Chapter 10
The fire cracked and sent sparks into the air.
Natalie watched them rise and vanish against the bright sky.
Nine o’clock and the light was only now beginning to soften.
Shadows from Emma’s back wall stretched across the patio stones and reached the firepit’s edge.
The flames warmed Natalie’s bare arms against the cooling air.
She’d been here since they got back from Galway. The hours with Emma had passed quickly.
She could still taste the salad dressing from lunch—lemon and something sweet, maybe honey. Emma had whisked it together while Natalie chopped tomatoes and cucumber and peppers.
They ate outside in the sun. Emma opened a bottle of wine. The hours passed easily, and now Emma had made dinner too and the second bottle was half empty and the fire was going and Natalie was still here. She couldn’t pinpoint when staying had become a decision. It had just happened.
Which was the dangerous part.
She tried not to think about the photo. The woman’s face. The friends with their phones. Some of those images were online by now.
The back door opened. Emma came out with the bottle from the fridge, water beading on the glass.
“Would you like a top-up?”
“Sure. Thanks.” Natalie held her glass out. The wine was cold and pale and tasted like grapefruit. She watched Emma pour, watched the level climb in the glass, and then asking Emma to stop. She’d already had more than she should.
Emma settled into the chair beside her. The firelight moved across her face.
“I’m sorry about today.” Natalie said it before she could talk herself out of it. “I know you haven’t brought it up. But I should have known better.”
Emma looked at her. Patient. Listening.
“I just hope it doesn’t affect things here,” Natalie said.
“That people won’t start doing detective work, connecting dots.
” She turned the glass slowly in her fingers.
“I don’t want to hide when I’m in Kilvolan.
That’s what I love about being here. Driving through Connemara, going out to Dog’s Bay, all of it.
I’ve never had to be afraid of what might happen.
Galway was too much. Or at least Galway in July on a gorgeous day. ”
“I honestly doubt it’ll snowball into anything.” Emma tucked one leg beneath her in the chair, casual, unhurried. “One photo on someone’s Instagram stories and it’s gone tomorrow.”
“I hope so.”
Natalie took a sip and let the cold wine settle against her tongue. The fire popped. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go on.”
“The car.” Natalie shifted in her chair, turning slightly toward Emma. “Putting a deposit down today. I assumed you were going back to Sydney.”
Emma’s eyes stayed on the fire. “I’ll have to go back. But just to wrap things up.” She said it the way she said most things. Level. Considered. “I’m on leave right now. I need to formally resign. Tell my roommates I’m not coming back. Sort out the lease, ship a few boxes.”
“And then?”
“And then I come home.”
Natalie’s chest tightened. Home. No hesitation, no qualifier. Just fact.
She stared at the fire. Looking at Emma while absorbing this was too much. Years of arriving in July to find the house next door dark or rented to strangers. Now Emma sat three feet away, talking about coming home and buying a car. Nothing temporary about it.
The wine softened the edges of everything. Natalie couldn’t tell if the tightness in her throat came from the alcohol or something else.
She took another sip. Set the glass down on the arm of the chair carefully. “It was kind of you. Writing to her.”
Emma glanced over. “To Bridget?”
“Yeah.” Natalie’s fingers found the stem of her glass again. “It was a really nice thing to do.”
“It just made sense. Video calls weren’t her style.
She’d have spent the whole time squinting at the screen and asking me why my face was so small.
” A corner of Emma’s mouth lifted. “Letters she understood. She’d write back on that blue paper she had, the one with the little flowers along the edge. ”
Natalie nodded, and then she cleared her throat. “That first summer. When I came back and you were gone.” The words came out quieter than she intended. “She told me you were settled. That you’d met someone. Another nurse. She said you seemed happy.”
The fire cracked. A log shifted in the grate, and smoke drifted sideways before the breeze carried it off.
Emma picked up her wine glass but didn’t drink. Just held it.
“Yes.” A breath. “Yeah. At the time, yeah. I was happy.” She paused.
“I met Maria at work. We danced around it for a while because she was my supervisor and I wasn’t sure if we could date, hospital policy, all of that.
And yeah, it was good. For a while it was really good.
” Her thumb moved along the base of the glass.
“But I could feel it getting serious for her. She wanted me to move in. And I just...”
Her voice faded. She stared at the fire.
“I couldn’t get someone out of my head. And I knew I wasn’t in the right place to be with her properly.
Not the way she deserved.” She breathed in slowly and let it out.
“So we had a great few months and then worked together for another year and then it was just awkward. So I changed jobs, landed the hospice position, and that was that.” She took a sip of her wine.
“I haven’t really put myself out there since. ”
The garden was quiet except for the fire’s low constant voice and the faint sound of the river from somewhere beyond the trees.
Natalie sat still. The wine warmed her blood and her pulse beat hard at her wrists and throat. She turned Emma’s words over in her mind, searching for their meaning.
Emma had someone. Emma left someone. Because she couldn’t stop thinking about someone else.
Three possibilities came to her. Herself. Trish. A woman she’d never heard of.
She lifted her glass. The wine trembled against the sides. “Who’s the lucky woman you can’t seem to forget?”
Emma looked away, but not before Natalie caught the edge of a smile.
It was small and private and disappeared nearly as fast as it had come, and something about it made Natalie’s chest tighten in a way that might have been hope and might have been fear and was definitely not a thing she should be investigating while she was slightly tipsy.
“Ask me another day.”
Natalie blinked. “Ask you...”
“Another day.” Emma’s voice was light but steady. “Not tonight.”
Natalie let the question go. Let the silence settle back around them, filled with firelight and the distant rush of the river and the particular peace of being near someone who didn’t need the silence filled.
Emma was home. That was the thing to hold onto. Emma was buying a car and resigning from her job in Sydney and shipping boxes across the world and coming back to this house, this garden, this village. Natalie turned the fact over in her mind.
And what about her own life?
She hadn’t let herself think about fall. The projects lined up, the obligations waiting, the life in Los Angeles that had been everything she’d thought she’d wanted.
The thought came suddenly. She could stay. Or she could come back here when she needed a break from Los Angeles, from the noise and the schedules and the careful performance of being herself. The cottage was hers now. Gran had always told her that she would leave it to her.
Natalie blinked and felt tears threaten behind her eyes. The wine made everything closer to the surface, made her chest tight with possibility and loss tangled together until she couldn’t separate them.
It was hard to think about the future without Gran. Every plan felt hollow, missing the steady presence that had anchored her summers.
She set her glass down on the stone beside her chair.
“I keep forgetting she’s gone,” she said quietly. “I keep thinking I should check on her before it gets too late. Make sure she’s taken her tablets.”
Emma’s voice was soft when she answered. “That’ll happen for a while.”
Her eyes found Emma’s. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
The fire cracked between them.
“I’m glad you’re here too.”