11. Cillian
CILLIAN
I should have told her.
That’s where I keep landing. Every time I sit in this study with the door shut, that’s the thing I come back to.
I should have told Valentina the minute I hung up. I should have walked into the kitchen and said, “I got a call from a woman I knew nine years ago. She says she has something to tell me and I don’t know what it is yet.”
But I didn’t.
I made the calculation I always make. Get the information first. Know what you’re dealing with before you bring it to someone else. Keep the blast radius small. Handle it.
I’ve been handling things for twenty years this way and it has mostly worked.
The blast radius is not small. It’s my pregnant wife crying on the other side of our bedroom door and the words that’s just something Connor would do ringing in my head.
I should have told her.
The call came two weeks ago.
It was an unknown number and I almost let it go to voicemail. I’m in the kitchen making coffee, while Valentina is in the study on a gallery call.
I can hear the particular crispness of her professional voice through the door, and for whatever reason something makes me answer.
Some instinct, the kind you develop in a job like mine where unknown numbers are either nothing or something and the odds of nothing get worse the longer you’ve been at it.
“Cillian Brennan?” A woman’s voice comes through from the other end. I frown. She has an Irish accent, but it’s hard to place.
The hairs on the back of my neck go up.
“Who’s asking?” I say as I pause my handling of the coffee machine, throwing my whole attention to this conversation.
“It’s Claire.” A beat. “Claire Murphy. From Belfast.”
I frown. I’m somehow pivoted to face the window, my eyes staring at the early morning beauty of Central Park, trying to place the name. Claire Murphy. Belfast. Why does that sound familiar?
“You stayed at the Merchant Hotel,” she says, when I don’t answer. “And you frequented The Duke of York on Hill Street. You were there for a summer.”
Specific memories come flying back at me. I was in Belfast nine years ago and I stayed at The Merchant for the first three weeks. I also went to The Duke of York.
The barman didn’t ask questions, the whiskey was good, and the lighting was dark enough that you could sit with your thoughts without anyone bothering you about them.
I walk to the balcony door, step out, and pull it shut behind me.
The air hits me, cool and sharp, the smell of the city coming up from thirty floors below—a mixture of exhaust and the faint sweetness from the pretzel cart on the corner.
“Okay,” I say carefully, refusing to comment on where I stayed. “What’s this about?”
“Not on the phone.” Her voice is steady, but there’s a tightness underneath, like a person barely holding themselves together. “I need to see you. In person. There’s something you need to know.”
I frown, curling my fist on the cool and damp iron of the balcony. “That’s vague.”
“I’m aware.” Then she says quietly, “I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t important. I’ve been trying to decide whether to do this for a long time.” Another pause. “Please.”
I look at the park before I cut my gaze back toward the house. Through the glass behind me I can see the edge of the kitchen, and beyond it, the closed study door.
“Where?” I ask.
Belfast in the summer smells like rain and fried food and, underneath all of it, the estuary.
The sky stays light until ten at night, which bewilders me.
You think it’s earlier than it is and then suddenly it isn’t.
I’ve been here three weeks and the work has been, well, I don’t want to think about the work.
I’m thinking about the work anyway because that’s what I do at the end of every day here when I sit at the bar at The Duke of York and wait for the whiskey to take enough of the edge off that I can go back to the hotel and sleep.
The bar smells like old wood and spilled beer and something underneath it. Old places have that smell. The Duke of York has been there since 1868, apparently. I know this because a sign boasts that fun fact the moment you enter the establishment.
She’s already at the bar when I arrive. Dark hair cut blunt across her jaw, showing off sharp cheekbones.
Brown eyes that go straight to me when I sit down then back to her drink.
She’s drinking something dark—Guinness or stout, I can’t tell in that light.
She has a book on the bar that she isn’t reading.
We don’t talk the first night. We are both just there, occupying adjacent space. When I arrive a second day, she actually speaks to me. “You’re not from here.”
“No,” I say.
“What are you doing here then?”
“Work.”
She tilts her head, glossy brown hair falling across her face as she studies me. “What kind of work?”
I look into her dark eyes, trying to figure out her angle. It appears she was just genuinely asking because she’s interested.
