I used to believe love announced itself loudly, with certainty, like a song starting in a pub when everyone already knew the words. By the winter I turned thirty-four, I had stopped believing in it altogether. My engagement had ended six months earlier in a kitchen in Rathmines, over a cup of tea gone cold and a silence neither of us could fix. After that, I moved through Dublin like a person keeping to the edge of footpaths, careful not to brush against anything that might ask me to feel.
That Friday evening, I was on the DART from Pearse Station to Bray because my sister had insisted I come for dinner. “You need air,” she said. “Sea air, preferably.” I nearly cancelled twice. The rain was doing that Dublin thing where it seems less like weather and more like a mood shared by everyone. Pearse was packed with wet coats, tired faces, takeaway coffee, and the small impatience of people trying to get home.
I got on the train and found one empty seat beside a woman holding a bunch of flowers wrapped in brown paper. They were daffodils, too bright for the grey evening, and she was guarding them like they were something fragile and alive, which of course they were. She smiled when I sat down. I gave the kind of smile you give strangers when you want to be left alone.
Somewhere after Grand Canal Dock, the train slowed, shuddered, and stopped. A voice came over the speaker apologising for a delay near Sandymount. A few people sighed. Someone laughed bitterly. I looked out at the darkening windows and saw only my own reflection, pale and annoyed.
The woman beside me shifted the flowers onto her lap and said, “I hope they survive this.”
“Daffodils are tougher than they look,” I said, surprising myself by answering.
She looked at me properly then. She had rain on the shoulders of her navy coat and silver threads in her dark hair. Not old, not young, just real in a way that made me suddenly conscious of how closed-off I must have seemed.
“They’re for my husband,” she said. “He loved them. Said they looked like little trumpets declaring spring whether spring was ready or not.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. Then she added, gently, “It’s a year today.”
The train stayed still. The carriage softened around us. People returned to their phones, but I felt as if the air between us had changed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She smiled again, and this time it was not polite. It was tired, warm, and full of something I didn’t understand yet. “Don’t be. I had thirty-one years with him. Some people don’t get thirty-one minutes with the person they’re meant to meet.”
I looked down at my hands. There was a thin white mark on my finger where my ring used to be. I had stopped wearing it the day after we ended things, but the skin remembered.
She noticed, of course. Some strangers see more in five minutes than friends do in five years.
“Fresh?” she asked.
“Fresh enough,” I said.
The train jolted forward a little, then stopped again. Outside, the lights near Lansdowne Road blurred through rain. I told her, I don’t know why, about the kitchen in Rathmines. About how we had been kind to each other at the end, which almost made it worse. About how I had mistaken peace for boredom and passion for uncertainty, until I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like anymore.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished, she turned one daffodil gently between her fingers and said, “My husband and I nearly split up in our fifth year. I threw a mug at the wall. He slept on his brother’s couch in Clontarf for three nights. We were both proud and both frightened. The thing that saved us wasn’t a grand gesture. He came home with two bags of shopping from Dunnes and said, ‘I don’t know how to love you perfectly, but I’d like to keep learning.’”
I laughed then
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