Chapter 30
Aoife
Iwake up alone.
That registers before anything else. The bed is warm where he was, but the space is empty.
I sit up. The room is pale with early light, the kind that hasn’t decided if it’s going to be a good day or not. My hip aches. My body aches in other places too, the kind that makes me press my thighs together and bite down on a stupid grin before the grin fades, because the bed is empty.
I pull on his t-shirt from the floor because my clothes are wherever they ended up last night, and head for the stairs. The house is quiet. Not empty-quiet. Occupied-quiet.
I go down.
He’s in the kitchen.
Not eating. Not making tea. Sitting at the table with his phone face down beside a mug with its handle facing right. His right. He’s dressed. His hair is damp from a shower. I slept through it all.
He looks up when I come in. His eyes move over me in that way he does, quick and thorough, checking I’m intact before he lets himself look at me properly.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning.”
I move to the kettle and click it on because I need something to do with my hands. “You didn’t sleep.”
“No.”
“At all?”
“No.”
I turn to face him. He’s watching me with an expression I haven’t seen before. Not the hard one. Not the soft one from last night. Something in between that I can’t read, and I can usually read him.
“What’s wrong?” I ask quietly.
“What makes you think something is wrong?”
“Your mug handle.”
He glances at it and then pushes the mug around with a frown.
“You look like you’ve been sitting here all night.”
“Most of it.”
The kettle starts its low rumble behind me. I fold my arms. I’m cold, suddenly, despite the warm kitchen.
“Aran.”
“Sit down, Aoife.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Tell me to sit down like you’re about to deliver bad news. Just say it.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods, once.
“I found him.”
The floor tilts under me.
My arms drop their defensive stance, and I grip the counter behind me. My fingers find the edge of it and hold on.
“What?” I manage.
“Darragh Walsh.”
My vision narrows. Not a panic attack. Not yet. Just the room getting smaller, the walls pressing in a fraction, the light going flat.
Something hot flickers through my chest. Something sharp and ugly that I can’t name yet.
“I told you I would,” he says. Not defensive. Just flat. Factual.
“I know what you told me.” My voice sounds strange. Thin. “I also told you not to tell me.”
“You did.”
“So why are you telling me?”
He holds my gaze. “Because I’m not keeping secrets from you, Aoife. You can be pissed off. You can scream at me to back off. But it doesn’t change anything. He hurt you, and now he pays.”
The kettle clicks off. Steam drifts up behind me. I don’t move.
“What exactly do you know?” I ask.
His gaze searches mine. Reading me. Deciding how much I can take, which pisses me off even though I understand why he’s doing it.
“Everything,” he says.
“Define everything.”
“His full name. Where he lives. Where he works. What he does for a living. His patterns are being mapped by the end of the week.”
I let that land. It sits in my stomach, heavy, wrong.
Not wrong because he did it. Wrong because hearing Darragh described in data points makes him real again.
He’s been a shadow for two years. A shape in a kitchen doorway.
A voice in my head telling me I’m nothing.
Reducing him to facts should make him smaller.
It doesn’t. It makes him solid.
“Tell me,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I snap, moving forward and slapping my hands on the kitchen table. “Tell me what you think you know.”
He doesn’t blink. “Darragh Walsh. Thirty-four. Senior VP at an investment firm in Cork. UCC graduate. Earns six figures. Lives in the Tivoli apartment.”
The Tivoli apartment.
Our apartment.
The room goes very quiet inside my head.
“He’s still there?” My voice cracks on the word there, and I hate it.
“Yes. Your name is still on the lease. Did you know?”
I press my hand over my mouth. I don’t know what sound I’m holding back. A laugh or a scream. Both, maybe. “What?”
His grim expression is answer enough. My God. He kept my name on the lease? Why? The answer jumps out at me, and I gulp.
Two years. I have been gone for two years.
I packed one bag while he was at work, walked out the door, took a bus to Dublin, and never went back.
I changed my number. I cut off every person I knew because every person I knew was someone he could use to find me.
I stopped existing. I became a ghost in a crappy life with a cleaning job, and he is still in that apartment.
Still in the bedroom I slept in. Still using the kitchen where he held a knife to my face.
Still walking across that hardwood floor in his socks on a Sunday morning.
Waiting.
My legs wobble. I make it to the chair and sit down hard. My hands are shaking. I press them flat on the table to stop them. “He’s waiting for me,” I whisper.
Aran doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. We both know.
I open my eyes. “What else?”
“One assault charge four years back. Before you. Different woman. Dropped because she didn’t testify.”
I feel sick. Properly, physically sick. My stomach lurches, and I swallow hard against it.
“I wasn’t the first.”
“No.”
I knew that. Somewhere in the back of my head, in the dark hours when I couldn’t sleep, and my brain wouldn’t stop with every red flag I’d ignored, I knew it.
He was too good at it. The escalation was too smooth, too measured.
He knew exactly how far to push and when to pull back. Nobody learns that on their first try.
“Noise complaint from a neighbor,” Aran continues. “Nine months before you left. Gardai came. No charges.”
