Chapter 6
PRESENT DAY
The canopy filtered July light through oak leaves, casting shifting patterns on the path. Natalie walked slowly, her calves aching from the uphill climb near the limestone cleft. The air smelled of decomposing wood, wild garlic, and minerals from the river running somewhere to her left.
She’d been back a week. Her body had adjusted to Irish time after she’d woken at four in the morning for the first few days. She’d spent those jetlagged days drinking Gran’s tea and dozing in the front room while her grandmother watched from her chair by the window.
The Sanders project still occupied her thoughts.
She’d finished twelve interviews in four days before flying out, each one asking the same question: do you think this is your year?
They meant the awards. She’d given gracious, deflecting answers twelve times, but alone here she could be honest. The performance had been good.
She’d found something in those final scenes that left her sitting in her trailer afterward with shaking hands and ruined makeup.
She knew the camera had caught it. Whether that would be enough to survive awards season politics was another matter.
The archway appeared ahead, a limestone tunnel with ferns growing from cracks in the mortar. The stone was dark with moisture. The temperature dropped as she approached. Her footsteps changed from soft earth to rock.
She didn’t slow down. That had been the victory, five years ago.
She’d come back that first summer without Emma and walked this path on the second day, before she could avoid it, before the avoidance became permanent and shrank her world by one more place she couldn’t go.
She’d walked through the archway with her jaw set and her hands in her pockets, and the memory had hit her—Emma’s mouth on hers, the rain outside, Emma’s fingers on the back of her neck pulling her closer—and she’d kept walking. Out the other side. Into the light.
Five years had changed it. The memory still surfaced every time.
But it had softened. The sharp edges had worn down the way the limestone wore down, season by season, until what remained was something almost warm.
They’d had that kiss. She and Emma had stood in this dim, cool space and been honest with their bodies in a way they’d never managed with words, and that had been real. Nobody could un-make it.
The what-ifs were harder to hold gently.
What if she hadn’t said what she said. What if she hadn’t delivered that careful, responsible little speech about not being able to offer Emma anything.
What if instead she’d said, I don’t know what this is but I don’t want it to stop.
What if she’d missed her flight. What if that was supposed to be the start of something?
What if they’d figured it out the way millions of ordinary people figured it out, imperfectly and long-distance and with too many time zones between them but together.
Maybe Emma wouldn’t have gone to Australia. Maybe Emma would have gone anyway but come home in July. To be with her. Maybe they’d have crashed and burned spectacularly, but at least they’d have known.
Natalie stepped out of the archway into a wide wash of July sun, the path ahead dappled and winding toward her grandmother’s back wall. She breathed in, held it, let it go.
She might never see Emma Dempsey again. That was the truth she’d stopped fighting around the third summer.
Emma was living her life somewhere on the other side of the world, and Natalie came to Kilvolan every July and loved her grandmother and walked these woods and carried the memory of a kiss that had mattered more than she ever could have known.
Natalie spent the rest of the walk taking in the woods, letting the damp air fill her lungs.
This was her first walk this summer, and while she enjoyed it, she looked forward to coming back.
She pictured walking up the stone path with tired legs and full lungs, knowing her grandmother was inside, that the kettle would go on, that they’d have tea and talk about dinner.
Her boots left wet prints on the stone floor of the back hall, dark marks that would fade in minutes. She pulled them off by the door, a habit her grandmother had drilled into her at twelve. Take off your shoes. The voice in her head was still Gran’s.
The kitchen was warm. The clock read just past four. Natalie filled the kettle at the tap and switched it on.
“I’m back. Do you want tea? I’m putting the kettle on.”
She said it over her shoulder, toward the doorway that led to the front room, and she was already reaching for the mugs, already pulling the milk from the fridge, her body moving through the rhythm of it without thought.
The biscuits were where they always were, in the tin by the breadbox.
Gran’s tin. A faded photograph of some Irish landscape on the lid, Connemara ponies against a grey sky, the paint worn away in patches from decades of handling.
She didn’t get an answer.
The silence registered as a small thing at first, a nothing.
Gran sometimes dozed in the afternoon, her chin dropping toward her chest, the newspaper sliding from her lap to pool on the floor in a slow cascade of pages.
