I met him on a wet Tuesday outside Connolly Station, both of us pretending the rain was not getting through our coats. I had just moved to Dublin from Mayo and was working in a café near Merrion Square, making flat whites for people who looked like they knew exactly where they were going. He was waiting for the 15 bus with a paperback held over his head like it was a roof. I laughed at him, he laughed back, and by the time the bus came, we were talking as if we had missed each other for years.
His name was Cian. He worked in an office near Grand Canal Dock and had a way of listening that made ordinary things feel worth saying. I told him about my tiny room in Rathmines, the mould on the window, the loneliness of eating dinner standing up because there was no proper table. He told me about growing up in Clontarf, about his father’s quietness, about how he hated olives but kept trying them because he believed people could change.
He mentioned Aoife in the second conversation. “My girlfriend,” he said, softly, like he was placing a glass down carefully. They had been together six years. She was doing a master’s in Galway and came up at weekends. I remember nodding too quickly, as if to prove I had understood the boundary. And I had understood it. That was the trouble. I understood it completely, and still I looked forward to every accidental meeting, every message, every coffee that could be explained away as friendship.
We became friends in the way lonely people do in a city: intensely, but with manners. We walked through St Stephen’s Green on lunch breaks and sat on benches still damp from rain. We went to the IFI once to see a film neither of us understood and spent an hour afterwards in a pub on George’s Street pretending to discuss it. He never touched my hand except once, crossing Dame Street, when a taxi came too close and he pulled me back by the sleeve. I thought about that sleeve for a week.
I was not proud of myself. People like to imagine love makes you noble, but sometimes it makes you small and watchful. I learned the rhythm of Aoife’s visits. I knew not to text on Friday evenings. I hated myself for feeling happy when he said she was staying in Galway an extra day. Nothing happened, not in the way people mean when they ask. There was no affair, no kiss in a doorway, no dramatic betrayal. But my heart was doing something dishonest, even if my hands were clean.
The worst of it came in December. Dublin had turned sharp and glittering, all fairy lights and people carrying shopping bags through the cold. Cian asked me to meet him after work at Kehoe’s. I thought, because I was foolish and twenty-seven and full of secret hopes, that something was about to change. He arrived late, cheeks red from the wind, and placed a small cream envelope on the table between us.
It was a wedding invitation.
I remember the noise of the pub moving far away from me. The laughter, the clink of glasses, the man beside us arguing about rugby. Cian smiled nervously and said, “I’d really like you to come.” On the card, their names looked beautiful together. Cian and Aoife. August. A church in Galway. Reception by the sea.
I said congratulations. I said it with a voice so steady I almost admired myself. He looked relieved, and that hurt too, because it meant he had been worried. Maybe some part of him had known. Maybe he had felt the strange weather between us and decided to stand under a different roof.
I did not go to the wedding. For weeks, I told myself I might, that
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