kitchen tilted for a moment.
Emma had moved to Australia. Not a vacation. Not a temporary escape. The realization sank in slowly, each layer colder than the last.
She wouldn’t see Emma this summer.
Maybe not ever again.
The woods behind the cottage, the archway, the path along the Volan River stretched out empty now. Their summer rhythm, the one Natalie had counted on even while telling herself she shouldn’t, had been cut without warning. She stared at her mug. Five summers of almosts pressed down on her chest.
She’d been looking forward to seeing Emma. The thought hit sharp and unwelcome. They could never be together properly—not with Natalie’s life across an ocean and Emma rooted here. But the pull remained, growing stronger each July.
Natalie had walked away.
What else could she have done?
Yet she’d hoped this summer might be different.
“She writes to me,” Gran said. “Every few weeks which is really sweet of her. She knows I don’t like to text, and she tried to show me how we could do video calls, but I’m glad she writes.
It’s been a long time since anyone has sent me a letter.
And Emma writes properly. Tells me about her life.
She’s working in a hospital in Sydney, a bigger one than Galway. ”
Gran’s fingers tapped lightly against her mug. “She met someone,” she said. “Another nurse at that hospital in Sydney. From the way Emma writes about her, she seems to be happy.”
The words landed one after another, each one pressing the air from Natalie’s lungs.
She sat very still while her grandmother spoke, the tea cooling untouched between them.
Emma had met someone. The phrase echoed in the hollow spaces behind her ribs, bringing with it the first cold touch of a question Natalie did not want to ask herself.
Had the kiss in the archway mattered to Emma at all?
Or had it been just one more thing that happened in a life already pointed elsewhere, a summer fling easily left behind when something better appeared?
The thought stung more than it should have.
Natalie had spent eleven months convincing herself the kiss had been a mistake, a moment of weakness best forgotten.
Now the possibility that Emma had already forgotten it felt worse than any rejection she could have imagined.
She felt the tightening in her throat first, that familiar, involuntary clench of muscle before her thoughts could even form. Emma had met someone. Emma was happy—with someone else, on the other side of the world.
Natalie swallowed against the tightness, her fingers pressing harder into the warmth of her mug.
She was holding it and the heat was seeping into her palms and she was thinking about the archway.
The rain hammering the canopy. The cold limestone against her back.
Emma’s mouth, warm and certain, and the way her hands had tightened on Natalie’s hips like she’d been waiting for permission to do exactly that for a very long time.
Emma’s breath catching. Her eyes afterward, that shifting hazel, wide and open and asking a question Natalie hadn’t been able to answer.
“Good for her,” Natalie said.
The words came out right. Steady and warm, exactly what a friend would say. She meant them. Emma deserved sun and good wages and a woman who could hold her hand in public without thinking about it, without worrying who might see.
“I doubt she’ll come back,” Gran said. “Once they go that far, they don’t usually come back. Why would they? The weather’s better, the pay’s better.”
Natalie lifted the mug to her lips and drank. The tea was hot and strong and exactly right, the way Gran’s tea always was, but something in her throat made it hard to swallow.
Her grandmother kept talking, her voice softening around each word like worn fabric. “I wonder if acting runs in the family,” she mused, gazing at the window where the morning light made patterns on the worn table, “because I don’t know how I kept it together when Emma came over to say goodbye.”
Natalie pressed her lips together. She watched her grandmother’s hands, those weathered, capable hands that had kneaded bread and planted roses and now trembled slightly around the china, and understood this wasn’t just about her own jagged grief.
“She was like another grandchild to me,” Gran continued, her words measured as if she was sorting through a lifetime of memories, weighing each one.
“A friend more than a neighbor, really. Always just... bopping in and out, whether it was for a quick cup of tea before she left for work or to bring over dinner for me. She never announced herself, just appeared at the door like...” She trailed off, her eyes suddenly bright, and Natalie saw how much it cost her to finish the thought: “Like she belonged here.”
Natalie’s throat tightened. She remembered the way Emma would move through this kitchen with an easy familiarity, opening the right drawers without looking, knowing which cupboard held the sugar bowl before Gran could point.
“I know,” she managed, her voice rougher than she intended.
“She was always so good to you, wasn’t she? ”
Gran nodded, her white hair catching the light as she lifted her mug. “She was,” she said simply before taking a sip, the words disappearing into the steam rising from her tea like a quiet confession.
Emma was gone. Emma had been gone for months, had been gone the whole time Natalie had been thinking about her, the whole time she’d been preparing for a conversation that was never going to happen, the whole time she’d been holding the memory of that kiss like a private talisman, something she could turn over in her mind in the quiet hours, something she could feel guilty about and grateful for in equal measure.
And Emma had kissed her and then she’d gone to Australia and met someone else, someone she could actually have, someone who wasn’t famous and closeted.
The kiss hadn’t mattered. Not to Emma. Or it had mattered but not enough. Not enough to change anything. Not enough to make her wait. And why would it have been? Natalie had told her that she couldn’t offer her anything.
The exhaustion settled into Natalie’s bones.
The adrenaline that had carried her through the flight and drive from Shannon had evaporated, leaving her hollowed out and heavy.
She would still enjoy these weeks with Gran—the quiet mornings with tea, the drives down narrow boreens where hedgerows brushed the car windows, the discovery of coastal paths or hidden beaches.
But the anticipation that had hummed beneath her skin since booking her ticket was gone.
The private fantasy of seeing Emma’s face when she walked through her grandmother’s door, of falling back into their rhythm, of maybe having the courage to say what had gone unspoken for five summers—gone.
She pressed her fingertips to her temples.
How was she supposed to walk these paths without thinking of Emma?
How was she supposed to sit in O’Shea’s without listening for her laugh?
The village had always been her refuge, but now every stone wall and woodland trail would remind her of Emma’s absence.
Natalie closed her eyes. Forgetting wasn’t possible. The only question was how much it would hurt to remember.