Chapter 11
The first sip was always the best. Emma tilted the glass and let the Guinness settle against her tongue, that mineral bitterness smoothed by the cream of the head, cold enough to feel clean and dark enough to feel earned.
Beside her, Natalie lifted her own pint and drank with the quiet concentration of someone who had learned to appreciate this particular ritual over many summers.
The bar was warm against Emma’s forearms. Years of elbows and spilled porter had worn O’Shea’s counter to a sticky-smooth finish that Trish’s polishing couldn’t erase.
Two pints in, the pub held its midweek quiet. No tourists. No weekend energy. Just regulars. Séamus had his fiddle out in the corner, starting up a jig with Pádraig and his accordion.
Emma set her glass down and listened.
A week since the funeral. The days had fallen into a pattern she hadn’t planned. She’d collected the BMW, driven it back to Kilvolan with the windows down.
She’d spent most evenings with Natalie. It had just happened.
Not by arrangement, but by proximity and shared loss.
Neither of them wanted to be alone. The first night Emma had cooked at Bridget’s.
Natalie had opened wine and they’d sat in the kitchen until eleven. The second night Natalie had texted.
Chicken in the oven. Come over.
The third night Emma had lit the firepit in her back garden. Natalie had appeared at the wall with a bottle of Malbec and two glasses. They’d talked until the fire burned to ash.
It felt natural. That was the problem. It felt like resuming a conversation they’d been having for years, picking up mid-sentence, filling in the gaps with silence that didn’t need filling.
Emma had missed their summers together with an ache she’d spent five years in Australia learning to manage, and now the management was failing because the thing she’d been managing was sitting beside her drinking Guinness.
More than once over the past week she’d had to pull herself back.
A moment at the kitchen sink where their hands had brushed.
A morning when Natalie had opened the front door still half-asleep, hair loose and tangled, wearing a hoodie that hung past her hands, and Emma had forgotten why she’d knocked.
An evening by the fire when Natalie’s gaze lingered on Emma.
There was nothing between them. She had to keep remembering that. Friendship. Proximity. Shared grief. The accumulated weight of ten summers boiled down to something that looked, from the outside, like two women who’d known each other a long time and were comfortable in each other’s company.
Except Natalie had kissed her in the woods five years ago and Emma had kissed her back and it was never mentioned again.
That was what Emma kept coming back to. She’d stood in that archway in the rain and told Natalie that she was crazy about her. The kiss… Emma couldn’t think about that kiss without a rush of heat running through her, electricity rippling over her skin.
But Natalie had left for Los Angeles the next morning, and it was all just a memory.
Last week, by the fire, Natalie had asked the question. Who’s the lucky woman you can’t seem to forget?
The answer had risen in her throat so fast it was almost violent—You.
Just that. Just the one word, the one truth she’d carried for five years like a secret pressed between her ribs.
She’d tasted it on her tongue, felt the shape of it against the roof of her mouth, and then swallowed it back down because the alternative was letting it out into the air between them, where it would hang like the smoke from the fire, impossible to unsee.
Ask me another day, she’d said instead, her voice steady even as her pulse hammered in her wrists.
Because it was the night after they’d buried Bridget, and it wasn’t the right time, and if Emma was being completely honest with herself, she was afraid of how Natalie would react.
But the thing about open loops was that they didn’t stay open forever. They frayed at the edges. They unraveled when you weren’t looking. And this one—this quiet, persistent ache—was the reason she’d never been able to give Maria what she deserved.
She was going to have to say it, eventually. Because she needed to close the loop, one way or another. Needed to know, once and for all, if that kiss in the archway had been a crazy moment in time, or if it was in anyway real for Natalie.
Now, Emma’s arm rested on the bar beside Natalie’s.
Close enough that the fine hair on her forearm caught against Natalie’s skin when either of them shifted.
Close enough that every accidental brush sent a small bright signal up through her elbow, her shoulder, the back of her neck.
She kept her eyes on the session and her breathing even and her body exactly where it was, because moving away would be an admission and moving closer would be something else entirely, and the narrow margin between those two options was the only territory she could safely occupy.
Natalie lifted her pint. The movement brought their arms together for a full second, the length of Natalie’s forearm warm against hers, and then Natalie set the glass down and the contact broke and Emma took a drink of her own Guinness to give her mouth something to do besides say something stupid.
The question surfaced again. What was the truth.
Emma had spent five years building and abandoning theories.
Natalie was bi. Natalie was gay. Whatever she was, it was something she kept hidden.
And the kiss in the archway—the way Natalie’s mouth had opened, the sound she’d made, the way her hands had held Emma, like she was afraid Emma might pull away.
That wasn’t confusion. That wasn’t curiosity.
