Chapter 1
For those I love and those I don’t know who could use a little fluff right now.
That some things once known would change your understanding of life, of the world, forever was not a new concept to Naoise. He had been experiencing it more and more often in recent years. Some had been joyous realisations, most had been upsetting, but the worst had been those that attacked your foundations; knowledge that lead to a loss of innocence, that made you question everything you thought you knew about anything and even all that you thought you understood about yourself. It was a sort of heartbreak that, though utterly life-changing and shattering, no one else seemed to have any time or sympathy for. It was the sort of heartbreak you were expected to file away and get over immediately because everyone else was too busy living their lives to pay it any mind.
And then there were things like this piece of knowledge that he had just stumbled upon: a long-held understanding of life that was completely destroyed and that came with a terrible secret he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, let alone figure out how he was supposed to move forward now that he knew it.
The second he made eye contact with his father, from where he had halted in the doorway, his body burst back into life and motion and he pivoted and fled. He ran from what he had seen and this new reality in which he existed and the sounds of pursuit that soon began to trickle in around the pounding of his heart in his ears. He escaped from the courtyard of converted out-buildings and whipped through to the shadowy orchards. Naoise sprinted along the dappled avenue between the different sections, trying to push down the need to retch that threatened to slow his flight, as sheets of apple blossoms came down around him with the breeze. He just had to get away and his feet knew this path so well that he didn’t really need to think about where he was going. The answer was obvious. It was where he had always escaped to when he had needed to be alone, when he had needed not to be found.
Naoise skidded around the corner of the area of tall shrubbery at the far end of the orchard and plunged into the entrance to the small hidden garden. He immediately found the familiar spot where he could still just about step back into a section of the bushes and be completely hidden. As he finally settled his adult body into a space that had been better equipped for his frame in childhood and looked out from his hiding spot, he made eye contact with the woman that he now realised had to have been sitting in the garden since before his arrival. As he panted and tried to quiet his breathing, they stared at each other in shock.
Face swollen and wet and red-hot from what must have been violent sobbing that had now been somewhat stuttered and abated by the surprise of his appearance, she sat directly across from him on the little iron bench shaded beneath a majestic old cherry blossom tree that took up the majority of the garden. A few pale pink petals had settled among her delicate arrangement of curls and plaits and she was wearing a long lime green dress – a guest at the wedding taking place in the main house, then. Another little breeze sent a fresh snowfall of them drifting all around her, more catching on her hair, her forehead, her lap.
She opened her mouth as if to say something and then froze as she looked at him properly, forehead creasing as her eyes darted over his features and whatever she found there.
But then his father, too, abruptly crashed into the garden right next to his hiding place and Naoise held his breath and slid his eyes from the woman to the other man. He could feel her own follow the path of his gaze to Michael. Able to glimpse him through little gaps between leaves, he watched a reflection of himself freeze in an echo of his own earlier shock, suddenly hating just how similar they were.
“I... ah... I’m sorry for interrupting,” Michael panted, as he tore his gaze quickly from the woman and darted a look around the garden, empty save for her. Michael coughed as he tried to calm the sound of his own panting and went to turn and leave the garden, his face already reddened from exertion and now turning a deeper crimson hue. “Sorry again to interrupt. I-”
“Were you looking for a young man around your height in a black t-shirt and trousers with black hair?” she asked in a hoarse voice.
Naoise’s wide eyes slid back to her again in renewed horror as Michael paused in his retreat and looked back at her in his contrapposto stance. Naoise watched him frown and consider her for a beat before saying, “Yes. I am, actually.”
Again, Naoise’s gaze returned to her. She nodded and jerked her head towards the entryway in which Michael lingered. “I saw him run down the path past the entrance to this garden. I assume this must be urgent.”
Naoise flicked his eyes back to his father, who pasted his best charmingly bashful smile onto his face, finally gaining control over his expression once more. “Ah, yes, something like that,” Michael replied with a self-deprecating chuckle and a shrug. “Thanks for your help.”
