Her fingers tap lightly against her cup. “The synthetics.”
“Yes.”
She looks down briefly, then back up. “She didn’t like that part.”
“No,” I say. “She hated it.”
I remember arguments in cars. In kitchens. In hotel rooms. Eva standing in a dress that cost more than most dockworkers earned in a month, telling me I didn’t have to be this man.
“You could walk away,” she’d said once.
I’d told her I couldn’t.
Riley shifts in her chair. “Did she ever ask you to choose?”
“She didn’t have to,” I say.
Silence stretches between us for a breath.
“You still loved her,” Riley finally murmurs.
“Yes.”
“And you don’t regret loving her,” she adds.
“No.”
She nods once, then glances toward the door as if she senses movement before I do.
A knock sounds.
My uncle’s voice carries from the hall. “We’re ready.”
I straighten instinctively, the past folding back into the shape I’ve trained it to hold. Riley stands, smoothing her dress lightly at the hips, and she looks at me for a second longer than necessary.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” she says.
“You didn’t,” I answer with a small smile. As we move toward the door, my mind drifts for half a breath to the day of the bombing.
I’d been meant to drive first. Eva insisted on grabbing something from the flat. I stepped out of the car to take a call. She slid behind the wheel, laughing about something trivial.
The blast came before I could cross the pavement. I still remember the flash. The heat. The way sound disappeared for a moment and left only a ringing void. And somewhere beneath all of it, the certainty that this war had a name. Patrick O’Callaghan.
It always circles back to him. I open the study door and gesture for Riley to step out first, and as she passes me, I catch the faintest trace of something in her expression I can’t quite place.
12
SAOIRSE
The hallway feels different when I step out of the study. I follow Cillian down the narrow corridor and let my gaze travel without turning my head too sharply, taking in the small details that don’t belong in the homes I grew up around. There are scuffed baseboards and framed school photos and a coat rack that actually holds children’s jackets, not decorative ones bought to signal a life that doesn’t exist.
I shouldn’t notice things like that.
But I do.
The floors creak faintly beneath us and the walls are lined with photographs that aren’t staged for press or power. They’re crooked in places and sun-faded at the edges, and I pause half a second in front of one where a younger Cillian stands beside a girl with braids and a missing front tooth.
“Your sister?” I ask quietly.