That was a woman who knew what she wanted and took it.
But pretending was what Natalie did for a living.
And Emma had watched her walk away and never mention it again, which meant one of two things.
Either it hadn’t mattered enough to acknowledge, or it had mattered so much that acknowledging it would have required Natalie to change her life.
And lately, Emma suspected it was the second one, which was worse, because it meant Natalie would rather lose her than risk her career.
That was probably it. Although, was she being too hard on Natalie?
When exactly would she have said something? When Natalie came back the next summer, Emma was already in Australia. And just like Emma couldn’t say it last week—that she couldn’t forget about her—it wasn’t the right time. They were both grieving.
A hand appeared on the bar beside her glass. Trish. Her sleeves were pushed to her elbows, a tea towel over one shoulder. The lines around her eyes were deeper than five years ago. Everything else was the same.
“It’s good to have you back in Kilvolan again, Emma.”
Emma felt something loosen in her chest. “Good to be back.”
“Oh, the snug’s freed up,” Natalie said, already standing, gathering what was left of her second pint. “I’ll go grab it.”
Her fingers curled tighter around her glass as Natalie moved away from the bar, the warmth of her presence lingering like the ghost of a touch.
Emma kept her gaze fixed on the condensation sliding down her pint, but her awareness stretched after Natalie—the slight sway of her hips beneath those worn-in jeans, the way her dark hair caught the dim pub light as she turned toward the snug.
Every step imprinted itself on Emma’s skin without her ever lifting her eyes.
Then she turned her attention back to Trish, who was leaning one hip against the counter in that unhurried way she had, as if time moved differently on her side of the bar.
“So how long are you back for?”
“For good.” The words came out before Emma could soften them. “I mean, I have to go back to Sydney and take care of a few things. Resign properly, sort out the flat. But then I’ll be back. For good.”
Trish went still. Then she leaned across the bar and put her hand over Emma’s, her palm warm, smiling.
“I’m sorry about the circumstances that brought you home.”
“I know.”
Emma watched Trish’s fingers tap against the bar twice before she pulled her hand back and reached for a clean glass. The movement was casual, but Emma caught the way Trish’s gaze flicked toward the snug where Natalie had gone.
“You two seem to be spending a lot of time together,” Trish said, polishing the glass.
Emma shrugged, pressing her thumb into the condensation on her pint. “I don’t think either of us really wants to be alone right now.”
Trish smirked, setting the glass down with a soft clink. “That might be true. But it’s the same look in your eye that you had ten years ago and you had nothing to be sad about then.”
Emma exhaled sharply through her nose, shaking her head. “Christ, Trish.”
Trish leaned in, voice dropping. “You think I haven’t noticed how you watch her? Or how she watches you?”
Emma’s pulse jumped. She took a slow sip of Guinness, buying time. “That’s not—“
Trish arched a brow.
Emma glanced toward the snug. Natalie was angled toward them, fingers curled around her glass, eyes fixed on their conversation with a stillness that wasn’t casual at all.
Emma turned back to Trish, feeling heat creep up her neck.
“Tell me,” Trish murmured, her voice carrying that particular pub-keeper tone that suggested she already knew half the answer, “how many hearts did you break in Oz?”
Emma managed a smile that felt more rueful than she intended. “Is that what you think of me? That I went around Australia leaving a trail of broken hearts?”
The truth was more complicated than that. There had been Maria, and she wasn’t proud of the way things went, so maybe Trish had the right idea. She hoped that she hadn’t broken her heart though.
“I think,” Emma said carefully, “that I learned some things about myself. About what I actually want.”
Trish’s expression shifted slightly, something knowing flickering behind her eyes. “Something possibly out of reach?”
Emma bit the inside of her cheek. “Yeah.”
“Right.” Trish straightened, businesslike again. “Will I pull two more?”
Emma hesitated, her fingers tapping lightly against the empty glass. “Let me just check with Natalie first. She might want to switch to something else.”
She slid off the bar stool and walked around the partition into the snug.
But it was empty.
Natalie’s glass from the last round sat on the table, the cream lacing the inside where the Guinness had been.
She looked back through the gap toward the bar. Scanned the room. There was no sign of her.
The door to the ladies’ was down the short corridor past the bar. Emma walked to it and pushed it open. Two empty stalls, both doors ajar.
She came back to the bar. Trish was pulling a pint for Séamus’s wife.
“Trish. Did you see Natalie leave?”
Trish frowned, the pint glass held at an angle under the tap.
Her eyes went to the door, then back. “No. I was facing you the whole time. I’d have seen her come back through.
She must have gone out the side.” The side door that opened onto the narrow lane behind the pub, the one the smokers used. “Maybe she stepped out for air?”
Emma was already moving.