Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
My life did eventually go back to normal.
Or at least, as close to normal as could be expected.
My favorite gelato was buy-one-get-one at the grocery store.
The mail carrier kept putting my neighbor’s magazines in my mailbox.
I ended up taking three weeks off work while I recovered, and they were mostly pretty good about it even if I did get passive-aggressive texts about how much hiring a temp cost, where did I keep the postage tracking reports, when was I coming back because this new girl was useless, she couldn’t even make coffee.
I ignored all of it except the postage reports question, which I texted the answer to even though they were in a clearly labeled folder on top of my desk and I didn’t know how you could miss them.
They were so grateful when I finally came back to work, in a way I found almost touching except that I knew mostly they just wanted their lives to be easier again.
I’d thought the hardest part would be having to be on the computer so much, because one side effect from my accident was that I got headaches sometimes, especially if I looked at screens for too long.
But the hardest part was staying focused at all, and I knew the blame for that wasn’t entirely medical.
He’d lived south of Dublin, about thirty minutes out.
Somewhere near the coast—me, with my feet in the water, Eamonn, laughing.
I don’t want you to be cold. That short drive in the rain back to his place, the way we’d barely gotten through the front door.
I’d clicked through so many descriptions of the various towns, looked at street views.
Parts did occasionally seem familiar, but in that way where I never knew if they were something I’d experienced or seen in a movie or could just imagine would be exactly like this.
If his shop existed, I should be able to find it.
Surely it would have a website, a listed phone number at least. I typed in Eamonn Gallagher, mechanic, I typed his last name plus variations on garage and auto shop, I felt bad about it but I did try searching up his criminal charges.
I tried social media even though he didn’t strike me as someone who’d be on social media.
Once I got excited—I thought I’d found his sister.
Sio Gallagher, an artist—this one lived in the States instead of London, but maybe she’d only recently moved?
I sent an exploratory message, trying not to scare her away with how insane I probably sounded, and she was very nice but just said no, she didn’t have a brother by that name, she was sorry.
I liked her art style so I kept following her.
I redownloaded the dating app onto my phone, cursing myself when I saw it truly had deleted all my information just as it had threatened to do when I’d clicked through all the prompts to say that was fine, I didn’t care.
If Niall ever came up again for me to swipe right on, that seemed like the easiest path to finding out more information.
That would be if he would swipe right back on me, of course.
I wasn’t confident in that part. I tried searching him up on social media, too, but came up with too many results and none of them seemed to be him.
Even if I could get back in touch with Niall, I didn’t know what I’d say to him.
I could tell him about the mugging and then maybe float a few details from my dream his way, see if he recognized anything.
If he thought it was weird that I was thinking about his family while I was in a coma, I’d pretend the doctors had told me it was normal, replaying your last moments before something like that happened.
When really I didn’t know what was normal.
I was nervous to bring any of this up with my doctors, because I knew how it all sounded.
All my checkups had gone really well, and they said hopefully any lingering effects from my injuries would clear up over time, even the headaches.
And if they didn’t, well, that was inconvenient but certainly in the realm of expected outcomes.
The internet was full of coma stories—I’d pored over them as much as I could, until I started getting that pain behind my eyes again and just couldn’t take any more.
People reporting things they saw and heard while in that state, weird coincidences, the things that brought people back to consciousness.
But none of it resonated with me, or explained what I’d gone through.
The phone at the front desk was ringing, had maybe been ringing for a while.
It was the most delusional thing, but sometimes I thought Eamonn might call.
Especially times like this, when I’d been thinking about him and looking up stuff about Ireland.
I just got a tingling premonition sense, like one day I’d pick up the phone and hear that lilting accent on the other line.
I minimized my browser and answered the phone.
I gave my usual greeting, asking how I could direct the call, my voice admirably under control, I thought.
Perfect receptionist voice. The call was for one of the head partners, a man who would bite my head off if I interrupted his work and who would bite my head off if I didn’t immediately let him know one of his clients had called.
“Just one moment, sir,” I said into the phone, deciding to take my chances.
I clicked over to the partner’s office, apologizing for bothering him but announcing the call.
I was silent while he berated me for interrupting, although I knew that he would still want to talk to this client, had in fact been waiting for his call.
When he finally finished I said, “You’ll have him when I hang up. ”
One of our associates, Caroline, had come out to the lobby to greet an attorney from another firm who was there for a meeting, and I politely asked if I could get them anything to drink. Caroline demurred but turned to the other attorney to check with him.
“Oh, hot water would be perfect,” he said.
I couldn’t have heard that right. “Hot water?”
Caroline had already gone back to talking, and seemed annoyed that this interaction was taking longer than she thought it should.
I generally liked Caroline—she could be a little sharp at times, but I always figured she must be under a lot of pressure, being one of only a few women attorneys at the firm and one of the youngest associates.
She was at least five years younger than me, I was pretty sure.
But she could also be single-minded to the point of ruthlessness, and I guessed this little lobby chat fell under that umbrella.
“Yes,” she snapped. “Can you get it, please?”
Maybe the attorney just liked hot water.
That was a thing, right? Usually with a bit of lemon, so maybe I’d see if I could find one to include on the side just in case.
I got a glass mug branded with the law firm’s logo down from a cabinet in the break room, putting it under the Keurig.
I’ll make you some tea, Eamonn had said.
It had been one of the last things he’d said to me.
I leaned my forehead against the wall, watching the Keurig fill with hot water.
I carried the mug carefully back out to the lobby, and Caroline reached for it, like she didn’t trust me with the handoff to the other attorney.
I tried to warn her about the glass, but she’d already taken it, and I knew a split second before she dropped it what was about to happen.
My reflexive attempt to catch it only resulting in scalding water splashing on my wrist, the mug still crashing to the ground, exploding in shards of broken glass.
“Jess!” she exclaimed. “That water was hot!”
“I’m so sorry about that,” the other attorney said congenially, tapping his briefcase. “I bring my own chamomile tea.”
I almost wanted to laugh. Instead, I made him another mug of hot water, setting this one directly down on the conference room table, where he and Caroline had retired for their meeting.
Caroline did give me a bit of a look that might have been meant as an apology, a kind of sheepish I didn’t know mixed with an Okay, now get out of here.
I swept the glass off the lobby floor, wiped up the water, held my wrist under the cold tap, and tried to settle back in at my desk.
The office manager leaned around the corner in a way that told me she’d been waiting for me to return. “Jessica?”
She was the only one who used my full name, and I really didn’t like it.
So funny how different it had been, hearing Eamonn call me Jessica.
Then, I’d suddenly felt like the name was special, actually, like it had the potential to be the most beautiful name in the world.
I had to stop thinking about it. It wasn’t doing me any good.
“Yes?”
She hesitated, like she knew she was about to bring up a sensitive topic.
It was her gentle reminder opening, which I hated, because I didn’t need a gentle reminder.
A regular reminder was fine. Matter-of-fact, to the point.
And often I didn’t need a reminder at all, had to bend over backward to pretend her micromanaging wasn’t making my job infinitely harder.
“I noticed you’ve been naming files with year, dash, month, dash, day. But remember, it should be dots, not dashes. So year, dot, month, dot, day. Then the name of the file.”
“The IT guy instructed us all to do dashes,” I said. Two years ago. “He said the dots can lead to corrupted files when people do it wrong, since there’s a dot before the file extension name.”
“Well, if you do it correctly then the files don’t get corrupted,” the office manager said. “Okay?”
Mari was right. I was thirty-seven years old, and I was alive. And she’d been right for a while—this job fucking sucked. “You know what?” I said. “I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about something, if you have a minute.”
“You quit?”