I thought the person I would miss most was Niamh. That seemed obvious. We had lived together in a small flat off Harold’s Cross Road where the kitchen window never closed properly and the radiators made a sound like someone clearing their throat. We had been together for four years, long enough to know each other’s coffee order, bad moods, childhood stories, and the exact silence that meant a row was coming. When she ended it on a wet Thursday in February, I prepared myself for missing her. I did not prepare myself for missing her father.
His name was Brendan, though everyone called him Bren. He was a retired bus driver from Cabra with hands like old leather and a habit of saying very little until the one sentence that mattered. When Niamh first brought me home, I was terrified of him. He sat in the corner of the sitting room watching the match, asked me if I followed any team, and when I said I wasn’t really into football, he nodded like I had confessed to a minor crime. For the first year, I thought he didn’t like me. Then one Christmas morning, he handed me a cup of tea without asking how I took it. Milk, no sugar. He had noticed.
After that, we became a strange sort of friends. Not the kind who texted or hugged, but the kind who could sit comfortably in the same room. If Niamh was late getting ready, Bren and I would stand at the front window and comment on the weather as if we were both employed by Met Éireann. Sometimes he took me for a pint in Dublin, usually somewhere quiet, and told me stories about driving the 46A, about students leaving violins and shopping bags and once, a sleeping ferret, on the bus. He knew the city by its stops, its turns, its small human dramas.
When Niamh and I broke up, I lost him too. That felt greedy to admit. You are allowed to grieve a relationship, but nobody tells you what to do with all the people attached to it. Her mother’s birthday cards stopped. Her brother unfollowed me. Bren simply disappeared from my life, as he had every right to do. Still, for months, whenever I passed through Phoenix Park or saw a bus driver lift a hand to another driver, I thought of him. I missed his quiet approval. I missed being known by someone who had no need to perform affection.
The last time I saw him was by accident, outside the Mater Hospital. I had been visiting a colleague after a cycling accident, and there was Bren, standing near the entrance with a paper bag from a shop and his cap pulled low. He looked smaller than I remembered. For a second, I considered pretending not to see him, because grief can make cowards of ordinary people. But he spotted me first and lifted his chin.
“Well,” he said. “There you are.”
That was
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