Chapter 18
18
My stomach plunged. It was more than eight years since Joey and I had crossed paths. The memory could still make me sweat.
I ducked into the bathroom to run cold water on my wrists to liven me up. Who splashes cold water on their face to achieve the same? That would only make your foundation streaky. Speaking of which, I did a speedy swoop across my face with one of the most expensive brands in the world. My stockpile wouldn’t last forever but a meet with Joey Armstrong called for it.
The issue was that I didn’t know if we were enemies or friends. Going by our last conversation, definitely enemies. But the last time we’d seen each other, although we hadn’t spoken, we’d been civil. Hopefully now we could fake pleasantries, at least for a couple of days.
I reached for my hairbrush and pulled it through my hair. A sudden fierce urge descended, to race into the street and find an emergency colorist, who would wash in my beloved gloss, and give me a chic, sexy cut while they were at it.
Full of trepidation, I went down to the bar. And there was Joey, absorbed by his phone. I took a moment, just for a sneaky peek.
He was unrecognizable from the man I’d first met a literal lifetime ago. He’d always had presence but now he looked…like a man from Planet Prestige. One who’d be automatically led to the best table in a restaurant.
His clothing—some sort of relaxed suit—was pitch-perfect, the kind of get-up that could take him from a funeral to an orgy. As for his deceptively low-key black trainers? They had impeccable eco, street and high-fashion credentials.
He was wearing glasses! Since when?
But his hair hadn’t changed—still a long way from short and the same browny-blond color it used to be. He must have a costly colorist? But his stubble matched the hair on his head. Maybe the costly colorist had something to do with that too?
His expression, fixed on whatever he was reading, seemed displeased. Nothing new there. Also familiar was the muscle jumping in his jaw.
…He’d spotted me. Startled, he whipped off his glasses and sprang to his feet. “Hey.”
I was treated to a Joey Special—an unemotional assessment, his eyes flickering over me, trying to gauge my needs, wants, strengths and weaknesses.
“There he is,” I said. Meaning, The narky fucker I know of old.
Holy mackerel, what had possessed me to agree to this?
“Anna Walsh.” He paused. “It’s so…weird to see you.”
“Weird to see you too, Joey. Or I hear you like to be called Joseph now?”
“Call me whatever you like. Special privileges for old friends.”
Old friends? So that was our cover story?
“Drink, Anna?” His accent still had its rough edges; he hadn’t changed beyond all recognition.
I’d been planning to stay on the water. “Gin and tonic.”
“Same,” Joey said, then turned to the bar. “Emilien? Two—”
“—gin and tonics. I’ll drop them down to you, Joseph.”
“This table okay?” Joey asked me.
“Fine.” I took a seat. “So, ah…any update on Queenie?”
He paled. “No. It’s the worst. I feel so bad for them all.”
“Me too.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Joey had never made small talk.
“So,” he said. “Before we get down to business, I guess we should address the elephant in the room.”
My heart clutched. He couldn’t possibly mean…
“My marriage.” He was somber. “Well, the end of it.”
Oh, that . “It’s a sad thing, Joey,” I managed. “It must be tough. I’m very sorry.”
Ten or fifteen years ago, the done thing would have been to joke, but these days, everything felt more fragile.
“And what’s your story?” he asked. “Your relationship?”
Warily, I wondered if he was faking. Did he know it was over with Angelo? We had plenty of mutuals; it would have been easy to find out. But maybe he hadn’t cared enough? At that thought, relief washed through me.
“Angelo and I, we, ah, broke up. About a year ago, officially. But a good while before that we were…you know?”
“Consciously uncoupling?” Joey scoffed. “He’s a Conscious Uncoupler, if ever I met one.”
“Stop!” Regretting having let my guard down, I said, “Angelo’s a really good man and I’ll always love him.”
Joey stared. He’d been caught off guard and he didn’t like it. “Sorry.” Then, “I didn’t mean…I’m a tool.”
