Page 3 of Irish Legacy

Quinn picked up her beer, letting Natalie guide her toward the corner booth. Just before the partition hid them, Quinn looked back over her shoulder once, at Trish, with the expression of somebody who thought they’d left something on the counter.

Trish lifted two empty glasses off the bar and stacked them in the rack. She ran the cloth along the timber, wiped a wet ring off the mahogany, and went back to filling the orders coming at her from the wedding crowd.

2

Quinn ducked through the low opening into a wooden booth that swallowed the pub’s noise down to a murmur. She draped it over the bench beside her before sliding in next to Natalie.

“Quinn, this is Emma,” Natalie said, and her voice carried that particular lift people got when they said a name that meant everything to them.

Emma sat across the narrow table with a half-finished pint of Guinness. She gave Quinn a warm smile.

“Nice to meet you,” Emma said. “Natalie’s told me about working with you.”

“All good things, I hope.”

“Definitely.”

Quinn took the seat beside Natalie, the wood solid through her damp jeans, and set her Corona on a coaster that advertised a stout she didn’t recognize. The snug smelled of old varnish and the ghost of a thousand cigarettes. Through the partition, the wedding crowd broke into fragments, a raised glass, a laughing mouth, the flash of someone’s phone. Nobody was looking for her. Nobody had looked for her since she walked in.

She took a long drink from the bottle, the lime sharp against her tongue.

“I didn’t believe you,” she said to Natalie, “when you told me I could just walk in here and not get mobbed. I was so nervous coming in and ordering.”

“It’s different here,” Natalie said. “You probably couldn’t walk around Dublin, or maybe even Galway. But there’s a relaxed atmosphere here. And especially on a night like tonight.”

“Yeah, what’s going on?”

“The second day of a wedding,” Emma said, tilting her pint toward the main bar. “A local couple. There’ll be music soon.”

Quinn nodded, filing the phrase away. Day 2. She had been to weddings in Malibu vineyards, in Tuscan villas, in New York lofts where the ceremony lasted twenty minutes and the divorce papers arrived before the thank-you notes. She had never heard of a second day, a whole village continuing the celebration because one day wasn’t enough?

“So how did you two meet?” Quinn asked them.

Emma and Natalie looked at each other, and something passed between them that made Quinn aware of her own solitude in the booth, the empty space on her other side where nobody was sitting.

“I lived next door to Natalie’s grandmother,” Emma said. “And Natalie came to visit her every summer.” She paused, her hand steady on Natalie’s knee, and when she spoke again her voice dropped half a register. “I had a massive crush on her.”

Natalie smiled and shook her head. She reached across to tuck a strand of hair behind Emma’s ear with a familiarity that made Quinn’s chest tighten.

“We danced around each other for a few years. Then one day we were out for a walk in the woods and we got caught in this downpour.” Natalie’s eyes went soft with memory. “We ran for shelter and had this perfect kiss.”

“Our timing was always a little off,” Emma said. “Natalie left for LA the next day. I was heartbroken. I know it was just a kiss, but...”

“And then when I came back the next summer,” Natalie said, “Ready to confess that I wanted more, she wasn’t there.”

Emma took a drink of her pint. “I’d gone to Australia. And I didn’t come back until Natalie’s grandmother died.”

“Five years later,” Natalie said.

Quinn stopped her bottle halfway to her lips. “You two didn’t see each other for five years?”

The words came out rougher than she had intended, her throat tight around them.

“No,” Natalie said. She swallowed hard, her hand finding Emma’s on the table and lacing their fingers together. “It was my fault, really. I never told Emma how I really felt after the kiss. Between our age difference and my life in LA... I just let that moment go. And I regretted it every year since. I thought I’d never see Emma again.”

Quinn looked at their joined hands, the way Emma’s thumb rested over Natalie’s knuckles.

“Wow.” What a crazy story. Sad. But not nearly as sad as it could have been. “But you’re here now. So it all worked out in the end.”