Chapter 32
Aoife
He doesn’t say much this morning. Makes coffee. Checks his phone twice while the kettle boils. Puts a bag in the trunk that I don’t ask about, because I know if I ask, he’ll tell me, and I don’t want to hear the answer at seven in the morning with coffee in a to-go cup, warming my hands.
I barely slept last night, but I’m wide awake and buzzing.
We leave Dublin at seven. Early enough that the streets are quiet. The Satnav says two hours, forty-nine minutes. Probably more with traffic.
The city falls away fast. The motorway opens up. Dublin becomes the Midlands, which becomes nothing. Fields. Stone walls. The occasional petrol station looking sorry for itself in the drizzle. The sky is low and gray, the kind that can’t decide between rain or just being miserable about it.
The last time I was on this road, I was going the other direction. One bag. No phone. No plan past the next bus stop, and as much of my savings as I could draw out of the ATM over a few days. All of which went on the deposit on the flat I no longer live in.
Now I’m going back. In the passenger seat of a Q7 with heated seats and a man beside me who kills people, buys me clothes and feeds me.
My life is a mess. But it’s my mess.
I look out the window. The fields roll by, flat and green, broken up by hedgerows and the occasional ruin of something that used to matter. Ireland does that. It leaves its old bones lying around for everyone to see and just builds around them.
“My old job was on Lapps Quay,” I say. It comes out of the blue, like something that’s been waiting years to be said out loud.
Aran glances at me.
“Junior analyst. Investment firm. Different one from his, but the same world. Same wine bars, same networking nights, same small-city bullshit where everyone knows everyone else’s business.” I pause. “Or thinks they do. That’s how we met.”
Aran doesn’t speak. His hand finds my thigh. Stays there.
“He proposed after eight months. I said no. Not because I didn’t love him. I did. I just thought it was too soon. I told him I wanted to wait.” I swallow. “That was the first time he hit me.”
His hand tightens.
I don’t look at him. I can’t.
“Not hard. Open hand. Across the face. He cried afterward. Said he didn’t know what came over him. Said it would never happen again. Bought me a bracelet the next day. Gold. Expensive. I wore it to work and told myself it was a one-off. That I should’ve said yes.”
I stare at the road, wondering if I should continue.
I do anyway. “The second time, I’d burned dinner.
I actually laughed because it was so ridiculous.
Smoke everywhere. I was waving a tea towel at the alarm.
He came in from the sitting room, and I was mid-laugh, and his face was just..
. blank. Completely blank. Like I’d insulted him by finding it funny. He didn’t find it funny.”
I stop. I don’t need to tell him every single time.
The list is long, detailed. It lives in a locked room in my head that I don’t open unless I have to.
Instead, I say, “I want you to understand something.” I turn to face him.
“The man in your file. That man is real. He’s not a mask.
He’s not pretending. That is who Darragh Walsh genuinely is, ninety-five percent of the time.
Funny. Smart. Generous. The kind of man people want to be around. ”
Aran’s eyes flick to me, then back to the road.
“The other five percent is the violence. The knife. The blank face. And that five percent is so well hidden, so completely sealed off from the rest of him, that nobody knows. His colleagues don’t know.
His golf partners don’t know.” My voice is steady.
Flat, almost. “That’s what makes men like him so dangerous.
They’re not monsters all the time. They’re monsters in private, and saints everywhere else, and when you try to tell someone, they look at you like you’re insane. ”
The car is quiet for a long time after that.
I didn’t plan to say any of it. The words just came, one after another, like something unplugging. I’ve never told anyone. The specific, ugly, ordinary flesh of loving someone who hurts you and staying because the good days are so good that the bad days start to feel like the price of admission.
That’s the part nobody tells you. The bad days aren’t every day.
If they were, you’d leave. The bad days are once a month, then once a fortnight, then once a week, and each time they get a fraction worse, but the gap between them is filled with the man who brings you coffee in bed and tells you you’re the best thing that ever happened to him.
You live for the gap. You start to think the gap is the real him, and the rest is just stress, or your fault for burning dinner, or for saying no, or for not being enough.
“Service station coming up,” Aran says. “Do you want to stop?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I want to get there.”
He nods. His hand is still on my thigh. It hasn’t moved.
The road narrows, then widens again. I watch the landscape soften.
The Midlands are flat, functional. Cork is different.
Greener. The hills roll. The hedgerows thicken.
The fields have a lushness to them that Dublin doesn’t, and I forgot that.
I forgot what this part of Ireland looks like in summer when the light breaks through.
Cork starts to announce itself. Names I haven’t seen for a while. Each one makes me flinch.
I watch the outskirts appear. Retail parks.
Roundabouts. A garage I used to fill up at on my way to work, the same faded sign I passed every morning.
The shop where I bought coffee on bad mornings, which, toward the end, was every morning.
The city unfolds around us, and it looks exactly the same.
Nothing changed. I left, and Cork didn’t notice.
The river appears between buildings. The Lee, gray and flat, moving through the city the way it always has.
