14. Lorcan
LORCAN
Over the next week I barely spoke to anyone. I skipped hurling practice. I ignored Finn’s messages.
I did not go to the tower.
Every second, I felt her on the other end of the separation. Pacing the tower. Watching the door. Wondering what had happened to me.
I stayed away anyway. I followed Nuala instead. Quietly. Always out of sight.
The whole time, I felt eyes on the back of my neck, like the Sons had stretched a thin wire from me to them and were waiting to yank it tight. The surveillance report in my pocket felt heavier by the hour.
I followed Nuala from her house, through campus, to her part-time job as a waitress in a restaurant on the other side of town.
She didn’t once look back. Didn’t clock me. Couldn’t fucking sense she was in danger.
God, she even went to the same damn café every morning like clockwork, like a fucking cliché.
I lingered outside of The Shamrock she played for herself. She wasn’t afraid of emotion, nor of being strange.
I swallowed, then pushed. “What else does she do? Besides play.”
Finn lifted an eyebrow. “You really want to know?”
I nodded.
“Alright,” he said, voice warming. “She loves to garden. Obsessed with botany stuff. She knows the medicinal properties of every single wild plant in Ireland. She… crochets, weirdly. She made me a scarf. It’s awful, but I wear it.”
After that, the questions came easier. I kept my tone light, as if I were only teasing or making conversation, and Finn, oblivious, answered every one.
He told me about the way she collected cuttings from the campus greenhouse, how she kept half-finished crochet projects stuffed in her bag, how she lost track of time whenever she was sketching plants in her notebook.
He told me she hummed under her breath when she was nervous, that her palms were so sensitive she couldn’t stand to hold chips in them, that banana peels made her skin itch.
He laughed as he whispered about her ridiculous fear of clowns and how she slept with the window cracked open even in winter because she couldn’t stand feeling trapped.
He spoke without hesitation, with the soft pride of someone already half in love, never noticing how each detail slid neatly into the blanks on the dossier burning in my pocket.
The guilt caught at the back of my throat, but I kept going because I was being watched.
“What about her family?” I asked eventually. “They sound close.”
Finn’s shoulders dipped. “Her mam’s been sick a while. She checks on her between classes. Her dad…” He grimaced. “They’re complicated.”
I hesitated. “And your father? What does he think of her?”
“As if I’ve told him.” Finn huffed a humorless breath. “You know him. He’d never approve.” His jaw tightened as he stared at the girl bent over the cello. “But I don’t give a damn.”
“So no taking her home for Christmas?”
Finn shook his head, his sandy hair falling over his forehead. “And I never will. Not because I’m embarrassed of her. I’m ashamed of them.”
I studied his profile, the rigid set of his mouth, the bitterness he was trying not to show.
Then I glanced back to Nuala, still playing, still making wails with her voice along with the music. And I understood.
Dinner at Finn’s house had always felt like stepping into a museum. His mother refused to leave her rooms unless she was painted and polished to perfection and dripping in diamonds. His father sat at the head of the table like a statue, stiff-backed and silent.
Mrs. Aherne loudly and poisonously cut down anything that did not fit her perfect image, like that time Finn pierced his eyebrow when we were sixteen. She made such a scene that he yanked the stud out on the spot just to shut her up.
Mr. Aherne’s disapproval might have been quiet and cold but it was no less impactful.
They would hate Nuala before they even cared to get to know her, and they would make a show of it, humiliating her and Finn both.
The last furious note of “Lamentatio” faded. Nuala closed her eyes for a breath, then lifted her bow. The next piece unfurled slow and aching, a cello arrangement of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight.
She leaned into each stroke, as if she were pouring herself into the music, the long, weighted notes drifting through the room, suspended in a way that felt like it hurt to let go.
It didn’t sound like performance. It sounded like someone remembering a grief they carried quietly, a kind of solitude that lived deep under the skin.