“Not a problem,” she said, and Naoise watched as she mustered up a smile in return to his perfect bared teeth and the appearance of those deep-set dimples of his, despite the wet trails still on her face.
Michael nodded cheerily and strolled more calmly back out through the entrance and down the path, in the direction she had indicated.
Naoise’s eyes lingered on her as the sound of his father’s footsteps on the dirt path grew quieter. When they were replaced by the distant hissing of displaced gravel underfoot as he reached the formal gardens behind the main house, Naoise let out an unsteady breath. Though his screaming nerve endings and cells and thoughts became gradually quieter and steadier, he waited a moment longer and tried not to flinch when she contemplated him once more.
The wind whispered through the leaves above her and all around him. Petals tumbled and skittered across the ground. Light flickered in and out between the dancing foliage and blooms in golden bursts.
He burned with embarrassment, at being caught running away and hiding from his daddy as a grown man by a complete stranger. She had seen him now, though, and those expectant eyes still remained on him. There was no avoiding her, not unless he wanted to stay wedged into the little hollow in the bush forever. Tempting as that was, the fit really was a good deal more of a squeeze than he remembered it. Sadly, unfortunately, hiding from her and from real life forever there was not an option. Finally thinking it safe and knowing it had to happen eventually, he sighed and eased back out into that ever-moving light of the shady little garden.
“Why did you say that to him?” he asked her as they finally faced each other without a veil of leaves between them.
Naoise couldn’t think of any better way to address the situation, couldn’t fathom any way to make it all seem more normal, natural. He figured he might as well sate his curiosity rather than try at some farce of seeming like he wasn’t a ridiculous person. Saying absolutely nothing had not appeared to be a viable alternative, although he now wondered if perhaps he could not have just run away. Naoise would have looked no stranger than he already must have seemed and it would probably have been easier. But it was too late, he’d already asked and he did want to know. He did feel like he now owed this person something.
She simply shrugged and said, “You looked like you really didn’t want to be found.”
He considered her words and then considered her. “I could say the same for you. I’m sorry for interrupting.”
Another shrug and a less convincing attempt at a grin than the one she had presented to his father. “This day couldn’t get much worse anyway,” she said, “What’s a little abject mortification between complete strangers?”
Naoise continued contemplating her and she dropped her gaze to the ground. He thought of leaving now. That had seemed like a reasonable enough cue to do so and with so much ground to cover, his father was unlikely to come back this way. It was the perfect time to leave. He could return back to the out-buildings, go get in his car, and get the hell out of there. But that would mean risking running into Her.
No, this garden, a place his father had now already checked, was one of the safest places he could be for the time being.
Yet again, he remembered that the woman before him had helped him. The desire to flee from such a naked and intense display of emotion from a stranger pressed in on him but with relief from being saved flooding his veins, with that glorious release of breath when his father had walked away freeing up space in his brain, Naoise wondered if turning away from her wasn’t actually the polite thing to do. Or, rather, it made him remember that turning your back on another person’s obvious suffering was actually just the easy thing to do. Once he had acknowledged that, it made it impossible to drown out his conscience. He could not ignore what was right.
“Are you okay?”
The words sounded thin and empty and stupid and he cringed at them as they made their way out of his mouth. But then her head dropped into her hands and her shoulders were shaking and she was crying again.
She wailed like a child. The noise made Naoise freeze in instinctual horror again but then he shook his head at this self-indulgence and took some jerky steps toward her, fighting his uncertainty with each movement and trying to dream up some way to help. When he reached the ring of thickly petal-dusted grass under the tree, he took a deep breath and quickly crossed the final few steps to the bench, lowering himself onto it and next to her.
Naoise wanted to put a comforting hand on her shoulder or arm or back, wanted to do something, but enough skin was exposed around the thin straps and low back of her dress that he could find nowhere to politely place his palm on this stranger. As he considered this, he could see that her pale upper arms were covered in goosebumps from the cool spring air in the shaded space. As he had fled without his jacket earlier, he couldn’t even offer her that. Stuck, he faced forward and dropped his floundering hands limply into his lap. He simply sat there, trying to think of anything he could do for her, as she cried.
