I met her on a wet Thursday in Dublin, the kind of evening when the whole city seems to be shining under streetlights. I was waiting outside a café near Grafton Street, trying to keep a paper bag of books dry under my jacket, when she asked if the 46A had already gone. She was laughing before I answered, because we both knew neither of us had a clue. Her name was Maeve. She had a navy coat, red lipstick, and the sort of tired kindness that makes you tell the truth quicker than you planned.
We had coffee because the rain got worse. Then another coffee the next week. Then pints in The Long Hall, a film at the IFI, chips shared on the steps near Temple Bar at midnight like we were students again. I was thirty-seven, divorced two years, and had been walking around with my heart packed away like something breakable. Maeve made me feel like it was safe to take it out.
She told me she was separated. Not dramatically, not with bitterness. “It’s over, really,” she said one night, watching a candle burn down between us in a small Italian place off George’s Street. “We’re only sorting the practical stuff.” I believed her because I wanted to, and because she never seemed like a person who lied. She had a way of putting her hand over mine that felt like a promise.
There were things I noticed, of course. She never stayed the night. Her phone was always face down. She preferred places on the south side where, she said, she was less likely to bump into work people. Christmas came and she vanished for five days, texting me from “down home” with little photos of frosty fields and a mug of tea. I asked once if she was sure she had space in her life for me. She kissed me in the middle of St Stephen’s Green, under bare trees and a sky the colour of tin, and said, “I’m trying.”
Trying became enough for me. That was the embarrassing part. I made a home out of nearly. I learned the rhythm of her absences. I became grateful for Tuesday evenings, for an hour at lunch, for voice notes recorded in a whisper. I told myself love in your late thirties was complicated. I told myself everyone had history. I told myself patience was noble, when really I was afraid to ask a question that might take her away from me.
The truth arrived on a Saturday in March in the most ordinary way possible. I was in Dun Laoghaire, buying a birthday present for my niece. The sea was rough and bright, and families were queuing for ice cream like it was summer by force of will. I saw Maeve before she saw me. She was outside a shop, holding a little boy’s scooter in one hand and laughing at something a man beside her had said. The man leaned down and kissed her cheek. Not a friendly kiss. Not an ex-husband kiss. A daily-life kiss. A we-belong-to-each-other kiss.
I stood there with a stuffed rabbit in my hand and felt my body go cold. The little boy called her Mam. The man called her love. Maeve turned then and saw me across the pavement. Her face changed so completely that I knew everything before she said a word. She didn’t come over. She just looked at me with panic and apology and something else
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