I met her because I was too proud to run in the rain. It was one of those Dublin evenings where the sky looked bruised from lunchtime and still managed to surprise everyone at five. I had left work near the quays with no coat, no plan, and the kind of tiredness that makes you feel older than you are. By the time I reached Camden Street, my shirt was stuck to my back and people were squeezing under shop awnings like birds on a wire.
She was standing outside a small café with a broken paper bag in her hand, laughing at herself. Or trying to. Apples had rolled everywhere, one under a parked taxi, one towards the kerb, one stopping at my shoe as if it had chosen me. I picked it up and handed it to her. She said, “That’s the only one with sense.”
I don’t know why that stayed with me. Maybe because I had been having a year with very little sense in it. My mother had died the previous winter, and since then I’d become a person who went home, made toast, and watched the kettle boil like it had answers. I had friends, good ones, but grief had made me boring to myself. I didn’t know how to talk about it without making a room go quiet.
She asked if I wanted half her umbrella until the Luas stop. I said I was grand, because Irish men are trained from birth to reject comfort at least once before accepting it. She looked at the rain bouncing off the pavement and said, “You’re absolutely not grand.”
So I stepped under the umbrella. Her name was Niamh. She worked in a bookshop and had been buying fruit because she was trying to become the sort of woman who ate breakfast. I told her my name was Paul and that I worked in accounts, which made her nod with the seriousness of a doctor hearing bad news. We walked slowly, shoulder to shoulder, trying not to bump into each other, though after a minute neither of us tried very hard.
At Harcourt Street, her tram came before mine. She handed me the umbrella and said, “You can return it when you’ve learned to check the weather.” I thought she was joking, but then she took a receipt from her pocket and wrote her number on the back. The ink bled a little from the rain, turning one digit into something uncertain. I spent the journey home staring at it like it was a map.
Our first date was in Dublin two days later, in a pub near George’s Street where the windows fogged up and the music was too loud for secrets. I brought the umbrella back. She said I had misunderstood the assignment, because it was meant to be an excuse, not an obligation. I told her I was good at obligations. She said she was trying to be better at joy.
For six months, we were careful and then not careful at all. We had coffee near St Stephen’s Green, cheap noodles after work, long walks along the Grand Canal when the evenings started to stretch. She learned that I went quiet around anniversaries. I learned that she hated being told to calm down and loved old cinemas. She had a small scar on her chin from falling off a wall in Wexford when she was nine. I had my mother’s habit of humming while washing dishes. We became familiar in the gentle, dangerous way people do when they start leaving toothbrushes behind.
Then I ruined it, or nearly did. The week of my mother’s birthday, Niamh planned dinner. Nothing dramatic, just a table in a place she liked and a promise that we didn’t have to talk about anything heavy. But heaviness had followed me all day. I cancelled an hour before, saying I was
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