Chapter 35
Aoife
The motorway signs start counting down to Dublin.
I’ve been watching them for an hour. Mileage numbers dropping in twenties, then tens, then single digits as we get closer. My brain has latched onto the numbers because the numbers are small and finite, and everything else inside my head is not.
Aran drives the way he always drives. One hand on the wheel, one hand on my thigh. His thumb moves every so often, tracing a small absent circle.
Neither of us has spoken much.
I thought I’d be different by now. I thought there’d be a breaking point somewhere on the drive back where everything caught up with me, where the shaking started, where I fell apart properly. It hasn’t come. Instead, I feel hollow in a quiet, manageable way.
Dublin appears in patches. The outskirts. The motorway becomes a dual carriageway. The dual carriageway becomes a road, and the road becomes Ranelagh, and then we’re turning into his street.
He pulls into the garage. Kills the engine. Neither of us moves for a moment.
“Home,” he says, quietly.
“Home,” I repeat.
He gets out, comes around, and opens my door.
I step out into the cool of the garage, and he pulls me into him properly.
One arm around my waist, the other at the back of my head.
I press my face into his chest and breathe.
He smells like him. Detergent and skin, and the faint edge of something that might be the drive or might be the day. I don’t care. I don’t want to move.
“Inside,” he murmurs into my hair.
“Did they text?”
“All clear.”
“What if—”
“No what ifs. It’s done.”
I nod, trusting him. I don’t know how this works. They must’ve had plants in the Garda or some-fucking-thing, just in case.
He keeps his arm around me as we go in through the internal door. The kitchen is exactly how we left it.
Normal.
I stand in the middle, look at it and feel something I don’t have a name for.
Not relief. Not grief. Something adjacent to both.
The kitchen hasn’t changed. It doesn’t know what happened today.
It’s just a kitchen. I’m a woman standing in it, and the world kept spinning without giving a single crap about Darragh.
Just like it didn’t give a single crap about me.
“Do you give a crap?” I blurt out suddenly. “About me, I mean?”
“I fucking love you, you idiot,” he says, hand heavy and warm on the back of my neck.
“What?” I blink like a slow owl.
“I don’t go around killing arseholes just for fun. Mostly.” He gives me that wicked smirk.
“But we’ve only been—”
“Doesn’t matter. When you know, you know.”
“I think I love you, too. I’m not sure what this is…”
“Good enough,” he murmurs. “Shower. Then food. Then bed.”
I nod, trying to process his declaration on top of everything else.
He means it. I know he does. He means it the way he means everything: flat, certain, and without performance. It settles something in me that the drive hadn’t settled. I don’t know how to explain it.
I go upstairs. He doesn’t follow. I hear him moving around the kitchen, doing something with pans, opening the fridge.
Normal domestic sounds that he’s making louder than he needs to, and I know why.
He wants me to hear him. He wants me to know where he is.
That’s a kindness I don’t have the energy to acknowledge, so I just let it land and keep walking.
The shower is long. Hotter than I should have it.
I stand with my forehead against the tile and let the water hit the back of my neck until my skin is pink and my fingers are pruned and I can’t remember what Darragh’s face looked like when he dropped.
It’s already fading. That surprises me. I thought it would stay.
Maybe it comes back later. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know yet.
I get out, towel myself dry, and dress in one of Aran’s fresh t-shirts from the drawer. I brush my hair flat with my fingers and go downstairs.
He’s plated two dinners. Pasta. I eat half of it before my stomach tells me that’s enough.
He notices. He doesn’t push. He takes the plate, wraps the rest in clingfilm, and puts it in the fridge.
“You’ll be hungry tomorrow.”
“Maybe.”
The look on his face is one I haven’t seen before. Not hard like granite, not cold as winter rain, but something quieter, like ancient stone worn smooth by centuries of water, and mine alone.
“Bed,” he says, voice a low rumble that vibrates through the kitchen.
“Yes.”
He holds out his hand, calloused palm upturned.
I take it. He leads me up the stairs with our fingers laced together like vines, and he doesn’t let go until we’re in the bedroom, and then only so he can pull his shirt off, revealing the ink across his chest. He drops his pants and helps me into bed. He climbs in after me.
I lie on my side against the cool cotton sheets.
He lies behind me, hot like a furnace. His arm comes around my waist and pulls me back against him, tight as a vise.
My back is against his chest, feeling each ridge of muscle.
His chin is at the top of my head, stubble catching in my hair.
His breath moves my hair in gentle waves.
“Sleep,” he says, the word a whisper against my scalp.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Try.”
I close my eyes. The room is dark as a confessional. The street outside is quiet but for the occasional distant siren. His hand is warm on my stomach, splayed wide as a starfish, holding me there like I might drift away.
I expect to lie awake, counting shadows. I expect my head to spin like a carnival ride, and the moment in the sitting room to loop in my skull until I couldn’t stand it.
It doesn’t. My mind blanks out.
The last thing I think before I go under is that Cork is three hours away, a lifetime of asphalt and concrete. Darragh is gone. And I am here, breathing, where I live, with a man who feels like home, in our bed, in a city that has no idea what I witnessed today behind closed doors.
Because it doesn’t give a flying fuck.
And neither do I.