I used to think betrayal was a single act, something dramatic and visible, a door closing in a hotel corridor or a phone lighting up at midnight. I didn’t know it could happen quietly, while washing dishes after dinner, while laughing too hard at someone’s joke, while walking home through Dublin rain and wishing you were going back to a house that wasn’t yours.
Ciara had been my best friend since college. We met in a damp flat in Rathmines, both of us pretending we knew how to cook pasta without turning it into glue. She was bright and blunt and loyal in a way that made you feel chosen. When she married Eoin, I stood beside her in a green dress and cried before she even reached the top of the aisle. I loved him then because she loved him. That was all.
Years later, after my own long relationship ended, I found myself in their kitchen in Phibsborough nearly every Friday. Ciara worked late in the hospital, and Eoin would make tea while I waited for her, the two of us talking about ordinary things: books, rent, the state of the buses, whether St Stephen’s Green was nicer in spring or autumn. He was gentle without making a performance of it. He listened properly. At first, I mistook the comfort of being seen for friendship. Maybe that is how I let myself off the hook.
The moment I knew was horrible in its smallness. We were all in Grogan’s one wet Saturday, squeezed around a table, coats steaming, pints half-finished. Ciara went to the bar, and Eoin leaned over to tell me something funny about a man outside arguing with a parking meter. I laughed, and he smiled at me, and my whole body went still. It was like someone had turned a light on in a room I had been pretending was empty.
After that, I hated myself every day. I became two people. One was Ciara’s friend, who brought soup when she was sick and remembered her mother’s anniversary and sent her voice notes from the Luas. The other was a coward who checked if Eoin had seen her Instagram story, who replayed harmless conversations until they became something poisonous, who felt jealous when he put his hand on his wife’s back.
Nothing happened between us. I say that because it matters, but also because it doesn’t save me. I never kissed him. I never told him. He never encouraged me. If anything, his kindness made it worse because there was nothing to accuse him of. The rot was mine. I carried it around Portobello and along the canal, into work, into bed. I would wake at 3 a.m. with shame sitting on my chest, thinking of Ciara’s face when she had asked me to be godmother if they ever had a child.
The breaking point came on Sandymount Strand. Ciara and I had gone for a walk because she said I seemed “far away.” The tide was out, the sky low and silver, dogs running like mad things over the wet sand. She linked her arm through mine, the way she always had, and said, “You know you can tell me anything.”
I nearly lied. I wanted to. I wanted to keep my place in her life, to wait until the feeling burned itself out, to be decent without paying the price. But standing there beside her, I understood that my silence had already become a kind of theft. So I told her. Not in a grand confession. In ugly little pieces. I said I had developed feelings for Eoin, that I was ashamed, that nothing had happened, that I was going to step back from both of them because I didn’t trust my heart to behave just because my hands had.
She didn’t slap me or shout. That would have been easier. She simply let go of my arm. I remember the cold immediately. She stared out at the water for a long time and then said, “I don’t know what to do with that.”
We walked back mostly in silence. Before she got into a taxi
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
