Page 19 of Irish Legacy

Trish backed toward the hallway. “I’ll leave you to it. Take whatever you find.”

Quinn looked up, surprised, then smiled. “You sure? Thank you, Trish.”

Trish lingered in the doorway just long enough to watch Quinn sit on the edge of the mattress, then pulled the door half-shut and headed back down to the bar.

12

Quinn sat on the edge of Trish’s bed, the mattress dipping under her weight. The room smelled like laundry soap and something woodsy from the old furniture. She had already worked through the biscuit tin and the cardboard box. Most of the pictures showed strangers smiling at cameras from decades ago, their faces blurred at the edges by time. A few had caught her grandfather in the background, always tall, always with that easy grin that made him look like he owned whatever room he stood in. She had scanned those, careful not to crease the edges.

Her back ached from hunching. She stood up, sliding off her blazer and placing it on the chair in the corner of the room. The lining caught softly against the wood. She stretched her neck and shoulders, rolling them until the knot from the plane and the rain and everything else eased a fraction. Only the shoebox remained. She had saved it because it looked the oldest, edges soft with handling. Now she dropped back onto the bed, the old frame protesting under her.

She lifted the lid. More photos, stacked without order. She flicked through them one at a time, mostly Trish’s family. A little girl with dark hair and serious eyes that had to be Trish at maybe eight, standing beside her father behind the bar. Another of an older woman who shared Trish’s sharp jaw, probably her mother, laughing at something off-camera. Quinn stacked each one neatly back in the box. The rhythm steadied her. This quiet sorting in a stranger’s bedroom was the first real breath she had taken in months.

She pulled out the next photo and stopped. Her grandfather, young and broad-shouldered, arm slung around another man. Both of them muddy from head to toe, grass stains on their knees, a leather football tucked under her grandfather’s arm. They grinned at the camera, breathless and triumphant. Quinn’s chest tightened. She recognized the stance, the tilt of his head. This was before California, before the accent smoothed out and the roles came rolling in. Before he left everything here.

Margaret had mentioned Séamus O’Shea had been his best friend. School together, then teammates. Here was the proof. Quinn turned the photo over. 1952. Two years before he boarded the ship. She traced the ink with her thumb. She couldn’t take the original. These belonged to Trish, to this house, to the village that still remembered Anthony Fallon as one of their own.

She set the photo aside and took out her phone. The camera clicked softly as she scanned it, then the five or six others she had already saved. Good enough. She would print copies later, maybe frame one for her place in LA. Something real to look at instead of the glossy headshots that lined her walls back home.

“How are you getting on?”

Quinn looked up.

Trish was leaning against the doorframe, one shoulder resting against the wood. Same navy sweater she had worn downstairs this morning, only Quinn hadn’t let herself stare over tea. She stared now. The wool was soft, washed thin enough to drape over the curve of her chest, sleeves pushed back past her wrists. Her bare forearms were pale in the flat afternoon light, a faint blue vein running down toward her pulse.

Her hair had tumbled loose over one collarbone, dark with those chestnut threads catching the gray light from the window. No makeup. Just that sharp jaw, and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. In Los Angeles, women spent six figures trying to erase those lines. Trish just looked like a woman who had lived forty-nine years in her own skin, and it made Quinn’s mouth dry out completely.

Quinn shifted on the edge of the mattress.

She was sitting on Trish’s bed, in Trish’s room.

Thursday night could have ended right here, tangled in these sheets, but it hadn’t.

“Great,” Quinn said. She cleared her throat and held up the photo. “I didn’t know your father played football with him.”

Trish came into the room. She picked up the empty cardboard box from the floor, set it out of the way in the corner to clear space, then sat on the edge of the mattress.

“You didn’t ask,” Trish said. She leaned closer to look at the photo, her eyes tracing the old ink. “Hmm.”

“Well, I was pretty distracted the other night,” Quinn said.

The words left her mouth and she cursed herself immediately. Don’t be desperate.

Trish met her gaze. Her expression had shifted, carrying an energy that hadn’t been present downstairs. “You don’t give up, do you?”

The challenge in her voice made Quinn swallow hard. She leaned in a fraction, letting her mouth curve up. “You kissed me, Trish. I think I’m allowed to be a little hopeful.”

A faint, wry curve touched Trish’s mouth. “I did.” She leaned back on one hand, the movement pulling her sweater tighter across her chest. “And I’ve been wondering what would’ve happened if I hadn’t put a stop to it.”

Quinn had replayed that kiss so many times. Every detail. The way Trish had been the one to initiate it. How her hands had gripped like she was afraid to let go and afraid to keep holding at the same time.

“Well,” Quinn said, voice dropping. “I can tell you.” Her eyes drifted down to Trish’s lips, full and slightly parted now. “Or… better yet, show you.”

Trish inhaled, a shaky breath that filled the quiet room. She sat up fully, shoulders squaring like she was steeling herself for something, and Quinn braced herself for another no.

Instead Trish reached out and took the photo from Quinn’s hand. She placed it carefully into the shoebox on the bed beside them, the movement deliberate, buying time. When she straightened again, her expression had shifted into something much hungrier.

Trish slipped her hand behind Quinn’s neck, a slow slide of fingers into the hair at her nape. The roughness of Trish’s palm carried years of pulling pints and stacking crates, grounding Quinn for one second before their mouths met.