Chapter 29
Aran
She sleeps like she’s earned it.
I don’t. I lie with her weight on my chest, her hair against my jaw. I count her breaths because the alternative is thinking, and thinking goes somewhere she can’t follow.
One in. One out.
She murmurs something I don’t catch and burrows closer. Her fingers curl against my ribs. Her mouth is soft and open. The last two years have fallen off her face while she wasn’t looking.
Mine.
I said it to her before she went under. She didn’t answer because she didn’t need to. She thought I meant her.
Half right.
I slide my arm out from under her slow enough that she doesn’t stir. She makes a small noise of protest, so I ease a pillow under her head to replace me. She curls into it. Her hand finds the hem of the sheet, fists it.
I stand in the dark for a long moment, watching her.
Two years she’s been running. Two years of cheap apartments, shift work, listening for footsteps in hallways. She said it herself. This is the safest I’ve been in two years.
I’m going to make that permanent.
I pull on sweats from the drawer and a t-shirt. I leave the door open a finger’s width so I can hear her if she wakes. The stairs don’t creak under me because I know which ones do and which ones don’t.
Downstairs, the kitchen is warm. The plates are in the sink. Her crusts, the ones she swore she left for me, are stacked in a neat pile on the side of her plate.
I put the kettle on out of habit. Then I pour whiskey instead.
My phone is on the table where I left it. I pick it up, sit in the chair she was in a few hours ago, and dial.
Dave answers on the third ring. His voice is flat. Not sleep-flat. Awake-flat. Dave doesn’t sleep in the same way a normal person does. He naps at the keyboard and drinks warm energy drinks. It’s why he’s useful.
“It’s late,” he says.
“I need a dig.”
“On?”
“Aoife O’Leary. Cork. Left roughly two years ago. I want everything before Dublin.”
Silence on the line. I hear him typing already. Dave doesn’t ask why. That’s the other reason he’s useful.
“Age range?”
“Late twenties. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight.”
“Narrowing it. O’Leary’s in Cork. There are a few. Give me something else.”
“She was with a man called Darragh. First name only. Lived together, so there’ll be a joint address, joint bills. Council records. Utilities. Anywhere the pair of them show up on the same line.”
“Timeframe again?”
“She walked out twenty-four, twenty-six months ago. Probably a workday. Took one bag. Didn’t come back.”
“So a sudden disappearance from a shared address.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a footprint. Hang on.”
The tapping of keys. I sip the whiskey.
“I’ve got four Aoife O’Learys in Cork county in the right age bracket,” Dave says eventually. “Cross-reference on shared tenancy with a Darragh narrows it to one.”
“That’s her.”
“Riverside development, Tivoli. Lease still in both their names. Nice postcode. Two-bed apartment with a balcony. Not cheap.”
That lands differently than I expected. He kept her name on it. My hand tightens into a fist that wants to rip this fucker’s throat out.
“Name.”
“Darragh Walsh.”
I turn it over. It doesn’t sound like much. It sounds like any other name on any other street. That’s the thing about men like him. They never sound like what they are.
“Keep going.”
“Running him now. Give me fifteen. He’s got more on him than I was expecting.”
He hangs up.
I sit in the dark with the name on my tongue, and I don’t move for a while.
She stood in a kitchen with a knife three feet from her face, and her legs wouldn’t work.
She told it flat, as if it had happened to someone else, and she had rehearsed the version where her voice didn’t shake.
I let her get through it because I understood what it cost her to say it out loud.
Any softness from me would have made her bolt.
I think about her in my bedroom, in my t-shirt with her knuckles split, holding a toilet brush like it was going to do anything against two armed men.
Connor’s office. Keeping her mouth shut with a mafia boss two feet away.
The car on the way back, driving through Dublin in circles because she didn’t know where my house was and left me to work, so she didn’t ask.
A woman who has been on her own for two years, making herself smaller, because a man named Darragh Walsh held a knife to her face and promised to kill her if she ran.
He didn’t get the chance.
That’s the thing that keeps rolling through my head. He didn’t get the chance, because she got out. Now she’s in my bed, and he’s alive somewhere in Cork having a perfectly ordinary week.
Not for much longer.
I get up. The whiskey’s done me no good. I rinse the glass, dry it, and put it back.
The house is too quiet, and quiet is when I start hearing things that aren’t there. I walk it.
Front door first. Chain on. Deadbolt engaged. I move to the sitting room and pull the curtain aside a fraction and check the street. Empty. A cat moves across the hood of a parked Audi three doors down and disappears under a hedge. Streetlights doing what streetlights do.
I check the camera feed on my phone. Front. Back. Side lane. The back-garden one shows the grass, the wall, the lane beyond. Nothing. I toggle through them twice. Clear.
Alarm panel in the hall. Armed. I key through the log. No triggers, no overrides.
I check the back door. I test it because habit is the only thing that’s ever kept me alive.
Outside, the rain patters against the window. Dublin does this. You get a clear night and then a soft rain rolls in off the sea without asking permission. I used to find it annoying. Tonight it suits me.
My phone lights up.
“Dave.”
“This is not what you were expecting.”
“Tell me.”
“Thirty-four. Born Cork city. UCC graduate, First in Economics. ACA qualified with one of the big four out of college. Worked in corporate finance in Dublin for five years, moved back to Cork, senior associate at a mid-tier investment firm in the city. Promoted to VP eighteen months ago. Salary six figures.”
I stand very still. “What else?”