“Nice to know some things never change.” I managed a shaky smile.
Breaking the tension, Emilien arrived with our drinks. “Bad news,” he said. “Her ladyship will be in at seven thirty in the morning.”
“Who?” Joey asked.
“The woman who does the rooms,” I said. “Rose? Is that right?”
“If you want your room cleaned, be awake then.” Emilien withdrew.
Cautiously, Joey and I clinked glasses.
“To?” I said. “Rescuing Brigit’s retreat?”
“To rescuing Brigit’s retreat.”
“Okay, here’s what I’ve done so far.” I told him about the public meeting, the email address, meeting Ike Blakely, everything. “I’ve put it all in an email.”
“I was just reading it there.”
“Did you know about a right of way being fenced off? Or the famine house being demolished?”
He stared. “For fuck’s sake. No wonder people are pissed.”
“Brigit said that if it all falls apart, she and Colm are wiped out financially. Can you tell me why?”
“The investors can pull their money out now. They’d make almost no losses, not by their standards. But Brigit and Colm didn’t have capital to invest, so their stake was their home and a two-hundred-year lease on the Kearney Farm. The consortium owns both now. If this collapses Brigit and Colm have no home and a farm of land they can’t sell or lease to another party. They’d be left with nothing.”
“The consortium wouldn’t give it back? Just out of decency?”
He took another swig of his gin. We were getting through it fairly fast. “That’s not how rich people stay rich, Anna.”
“Joey, are you rich?”
“Nothing like that.”
“What’s the situation with the funds?” I asked. “Because the construction workers should be paid. It’s not their fault the work has stopped.”
He tensed, interested. “Convince me some more.”
“They’re just little guys in this mess, they’ve done nothing wrong. But they’ll still have their usual outgoings. And their machinery needs to be fixed or replaced.” Finally, I said, “And if you want to be cynical about it, it’s good optics.”
“I’ll get an income stream sorted first thing, then call the foreman.” He shifted to study me with renewed intensity. “You look great .” It sounded like an accusation. “You’ve barely changed in all these years.”
“Because I’m seventy percent Botox and twenty-two percent HRT. The rest is your bad eyesight. Put your glasses on.”
“They’re just for reading. I can see you perfectly.” His gaze moved over my face. “I’m trying to remember the last time we actually met…”
My heart almost seized up in my chest. Were we really going there?
He glanced away, then refocused, all bright-eyed candor. “Was it my engagement party to Elisabeth?”
That was the last time we’d occupied the same room. But we hadn’t even spoken that night.
“So about eight years ago?” he said.
“About that.” (It was eight years and four months.)
He was trying to set the tone for the next two or three days. We could neither ignore nor acknowledge our long and complicated history. But by presenting a sanitized version of events, he was laying out a surface we could walk on. It was as fragile as thin ice over a deep, dark lake but if we stayed light and careful, we could probably do it.
“So…aaah.” I sought a safe subject. “Tell me about your kids.”
“Oh! Okay…As well as Trea, I’ve three sons, Max is seven, Isaac is six and Zeke is nearly five. They’re great. D’you want to see a photo?”
“Um, sure .” I really hadn’t expected Proud Dad Joey to make an appearance.
“Here.” A picture of three boys.
“Max there”—Joey tapped a finger—“the eldest. He’s a mysterious one, always thinking about stuff.”
Dark-haired and unsmiling, Max did look fairly serious.
“But Isaac?” A smile crept across Joey’s face. “A right little brat.”
I leaned closer. Isaac was grinning, blond and sly-eyed. He was the one who looked most like Joey.
“He’s a riot.” Joey couldn’t disguise his pride. “Always pushing to see what he can get away with. A chancer.”
“Wonder where he gets that from?”
“Wha— Oh, you mean me . But can’t a man change?”
“Uh. Sure. And Zeke? What’s he like?”
Looking at the curly-haired cherub, Joey sighed. “A beautiful little fella. Nothing but love. Another drink?”