I used to walk along it on my lunch break.
I used to sit on the bench near the Shakey Bridge and eat a sandwich, watch the water, and think about nothing.
Those were the good days when I could breathe for an hour without wondering what mood he’d be in when I got home.
I wonder if the bench is still there. I wonder if someone else sits on it now, eating their lunch, not thinking about anything. I hope so.
We drive through streets I haven’t driven in two years but remember with a clarity that surprises me. Left at the lights. Right past the church. Straight through the junction.
We pass the end of Lapps Quay, and I see the building where I used to work.
Third floor. Open plan. My desk was by the window.
I used to look out at the river between spreadsheets and think I had a good life.
I did have a good life, for a while. Before the good life turned into a locked door, a man who cried after he hit me and bought me gold to make it better.
I don’t look at the building for long. I don’t need to.
It’s just glass and concrete. The woman who worked there is gone.
She’s sitting in the passenger seat of an Audi, heading toward the man who destroyed her, with a different man beside her who would burn the entire city down if she asked him to.
I don’t ask him to. But it’s nice to know the option’s there.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Safehouse.”
“Do I want to know why you have a safehouse in Cork?”
“No. You okay?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I look at him. “Good?”
“If you were okay, I’d worry.”
He pulls up outside a terraced house on a quiet road I don’t recognize. Two-up two-down. Painted gray. Net curtains. A hanging basket with something dead in it. It looks like every other house on the street, which is probably the point.
He kills the engine.
“Stay here a second.”
He gets out, checks the street in both directions, then opens my door. I follow him to the front door, which he unlocks with a key from his jacket pocket. The door swings in on a narrow hall. Laminate floor. Radiator. A coat hook with nothing on it.
Inside is clean. Functional. The kind of clean that isn’t lived-in clean but maintained-clean, like someone comes in once a week, wipes down the surfaces, checks the windows, and leaves. A sofa. A coffee table. A kitchen at the back with a view of a tiny yard.
Aran moves through it quickly. Checks the back door.
Checks the window locks. Opens a cupboard in the kitchen and looks inside, then closes it again.
He does all of this without speaking, and I stand in the middle of the small sitting room, watching him work and trying not to feel like I’m waiting to be sick.
“Okay,” he says, coming back through. “We’re good.”
“What happens now?”
“Now we wait.”
“For what?”
“For Walsh to follow his routine.” He sets his phone on the coffee table and sits on the sofa, forearms on his knees. “He’ll be at the office until six. He’ll go home. Tonight he’ll be in the apartment.”
I process that. “Tonight.”
“If you want it to be tonight.”
“What if I said I wanted to go home?”
“Then I would tell you I can’t do that. This went past you. Aoife, when you told me about him. He is going to know that you have a real man now, not a fucking coward who hits women. It will be the last thing he sees before it’s lights out. Permanently.”
The words hit me somewhere behind the sternum and stay there.
A real man.
I sit with that for a second. With the way he said it. Flat and certain and completely without performance, like it’s just a fact he’s stating.
“The question is now, Aoife, if you are going to watch me teach him a lesson, or stay here until I get back?”
I gulp. “You can’t ask me that.”
“I just did.”
The question hangs in the air between us.
I look at him. At the set of his jaw, the stillness of him on that sofa. He’s not pushing. He’s not pulling. He’s just waiting, the way he always waits, like he has all the time in the world and no opinion about which way I fall.
Except he does have an opinion. I know he does. He just won’t say it.
“What would you do?” I ask. “If it were you.”
“It’s not me.”
“Hypothetically.”
His eyes hold mine. “I’d watch. I’d want to make sure he would never be able to hurt me or anyone else ever again.”
“I trust you.”
“I know you do. I love that you do, and I will never let you down. But wouldn’t you always wonder?”
Fuck.
That hits me hard. Wouldn’t I always wonder.
Probably. I wouldn’t look at Aran sleeping and wonder if he actually did it, I wouldn’t question him.
But I’d wonder if maybe, somehow, Darragh managed to get help and lived.
I’d wonder if when we walked away, he called the paramedics, and they saved him.
“How will you make sure he doesn’t get back up from this?”
The words are foreign to me. My voice sounds like an echo in the small house.
Aran looks at me for a long moment. The silence stretches out, and I hold his gaze because I need to hear this. I need to hear him say it plainly, without softening it for me.
“He won’t,” he says.
“How can you be sure?”
“I never miss.”
I nod slowly. The certainty in his voice should horrify me.
The complete absence of doubt. Instead, it settles something in my chest that has been restless since I saw Darragh’s face on that phone screen.
Since I heard his name spoken out loud in a kitchen in Dublin and felt my years of carefully built distance collapse in seconds.
“I want to be there,” I say. “I need to see his face when he realizes it’s over.”
Aran is very still.
“Not for revenge,” I say, and then I stop, because that’s a lie, and he’ll know it. “Okay. Partly for revenge. But mostly because I spent a long time being afraid of him. I want to see him afraid.”
He nods once, accepting that.