But she doesn’t need to know what I do. That’s classified.
“It’s boring.” I take a drink of my Guinness.
She laughs. “That’s what everyone from away says.”
We talk about nothing consequential—the city, the bars, a film she’d seen that she had strong opinions about, whether the bar’s reputation for its whiskey selection was deserved or just tourism.
She’s funny in a dry, quick way. She doesn’t push on my career and I don’t ask about hers.
We’re both there to not think about our days and we understand that about each other without saying it.
I don’t remember the exact sequence of events that leads to the rest of it.
I’m twenty-seven and it has been a very bad week.
Claire is interesting and I’m interested in forgetting everything.
Her flat is small and smells like coffee and some kind of vanilla candle she has burning on the windowsill.
The curtains are not thick enough to block the late northern light.
I go back over and over again for the span of six weeks. Or was it longer? I’m not paying attention as long as it distracts me from work.
When I return home, I think about her occasionally for about a month, then I don’t anymore.
I don’t remember much else. I’ve tried since the phone call to go back and find more than that, and there isn’t more.
She was a person I liked for a short time in a city I was glad to leave.
She’s at the corner table when I walk into the coffee shop in Queens.
It’s a small place, something that hipsters and Gen Z’ers probably love, with mismatched chairs and the smell of burnt espresso layered over something sweeter, a candle or a diffuser somewhere.
It’s quiet as I’ve arrived sometime after the lunchtime rush.
There’s only a couple of people on laptops and the hiss of the machine behind the counter.
Gone is her short bob.
Her dark brown hair is past her shoulders now, with some silver strands glinting in the light. She’s in a gray wool coat over a dark sweater and she’s sitting with a Styrofoam coffee cup in front of her.
There are fine lines at the corners of her eyes that weren’t there before.
She looks like, well, she looks tired.
The past nine years haven’t been that good to her, based on her face.
She sees me and her whole body tightens, like she’s bracing herself.
I walk over to the table as she starts to stand, the reflex you have when someone approaches.
Then she stops halfway. We both realize at the same time what this is: two people who slept together nine years ago and haven’t spoken since.
There isn’t a normal greeting for that.
A hug would be too much.
A handshake would feel ridiculous.
Her right hand lifts a little, like she might offer it, then stalls there.
I stop a couple of feet from the table. For a moment we just stay like that—her half out of the chair, hand raised, and me standing there with nowhere to put mine.
She sits back down.
I pull out the chair across from her and sit.
Up close, she looks even more tired.
The tension I noticed from the door is clearer now.
She’s holding herself very straight, and her hands are now touching the cup, gripping it harder than they need to.
“Thanks for coming,” she says.
Her voice is exactly the same as I remember. The Belfast lilt bringing back a barrage of memories.
“You didn’t give me a lot to go on,” I tell her, disapproval clear in my voice.
One corner of her mouth moves into not quite a smile. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”
She looks down at the cup then back at me.
I can see the moment she decides to say whatever it is that made her ask me to join her at this coffee shop.
Her chin lifts slightly, her shoulders settle as she meets my eyes and she exhales.
“I was pregnant when you left Belfast,” she finally says.
The coffee shop keeps going.
The machine hisses.
Someone at a laptop near the window shifts in their chair and coughs.
An ambulance wails outside.
All of it is perfectly normal, but I’m not sure if it actually is.
There’s a weird pressure in my ears with my brain refusing to fully catch up with what she just said.
“What,” I ask faintly, shocked that my voice is actually working.
“I found out after you left.” Her voice is even.
She’s practiced this—I can hear it in the steadiness, the way the words come out smooth, like she’s gone over them many times already.
“I tried to reach you. I didn’t have a number.
Just a first name and the hotel you’d already checked out of.
” She bites her lips, looking pained. “I knew you worked for someone in Dublin—you mentioned it once—but nothing specific.”
She pauses.
“It took months to find anything real. By the time I did…” She stops and her jaw tightens for a moment. “I made a decision. I decided not to disrupt your life. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
My hands are flat on the table and I can see them there. They look steady even though on the inside I am anything but steady.
“I raised him on my own,” she says. “He’s eight.”
Eight years old.
Nine years ago.
Fuck. The math works.