“Clean-shaven, good haircut, golf club membership, does a triathlon once a year for charity. LinkedIn has three hundred connections. Twitter account with a handful of posts about interest rates and rugby. Instagram is private, but his friend list is exactly what you’d expect.
Colleagues. A few lads from college. Professional network.
Here’s the ugly stuff. One charge four years back.
Assault causing harm. Dropped. The victim didn’t testify.
Sealed, but the file predates Aoife’s name on the lease. ”
Something cold settles. Not rage. Something lower and slower. Confirmation.
“Keep going.”
“Noise complaint from the apartment below theirs in Tivoli, nine months before Aoife left. Gardai attended. No charges. Domestic marked on the call, then unmarked, then the file goes quiet.”
“She told them to go away when they knocked.” It hurts me somewhere deep in my soul.
“Current situation. Lives alone in the Tivoli apartment by all accounts. Nothing on dating apps I can access in the next twenty minutes. No wife, no girlfriend on record. No kids.”
“He’s careful.”
“He’s something. A man that polished doesn’t tend to sit single for two years by accident unless he’s choosing to.”
“Or he’s waiting for Aoife.”
A pause. “That too.”
“Send me the pictures.”
My phone buzzes. I scroll.
Darragh Walsh in a navy suit at an industry dinner, wine glass in hand, smiling at something a woman beside him has said.
Darragh Walsh at a charity triathlon finish line, lean and tanned, arms up.
Darragh Walsh on a golf course with three other men in pastel polos, all of them grinning.
A corporate headshot in black and white, slight smile, the kind of face that gets trusted with other people’s money.
This is the man she had.
This is the face he wore in public. The face that bought flowers at the right times, said the right things, stood up in suits at weddings. The face that charmed and made everyone love him.
The other face—the one with the threats, the violence, the knife—that one nobody else ever saw. He kept that one for her.
Of course he did. That’s the whole fucking point of men like him.
“Keep digging. I want his week. Where he is on Mondays. What golf club. What restaurant on a Friday. When he’s at the apartment alone. When he works late. I want his patterns.”
“Timeline?”
“End of the week.”
“That’s tight.”
“I’m not paying you to be comfortable.”
He huffs. “Fine. Anything else?”
“One more. I’ve got a man in Cork. I’ll reach out myself. But I want your digital picture clean before I put any boots on the ground.”
“Understood.” He hangs up.
I set the phone down on the counter.
I’ve got his name, his face, his address, his firm, his routine pending, his reputation pending.
I’ve got an apartment in Tivoli with a balcony, a man who lives alone with my woman’s name still on the lease, a man who is either lazy or waiting for her to come back, or be dragged back.
I’ve got a golf club and a Twitter account and a bank balance and nothing on paper that would ever raise an eyebrow.
Dave gave me paper. The paper is clean. A man like Walsh banks on the paper being clean.
What the paper can’t tell me is what a golf club bar sounds like at eleven on a Friday when the lads are three pints in, and someone mentions his name.
Whether anyone pauses. Whether anyone changes the subject.
Whether the woman who left him four years ago left quietly or left fast, and whether anyone’s heard from her since.
That’s a different kind of dig. That needs a man on the ground.
I pick up my phone and scroll to a number I haven’t used in four years.
The man I’m about to call owes me. He lives in Cork.
He is not connected to the O’Neills. He is the kind of man who asks three questions in the right pub on the right evening and walks away with a week’s worth of a man’s life, and nobody remembers his face the next morning.
I dial.
He answers in four rings. His voice is rough with sleep. “This had better be good.”
“It is.”
A pause. “Aran.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ. Let a man sleep.”
“I need a favor.”
He sighs. “Go on.”
“Darragh Walsh. Senior finance bloke, Cork city. Lives in Tivoli. Plays golf. I want the quiet stuff. What people say about him when they’ve had a few.
Who he drinks with. Whether his friends know what he is.
Whether there have been other women before Aoife O’Leary.
Whether anyone’s ever had a reason to wonder about him at closing time. ”
A longer pause this time.
“I’ll find it.”
“This is personal.”
“I gathered.”
“Take the time you need. Do it right.”
“Money?”
“Same as before. Plus twenty.”
“Plus thirty.”
“Done.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
He hangs up.
I stand at the counter with my phone in my hand and the rain still running down the window.
His name, his face, his address, his firm, his triathlon time, his LinkedIn. A clean digital picture and a quiet man going deeper to fill in the rest by the end of the week.
By the time I sit down across from her at this table in a few hours with a coffee in my hand, I’ll have enough to tell her I know.
On the way past the table, I stop. Her crusts are still there. I pick them up, drop them in the bin.
I go back upstairs. The bedroom is still quiet. The door is still open the finger’s width I left it. I push it open. She’s exactly where I left her, curled around the pillow, fist in the sheet, her hair splayed against the gray pillow.
I strip the sweats and tee off and get back in beside her. She doesn’t wake. She shifts, drags herself across the mattress, and settles against me like she’s been doing it for years. Her head finds the spot on my chest. Her hand lands flat over my heart.
My arm goes around her on its own.
I stare at the ceiling in the dark and run the list again.
Aoife breathes slowly against my chest. Her hand over my heart. The rain on the window.
I turn my head and press my mouth to the top of her hair.
“I’ve got your man, sweetheart. This will end.”
The rain keeps coming. Dawn is a few hours off yet.
I don’t sleep. I power down, lying there with her on my chest and Darragh Walsh’s face behind my eyes, while I wait for the light.