I shook my head. “Not much of a drinker these days.”
“Same!” He seemed pleased. “These days I run. You?”
“I had a Peloton in New York. But it was too expensive to ship here.”
Details I hadn’t immediately noticed were coming into focus. The Celtic warrior band was still inked on his left wrist, partially covered by a heavy metal-chained watch and a simple bracelet of silver spheres. No rings, but discreet symbols—Ogham letters?—were inked on the four fingers of his right hand.
“What brought you back to Ireland?” he asked. “Bit extreme. Giving it all up.”
“I didn’t want to grow old over there.”
“Too late.” He smiled hard .
“Haha. Anyway, you moved back here.”
“Because I married a woman who wanted to live here and I did everything she told me.”
Oh my God, I was just dying to know more. But I had to pretend I wasn’t, at least for now. “D’you think you’ll stay in Ireland or go back to New York?”
“What? No. I need to be near my boys. I live two minutes’ walk from them. They matter more than anything.”
“Wow…” His fervor was unexpected. “Fair play, Joey.”
“Fair play?” His tone was sharp. “For what? Loving my children?”
“Sorry, I just meant…”
“You don’t know me, Anna.” He was matter-of-fact. “You haven’t known me for a long time. Elisabeth and I made a commitment to parent our boys as if we were still together.”
And he’d had the nerve to accuse me of being a Conscious Uncoupler!
“Well, aaah,” I said. “Noice.”
“ Noice? ”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I praised you and you got cross.”
“But you—” He stopped. All of a sudden, we were in danger. That hadn’t taken long.
“Touchy subject.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
“She’s good, is she?” My tone was light. “Elisabeth?”
“What?” He sounded distracted. “Oh yeah. Great.”
Frustratingly he said no more.
I’d met her only once. About five months after the most shameful act of my life, I received a stiff, cream card in the mail: an invitation in curlicued script to the engagement party of Elisabeth Boyd-Hamilton and Joseph Armstrong.
I went hot and cold with shock. After my feelings had settled, I did a deep online dive and discovered she was the daughter of a successful hotelier from Northern Ireland. Her Insta showed her skiing, horse-riding and attending charity balls. She seemed close to her mum and there was a disproportionately high number of pictures of her at afternoon tea in five-star hotels. Well, one must find ways to fill the days when one hasn’t got a job, I thought to myself, shaken and sarky.
Hoping that I’d get to talk to Joey in person, I RSVP’d my acceptance. But at the party, he was in constant motion, dropping in on knots of people, smiling, receiving congratulations, sometimes laughing out loud—and always slipping away just as I arrived.
Elisabeth, however, made it her business to nab me. Impeccably polite, she was the last woman on earth I’d have matched Joey with. Probably a decade younger than him (actually, that part tracked), she had a pale oval face, pale slender limbs and an Hermès clutch in a meek shade of gray—although there was nothing meek about the woman herself. Undeniably likable, she had the cast-iron self-possession of someone who was born loaded.
“I met Joseph at a business dinner of my dad’s.” A story she’d obviously told eighty times already that evening, but was happy to do so again. “I said to him, ‘Do something about that hair of yours and I might give you a chance.’ The very next morning, at eight a.m., I got a photo. He’d had it cut short.”
“Well. Yes. Lovely.” I was shaking. “And how long ago was that?”
“Och, barely five months. It’s been a whirlwind.”
I could well believe it.
I remembered how, once again, I’d looked across the room at Joey. Facing in my direction, his eyes had slid over me as if I was blank air, then he’d smiled at Elisabeth.
Something was different about the smile—then I got it. He’d had crowns or veneers, some sort of fancy dentistry. The chipped tooth I’d found so sexy was now covered over. Made smooth and perfect.
Eleven weeks later, Joey and Elisabeth got married; a huge, three-day event in a stuffy five-star hotel in County Fermanagh.
I wasn’t invited.