Natalie would find her like that and cover her with the afghan from the back of the sofa, and Gran would wake an hour later and pretend she hadn’t been sleeping at all, just resting her eyes.
“Gran?”
Still nothing. The kettle began its low hum, the sound of water molecules beginning to agitate, the climb toward boiling. Natalie set the mugs down on the counter. The ceramic made a soft click against the wood.
She walked to the doorway of the front room.
Her grandmother was in her chair. The one by the window, angled to catch the light and the view of the boreen.
Her back was to the door, so Natalie saw only the crown of white hair, the familiar shape of her shoulders in that grey cardigan she’d worn for years, the one with the wooden buttons that Emma had mended last summer after the sleeve caught on the door handle and tore.
The afghan was still folded over the back of the sofa.
Natalie had draped it there herself that morning after making up the cushions.
The kettle hummed louder.
She stepped into the room. Her socked feet made no sound on the floorboards.
The light from the window was falling across her grandmother’s lap, across her hands resting there, those weathered, thickened hands with the knuckles swollen from decades of gardening and bread-making and life.
The hands were still. Too still. The silence was too still.
The quality of the air in the room was different, a stillness that wasn’t rest but its opposite.
The kettle was whistling now but the sound came from very far away, muffled, like hearing something through water.
Natalie’s body knew. Her heart did something irrational and muscular inside her chest, a lurch that was there and gone before her mind could form a single thought about what she was seeing.
Her breathing changed. There was cold moving through her, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, which was warm, which was filled with July sunlight and the smell of peat and the faint ghost of the roses Gran had cut that morning.
She circled the chair. She came around to the side, and she saw her grandmother’s face.
The Tierney eyes were closed. The translucent skin, mapped with those fine lines from a lifetime of Atlantic wind, was slack in a way Natalie had never seen it, not in sleep, not in rest. Her mouth was slightly open.
Her head was tilted, angled into the corner of the chair back as if she’d turned to look at something and simply stopped.
“It’s okay,” Natalie heard herself say. Her voice was strange. “It’s okay, Gran, I’m here.”
She didn’t know why she said it. Her grandmother couldn’t hear her. But the words came out of her mouth anyway, the same way the kettle was still whistling in the kitchen, a sound that belonged to a version of the world where nothing had changed.
She crouched. Her knees met the floorboards and she felt the impact distantly, a thing happening to someone else’s body. She reached for her grandmother’s wrist.
The skin was cool. Not cold. Cool, the way skin goes when the blood has stopped its work, when the engine has been off for a little while. Long enough that the warmth of the afternoon sun hadn’t been enough to keep it. Not long enough for anything else.
Natalie pressed her fingers into the place where the pulse should be, that spot at the base of the thumb that her mother had shown her when she was a child, demonstrating on her own wrist, feel that, that’s the blood going through, that’s the heart doing its job.
She held very still. The kettle shrieked on in the kitchen.
Her fingers trembled against her grandmother’s skin, and she pressed harder, searching for the thrum of life that she already knew she wouldn’t find.
She waited.
The silence was enormous. It filled the room like water, like the river rising over the weir, a soundlessness so complete that the kettle seemed to belong to another country entirely.
Natalie’s fingertips were still at her grandmother’s wrist, and there was nothing.
No beat. No flutter. No whisper of blood moving through the veins that had carried this woman through eighty-eight years of living, through marriage and motherhood and widowhood and the specific loneliness of being the one who stayed when everyone else left.
She didn’t cry. The tears would come later, she knew, the way they’d come when her mother died, not at the moment itself but hours afterward, when the shock had worn off and the reality had seeped in through the cracks in her composure.
For now there was only the floor beneath her knees and the cool weight of her grandmother’s hand in hers and the whistle of the kettle filling the cottage with its long, insistent note.
She let go of her grandmother’s wrist. She took her hand instead, cradling it between both of hers.
The knuckles were still swollen. The skin was still soft in the places where it wasn’t rough.
Gran’s hand, that had kneaded the bread and pruned the roses.
Gran’s hand, that had waved goodbye to Natalie every September, standing in the doorway, wishing her a safe trip back.
Natalie held on.
She sat on the floor of the front room with the July light falling across her shoulders and her grandmother’s cooling hand in both of hers, and she was alone in the cottage in a way she had never been alone in her life.