I was thirty-four when I met Conor, and old enough to know the difference between loneliness and love, though I still confused them some evenings. We met outside The Cobblestone in Smithfield, both standing under the little shelter of the doorway while rain came down like it had been saving itself all week. I had gone there after work with two women from the office, but they left early, and I stayed because the music was good and because I dreaded going back to my flat in Stoneybatter, where every room felt too quiet since my mother died.
Conor asked if I was waiting for someone. I said, “Apparently not.” He laughed in a kind way, not a clever way, and offered me half his umbrella for the walk towards the Luas. He was a secondary school teacher from Drumcondra, recently separated, with a daughter who was six and a habit of looking away when he said anything too honest. We walked as far as the Four Courts stop and missed two trams because neither of us wanted the conversation to end.
For months after that, we saw each other in the small pockets life allowed. Coffee on Capel Street before he collected his daughter. A walk in the Phoenix Park when the deer were standing in the mist like old ghosts. A quick pint in Grogan’s when I had a late shift and he had papers to correct. It was gentle, which frightened me more than if it had been dramatic. I knew what to do with men who were loud about love. I knew how to escape them. But Conor was careful. He remembered things. He noticed when I was tired. He never tried to make grief sound smaller than it was.
Then, one Thursday in November, he rang and said he couldn’t keep seeing me. He didn’t dress it up. His daughter was struggling. His ex-wife was angry. He felt guilty every time he was happy. I stood in the little kitchen of my flat with the phone pressed to my ear, looking at a mug he had bought me from a charity shop because it had a crooked blue robin on it. I remember saying, “I understand,” though I did not feel understanding at all. I felt as if someone had opened a door and let all the warmth out.
Afterwards I tried to be dignified. I did not text him. I did not walk past places where I thought he might be. I made myself busy. I went swimming at the Markievicz every Tuesday. I took my aunt to lunch near Stephen’s Green. I said yes to a date with a solicitor from Ranelagh who had perfect teeth and no interest in asking a second question. But grief has a cousin, and it is hope. I carried it around even when I was ashamed of it.
Nearly a year later, I saw Conor again on Ha’penny Bridge. It was one of those bright cold evenings when Dublin looks briefly polished, the Liffey catching the last gold of the day. I was coming from a meeting; he was carrying a schoolbag and a paper bag of groceries. We both stopped in the middle of the bridge, awkward as teenagers. He looked thinner. I probably looked harder.
He said, “I’ve thought about you every day.”
I wanted to say something sharp. I had rehearsed sharpness, privately, in showers and on buses. But standing there, with people brushing past us and the city moving around our little interruption, I found I had no appetite for punishment. So I asked him the only thing that mattered. “Are you free to mean that now?”
He nodded, but not quickly. He told me things had settled at home. His daughter was doing better. He had spent the year learning what was his guilt and what was his responsibility. He said he hadn’t contacted me because he thought leaving me alone was the one decent thing he had managed. I believed him, not because the words were perfect, but because he looked afraid of wanting anything for himself.
We went for tea in a café near Temple Bar, the kind with tiny tables and steamed-up windows. We did not fall straight back into romance. That is the part I am proud of now. I told him I had loved him, but that I had also survived him. He cried when I said that, quietly, into a napkin. He asked if he could try again, slowly. I said yes, but slowly meant slowly.
For three months we
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