I met her because the bus never came. That is the simplest way to tell it, though it leaves out the rain hammering sideways across Donegal, the way the sky had turned the colour of an old bruise, and the little crowd of us standing outside a shop in Ardara pretending we were not worried. I had gone up there alone after a long, dull breakup in Dublin, the kind that ended without shouting and somehow hurt more for it. I told everyone I wanted fresh air. Really, I wanted to be somewhere my own life could not recognise me.
The storm had been forecast, but I had trusted Irish optimism and a waterproof jacket that proved useless within ten minutes. By late afternoon, the roads were flooding, phone signal came and went, and the bus to Donegal Town was cancelled with a shrug from a man who looked like he had delivered worse news in worse weather. That was when she turned to me and said, “You look like someone who has made a poor decision.”
Her name was Clara. She was from Rathmines, though she had been living in Galway, and she had come to Donegal to photograph abandoned dance halls for a project she spoke about with such seriousness that I first thought she was making fun of herself. She had a green scarf wrapped twice around her neck, wet curls stuck to her forehead, and a calmness that made the storm seem like something happening on a screen.
There were no rooms left in the small hotel near the corner, but the woman at the counter of a nearby café knew a B&B owner who might take pity on “two drowned-looking Dubs,” even though Clara insisted she was only half a Dub on her mother’s side. We walked there together under one umbrella that gave up immediately. By the time we reached the place, laughing and shivering, my shoes were making a sound like soup.
The owner put us in separate rooms and fed us stew in a dining room with a peat fire and a radio murmuring warnings about fallen trees. There were three other guests: a German couple and a man from Sligo who kept saying he had seen worse in 1987. Clara and I sat by the window after dinner, drinking tea gone too strong, watching the rain erase the road.
I do not remember flirting. I remember talking properly for the first time in months. She told me her father had died the previous winter and that she kept travelling to places he had once brought her as a child, not because it helped exactly, but because grief needed somewhere to walk. I told her about my breakup, my small flat near Phibsborough, my job that had started to feel like wearing a jacket one size too tight. I told her things I had not even admitted to friends over pints in Dublin pubs, because strangers in storms can be safer than people who know you well.
The lights went out around ten. The whole house gave a soft sigh, and then there was only firelight and the weather throwing itself at the windows. The owner brought candles. Someone produced a bottle of whiskey. Clara took out a small camera and, without asking us to pose, photographed the room: the German woman’s hands around her mug, the Sligo man’s profile, the candle reflected in the black glass. When she pointed the camera at me, I looked away.
“You don’t like being seen,” she said.
“Not recently,” I answered.
She lowered the camera then, and that small mercy was the moment I began to love her, though I would not have called it that yet. It was not dramatic. No music, no lightning revealing a destiny. Just a woman noticing a tender place and choosing not to press it.
The next morning, the storm had passed but left its evidence everywhere: branches across the lanes, puddles shining in fields, sheep looking personally insulted. The buses were still uncertain, so we walked through the village and up a road where the hills opened green and raw around us. Donegal after bad weather has a way of looking newly made. Clara photographed a rusted gate. I carried her spare roll of film in my pocket like it
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