I bought the ring on a wet Thursday afternoon off Grafton Street, with my lunch break running over and my hands shaking so badly the jeweller asked if I wanted a glass of water. It wasn’t a grand ring. I was working in a hotel kitchen then, mostly evenings, mostly smelling of onions and fryer oil, and I had saved for months by skipping taxis home and walking from town to Phibsborough after late shifts. But when I saw it, small and bright in the tray, I thought of Niamh laughing into her scarf at the bus stop, and I knew.
I had a plan. That Saturday, I was going to bring her to St Stephen’s Green, where we’d had our first proper date. I’d carry coffees, complain about the pigeons, wait until we reached the bench near the pond, and then ask her. I kept the ring box in the inside pocket of my good coat and touched it every few minutes, as if it might vanish.
On the Friday night, my father rang to say my mother had collapsed in the kitchen in Cabra. I went straight there. By Monday, we knew it was cancer. By the following Saturday, the ring had become something I couldn’t look at. It felt indecent, somehow, to be planning joy while my mother was learning the names of hospital wards. So I kept it in the pocket.
That was the beginning of the five years.
It wasn’t that I stopped loving Niamh. If anything, I loved her more during that time. She was the one who brought sandwiches to the Mater when I forgot to eat. She sat with my mother and painted her nails a soft pink because Mam said she didn’t want to look sick. She learned the names of all the nurses and remembered who took sugar in their tea. There were days I watched Niamh from the doorway and thought, ask her now. Ask her before the whole world changes again.
But fear had got into me. At first I told myself I was waiting for the treatment to be over. Then I was waiting until Mam was stronger. Then, after Mam died, I was waiting until grief made me a better man, as if grief ever does that on a schedule. The ring stayed in my pocket through the funeral, through the clearing of her wardrobe, through the first Christmas when my father set four places at the table by accident and then went into the back garden to cry.
Niamh never pressured me. That made it worse. She had this gentle way of asking about the future without making it a trap. “Would you ever like a garden?” she’d say, passing estate agent windows in Drumcondra. Or, “Imagine us old, giving out about young people on the DART.” I’d smile and say something useless like, “We’d be great at that.” All the while, the ring sat in whichever coat I was wearing most often, carried from season to season like a secret I was too cowardly to turn into a promise.
In the fourth year, we nearly ended. Not with shouting. That would have been easier. It happened over pints in Kehoe’s after her friend’s engagement party. Niamh looked tired in a way I had started to recognise, the tiredness of someone who has been patient for too long. She said, “I don’t need a big wedding. I don’t even need a wedding. I just need to know you’re choosing me, and not just staying because it’s comfortable.”
I could have taken the ring out then. It was in my pocket. I remember feeling the corner of the box against my ribs. But I didn’t. I was ashamed by then, ashamed of the delay, ashamed that a thing meant to be beautiful had become proof of my weakness. I told her I loved her. She said she
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