After some time, her tears calmed again, just enough for words to leak between the heaving of her body and the gasping cries, to escape from behind the curtain of her hair, though they were somewhat muffled by the hands covering her face. “He brought his new girlfriend.” That’s what it sounded like but he wasn’t entirely certain.
“Sorry?” Naoise said, tilting his head a little closer to her to better make out the words.
“His new girlfriend. He brought her,” she said, a little louder and more clearly, lifting her face from her hands and turning to him.
So close by, her emotion was even harder to face. Naoise tried to hold her gaze but couldn’t bring himself to look her right in the eye. He fixed his eyes on her tear-clumped eyelashes instead and, yet again, winced at himself as he responded with an, “Oh.”
She nodded at this, as if it were some eloquent reply. “Lara and Pat forgot to tell me. Things got so hectic coming up to the day, especially with her mam being sick. It ‘slipped their minds,’ Lara told me in a panic when she saw me at the church earlier. And what could I say? It’s their big day and it almost didn’t happen. It’s not about me. So I laughed it off. Said it wasn’t a big deal and she shouldn’t worry about it.”
“That still sounds difficult. It sounds like you have every right to be upset,” Naoise told her, still not overly enamoured by this latest attempt at a reply of his but it was an improvement, nonetheless.
“We were engaged,” she said now, clearly not too concerned with his less-than-dazzling conversational skills. “We were together for eight years. We split last month. And Lara and Pat were my friends first. And he brings someone else to this wedding that we were meant to attend together, that I had to drive down to for the day because we’d booked our room together and I have nowhere to stay now.”
Naoise let out a breath. “Wow,” he said, unable to think of anything else and now truly despairing at his own stupidity.
Yet, she laughed at it and he grinned at the loud and infectious sound. It seemed that every emotion she felt was done so clamorously. She shook her head. “I just can’t believe this is my life. I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping on my younger sisters’ couches while he stays in the apartment I decorated. Or that I still don’t have any money. Or that I’ve been priced out of the city I’ve loved for over a decade. Or that I’m fucking bawling in front of some random guy at a wedding. Why is everything so damn hard?”
Naoise loosed a big gust of air out of his mouth and nose and did a little head shake of his own. “I don’t know.” They sat in silence with that, for a moment, as the leaves overhead rustled and shadows waltzed with the roiling petals across the ground.
“So,” she asked quietly, “Why are you hiding from your father?”
“Wha- how did you know he was my dad?”
She gave him a look. “Aside from the fact that you’re his clone? Except he’s...”
“Better looking? More charming?” Naoise supplied, rolling his eyes.
Another look. “No,” she said slowly, “He’s... it’s like he’s very careful about how he’s being perceived all the time.”
Naoise blinked and considered this. Was that true? Was that even a fair assessment given the brief and fraught experience she’d had with him? It seemed strange to him that anyone would have a not entirely positive first impression of his father. Everyone liked Michael. Everyone had always told Naoise about what a heartbreaker Michael had been and what good craic he was and how he used to set trends in town when he’d arrived from New York in his late teens, returning with his own father to his homeplace and seeming unbearably cosmopolitan and sophisticated to his Irish peers. And all of the things that Naoise had inherited from his father, though they truly were almost exact copies of each other, had never been received the same way because he was more like his mother in every other sense. He wasn’t cool or easy-going or quick with his words. He was moody and quietly spoken and it was hard to truly get to know him. Naoise had always thought that he cared too much while his father didn’t care at all, just did as he pleased, and was admired for it. Naoise had always wanted to be even more like his father, beyond their looks, had always wanted a little bit of that ease for himself.
It had never even occurred to him that it might all have been actually something that his dad worked at. What if all that charm was, in fact, something he carefully crafted? Was it some calculated thing to make people see what Michael wanted them to see? It had clearly made Naoise blind to many things, after all.