I remember that. I remember them knocking. I remember the look on his face when he told me to answer the door and tell them everything was fine.
I told them everything was fine.
I stood there with a bruise under my sleeve and told two Gardai in my hallway that everything was fine, and they left.
They left because I told them to, and Darragh stood behind the bedroom door and listened to every word.
Afterward, he made me tea and told me I was a good girl. Good girl. I fucking hate that.
“The day-to-day is being looked at by someone in Cork. Quiet. Nobody connected to any of this.”
“You have someone in Cork.”
“I have people in a lot of places.”
I drag both hands down my face and press my fingertips into my closed eyes until I see spots. This is too much information. It’s pressing in from all sides, filling up space I don’t have.
“Do you have a picture?” I ask. I’ve spent two years trying to forget his face, but I need to know Aran has got the right guy, even though all evidence points to it. I need to see.
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“Aoife.”
“Show me his face, Aran.”
He picks up the phone. Unlocks it. Scrolls. Then he turns the screen to face me.
Darragh Walsh.
I stare at the photograph until my eyes burn.
He looks the same. He looks exactly the same. Two years, and nothing about him has changed. The same face that went blank, completely blank, when he picked up the knife.
“Enough,” Aran says, pulling the phone back.
“Wait.”
“No.”
“I said wait.”
“I heard you. No.”
He puts the phone face down on the table.
I’m breathing too fast. I know I’m breathing too fast because my fingers are tingling and the room is getting bright at the edges.
He sits there, watching me fall apart from across the table, and he doesn’t reach for me.
Doesn’t stand. Doesn’t cross the space between us.
He lets me have it.
That’s the thing about Aran that I will never be able to explain to anyone.
Any other man would try to fix me. Hold me.
Soothe me. Tell me it’s going to be okay.
He doesn’t. He sits there like a wall between me and everything outside this kitchen, and he lets me break without trying to hold the pieces together.
Because he is going to fix this. Not me. This.
I push back from the table. The chair scrapes against the floor.
“Where are you going?” he asks. Not sharp. Not commanding. Just asking.
“Upstairs. I need to be alone.”
Something moves in his eyes. Something that wants to follow me. Something that’s fighting the urge to stand up, cross this kitchen, and put his arms around me until I stop shaking. I can see it. I can see the cost of him staying in that chair.
He stays.
“Take your time,” he says.
I walk out of the kitchen, through the hall, up the stairs. I don’t run, but I move fast, because if I slow down, I’ll stop, and if I stop, I’ll go back to him. I need five minutes where I’m not being held together by someone else.
I enter the spare bathroom and close the door behind me. I sit on the cold tile floor with my knees pulled up to my chest.
The shaking hits properly then. Full body, teeth-chattering, can’t-stop-it shaking. I press my face into my knees and wrap my arms around my shins and hold on.
Two years, and my name is still on the lease. Two years, and he is still in that apartment, sleeping in that bed, using that kitchen. He didn’t move on. He didn’t find someone new. He didn’t accept that I was gone.
He’s sitting there. Waiting.
And until five minutes ago, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know any of it. I was asleep in Aran’s bed, safe for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, with his name carved into my hip. I was happy. I was so close to happy I could almost hold it.
Now Darragh’s face is behind my eyes again, exactly where I put it two years ago, exactly where it’s been sitting in the dark all this time. Waiting for me to look.
I press my forehead harder into my knees.
He’s alive. He’s well. He’s going to work in the morning, playing golf on Saturdays, drinking wine at industry dinners.
He’s charming women who don’t know what he is.
He’s living a full, clean, polished life, and I’m scrubbing hotel toilets in Dublin and sleeping in a dead-bolted apartment, flinching at loud noises in kitchens.
That’s what he took from me.
Not just safety. Not just confidence. He took my whole life.
My career, my apartment, my city, my future.
He took everything, and he’s still living in it.
He’s standing in the middle of my old life like he owns it, because he does.
He kept it all. He kept the apartment, the kitchen, the balcony, and the view.
He kept my name on the lease like a bookmark, holding my place for when I come back.
I’m not going back. I will never go back. How dare he? How dare he assume I would ever set foot near him again?
The shaking slows. My jaw unclenches. My fingers loosen around my shins.
I sit on the bathroom floor in Aran’s t-shirt with my knees pulled up and my hair in my face, and I breathe. Slow. Deliberate. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
I’m not going back. I’m never going back.
But I’m not done, either.
I don’t know what that means yet. I don’t know if it means I want to face him.
I don’t know if it means I want to watch Aran…
do whatever he is going to. I don’t know if it means I need to stand in front of Darragh one more time and let him see that I am not the woman who froze in the kitchen while he threatened to kill me.
I don’t know any of that yet.
All I know is that I’m sitting on a bathroom floor in Dublin, and a man downstairs cares about me enough to let me fall apart without trying to fix me. A man who spent his night finding the monster under my bed and is waiting in his kitchen for me to decide what happens next.
I press my palms flat on the cold tile and push myself up. Darragh doesn’t get another minute of my agony, my time. However, the mafia deals with shit like this, then so be it.