“The kind you’d expect,” Saoirse says with a shrug. “He was the one that put me in jail. He likes to show me he’s in control.”
“By putting his wife in jail?”
“I mean, it is the first time he’s done this exact thing,” she admits. “But then, this is the first time I’ve run.”
I stop short. “You… ran?”
She nods, pointedly avoiding my eyes this time.
“About a year ago, I reached a breaking point,” she says without actually giving me details. “I… I decided I was done. I needed to leave. I wanted to be free. So I put aside money, made plans for Da. And yesterday morning, I was planning on leaving Ireland for good.”
I feel my chest tighten as a realization hits me square in the chest.
“That was you,” I breathe. “Yesterday, outside the airport… That was you.”
She nods slowly. “Yes, it was me.”
“You saw me?”
“Of course,” Saoirse replies as if it was always meant to be that way. Her tone is achingly sad.
All I want to do is touch her, comfort her.
But she doesn’t want that. And I still don’t know how to bridge this gulf between us.
“I’ve been seeing you for the last thirteen years, Cillian,” she murmurs without looking at me. “Every time a man with blond hair walks past, I see you. Then I blink and you’re gone again.”
Unable to resist any longer, I reach out and put my hand over hers.
She freezes, but she doesn’t push me away, either.
“You think you’re the only one seeing ghosts?” I admonish softly. “Saoirse, it was too painful thinking about you. It was too painful imagining you or talking about you.”
My chest tightens and my tongue feels awkward and heavy. But I push on.
Some things have to be said.
“So I didn’t. I pushed you to the back of my mind and kept you there in an attempt to salvage the remnants of my heart. But you were always there, just a thought away. You never left.”
“Was I?” she asks uncertainly.
“Look at me,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t lie about this.”
Her eyes soften a little, but her walls are still up. Higher than I can climb.
“That one night with you got me through the last thirteen years, Cillian.”
My body floods with inexplicable warmth.
“Maybe that’s why we found each other when we did,” she ponders. “Maybe that’s what that night was about. I used to think it was my way out. That you were my way out. But that’s not true.”
Her face is half in shadow, half in firelight. She looks unspeakably beautiful.
But her eyes… she’s not seeing the glow of our one night together the way I’ve spent thirteen years seeing it.
All she’s seeing is the nightmare that followed.
“We were never meant to live happily ever after,” she presses on. “We were kids. And now, we’re strangers. There’s no fairytale ending here. We’ll always have that night. But it’s just that: just one night. And it happened a long, long time ago. There’s no such thing as getting it back.”