I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday evening outside the Abbey Theatre, when the rain was coming down sideways and everyone on Abbey Street seemed to be personally offended by the weather. She was trying to open a broken umbrella with one hand and hold a takeaway coffee in the other. I offered her mine, not because I was gallant, but because I had already given up on staying dry. She laughed and said, “You’ll regret that before O’Connell Bridge.”
She was right. By the time we reached the bridge, my coat was soaked through and my shoes were making that awful squelching sound that turns a grown man into a child. She insisted on buying me another coffee in a small place near Temple Bar, and that was where I learned she was a primary school teacher, she hated coriander, she could name every county in Ireland in alphabetical order, and she was engaged to a man called Mark who lived in Galway.
I remember the word “engaged” landing softly, like a door closing in another room. It did not stop the conversation. If anything, it made it safer. I was not a threat, and she was not available, so we spoke with the kind of freedom strangers sometimes get for one evening. We talked about grief, bad dates, school plays, our favourite corners of St Stephen’s Green, and how Dublin could feel like a village when you were trying to avoid someone and like a continent when you were lonely.
We did not exchange numbers that night. I thought that was the end of it, a tiny bright thing the city gives you and then takes back. But two weeks later, I saw her again in Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street, reaching for a poetry collection I had pretended to like in college. She recognised me immediately and said, “You’re the drowned man.” After that, we became something I still struggle to name.
We met for coffee every few weeks. Never dinner. Never drinks that went too late. She was careful without being cold, and I respected that, or at least I tried to. We walked around Merrion Square on her lunch breaks. Sometimes she brought me stories from her classroom, tiny disasters involving glitter, lost teeth, and children who believed teachers lived in cupboards after 3 p.m. I told her about my father’s illness, about the flat in Rathmines I could barely afford, about how I had started waking up every morning with a heaviness I could not explain.
Niamh had a way of listening that made you want to become more honest than you had planned. She never gave grand advice. She would just say things like, “That sounds lonely,” and somehow that was enough to make me feel less alone. I began to measure weeks by whether I would see her. I knew this was dangerous. I knew she belonged to a life already chosen, with a ring on her finger and a man who called during our coffees sometimes, making her smile in a way I both admired and envied.
The worst part was that Mark was not a villain. I met him once, outside Grogan’s, completely by accident. He was tall, warm, and funny, the kind of man who shook your hand properly and remembered your name. He thanked me for “keeping Niamh entertained with book talk” when she was in Dublin. I wanted him to be smug or careless. Instead, he was decent. That made the line between right and wrong painfully clear.
The incident I remember most happened the week before her wedding. She asked if I had time for one last walk. We met at the Ha’penny Bridge just before sunset, when the Liffey was catching gold between the grey buildings. She looked tired but
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