I met her on a wet Tuesday outside St Stephen’s Green, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as sit on you. I was twenty-seven, newly single, and pretending I was grand in that way Irish people do when they are absolutely not grand. I had just come out of an interview I knew I had ruined. My shirt was sticking to my back, my shoes were letting in water, and I was standing under the Luas shelter wondering if I could afford a coffee or if I should go home and eat toast for dinner.
She was beside me, holding a paper bag from a bakery like it was something precious. A gust of wind lifted the rain sideways and soaked us both. I muttered something about Dublin having a personal grudge against dry socks. She laughed, not politely, but properly, with her head turned towards me. Then she smiled. That was the first one. Warm, crooked, a little surprised, as if she hadn’t expected herself to laugh either.
Her name was Niamh. She was a teacher in a primary school near Rathmines and had bought three almond croissants because, according to her, “bad days require pastry in bulk.” I told her about the interview. She told me she had once cried in the toilets of Brown Thomas because she couldn’t choose a birthday present for her sister and had convinced herself this meant she was failing at life. By the time the Luas came, neither of us got on.
We walked instead. From the Green down towards Grafton Street, then along the quays as the rain eased into a silver mist. We shared one of the croissants on a bench near the Ha’penny Bridge, tearing it badly with cold fingers. It was not romantic in the film sense. There were buses hissing past, a man shouting into his phone, and a seagull watching us like a tax collector. But I remember feeling, for the first time in months, that the world might still have small kindnesses hidden in it.
We swapped numbers before she caught her bus. I didn’t expect much. I thought maybe it would be one of those lovely little meetings you carry for a week and then lose. But she texted that night: “Hope the toast was good. You deserved better than toast.”
For eight months, Dublin belonged to us in little pieces. We had pints in Kehoe’s when there was no room to sit. We walked the pier in Dún Laoghaire with chips burning our fingers. We went to the cinema in Smithfield and argued afterwards about films neither of us fully understood. She learned that I hummed when I was nervous. I learned that she touched the covers of books before buying them, as if asking permission.
What I loved most was that she didn’t try to fix me. I had come out of a relationship that left me small. I was used to measuring my words, apologising before I had done anything, making myself easy to live with. Niamh noticed. Once, over coffee near George’s Street Arcade, I said sorry three times in five minutes. She put her cup down and said, very gently, “You know you’re allowed to take up space, don’t you?”
I think I fell in love with her then. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was quiet and true.
Near the end of that summer, she told me she had been offered a
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