Looking at this person he would probably never see again, he surprised himself once more by admitting, “I just saw him cheating on my mum. I freaked and bolted.”
Her big eyes went rounder and her mouth formed an, “Oh,” that slipped out into the space between them. “Oh, dear,” she then added.
“Exactly.” He looked forward again, away from those probing eyes.
“Tough day at the office all round,” she said with a sigh and Naoise let out a little snort of laughter. They glanced at each other and she laughed as well, eyes crinkling, and then they were both giggling. The note of hysteria that ran through the sound only seemed to spur them on until she was wiping tears from her eyes again and clutching her stomach. Her chuckles were coming in bursts, like a machine gun, and the wild noise only made him laugh harder and harder.
“Oh no,” he gasped. “I’m properly in pain.”
“We need to stop,” she managed to say between the bursts.
Finally, the laughter slowed and eased and trickled to a stop. Both of them were wiping at their eyes and bent over from it when they made eye contact again.
“I haven’t laughed like that in years,” Naoise said, “I didn’t imagine myself laughing at all today.”
She nodded. “I never seem to have time for it any more but I remember doing my machine-gun laugh a lot in college – much to everyone’s amusement.”
Naoise tilted his head and grinned at her. “That’s exactly how I described it in my head a minute ago. A machine-gun laugh.”
Her mouth tilted up at the corners in return. “It’s pretty accurate. God, I really don’t have an elegant bone in my body. And I probably look an absolute state right now. I should really sort myself out and get back before someone sends out the search party.”
Naoise darted a glance over her features and felt his forehead crease. Her fingers floated to her face as she frowned in reply. “Is it that bad?”
He didn’t want to hurt her feelings but. “You just do look like you’ve been crying. A lot.”
“Well, fuck,” she sighed.
Naoise glanced at his watch. “I think the bride went for the full package with Joy. Pricey but it means she’s probably still around.”
“Joy?”
“The makeup artist who works with us. She stays for pretty much the whole thing to do any top-ups if you’re willing to pay the top rate. I bet she can help make it look a little less like you’ve been bawling and cackling – no offence.”
“None taken,” she said with a dismissive shrug, “But, ‘us’? Do you work here?”
Naoise startled at that, realising he’d been confiding and getting hysterical with this person and he really didn’t know a single thing about her, not even her name, nor she his. “Sorry, yeah, my name’s Naoise. This is my parent’s place. I don’t normally work here any more but I came to help out today because it’s a high profile thing or something. I don’t know. Mum asked.”
She nodded at this. “Lara’s a really big fitness influencer now. She’s got a lot of followers.”
“Oh,” Naoise simply replied, eyebrows rising, not sure what to say to that.
“I’m Emmy,” she said. “And a patch-up job would actually be appreciated. Although, I’m not sure what she’ll be able to do for a dire case like this. I’m scared to take a peek in my front camera to assess the damage.”
“Don’t bother,” Naoise said and when Emmy started in surprise again, he waved his hands in front of himself in a panic. “It’s not that bad, I swear! I just think you’ll get in your head about it. Let me bring you to Joy. I can sneak you in through the back service entrance.” He jumped to his feet and held a hand out to her.
Emmy stared at that hand and then back up at him, concern etched all over her still-wet face. “But what about your dad?”
Naoise, amazingly, had somehow managed to forget all about that waking nightmare for a moment but as he noted that worry in her eyes and gathered brows and tight jaw, he was overwhelmed by the need to help Emmy. He wanted to properly repay the debt he now owed her. He wanted to take away even a fraction of her pain. He wanted to see her eyes crinkle up again as she smiled.
“He’s the consummate professional,” Naoise assured her, “So, if we do run into him, he won’t say or do anything with a guest around.”
Emmy frowned a little more but she reached up and took his hand and allowed him to help her to her feet. She let him hold her elbow when she staggered a little, dizzy from all of the energy used up in expelling so many feelings, and then went with him as he guided her out of the garden and towards the house. And if she realised that her hand in his was perhaps more a comfort to him than to her, she said nothing about it to Naoise.