For a long moment, he didnât move. Didnât even breathe. The picture lay sharp against the dark wool of his trousers, the ghosts of Belfast staring up at him from a world that felt a lifetime away. One face gone to earth, the other heâd buried himself the night he boarded a ship west.
His hand hovered before he picked it upâslow, reluctant, like it might burn him. The weight of it was wrong: too light to hold what it carried. His thumb brushed the corner, frayed with years of keeping. And then there it was, undeniable. The boy heâd followed into fire. The man he never came back as.
He thought heâd left that part of himself in the mud, buried with the body they never shipped home. Thought heâd been clever enough, hard enough, to cut clean. But seeing them againâseeing herâit was like someone had ripped open a seam heâd stitched too tightly. The air left his lungs in a hard, shallow drag.
His jaw locked, the muscle twitching once, twice, before he finally looked at her. Really looked. She hadnât changed in the ways that mattered. Same eyes, same way of holding herself like she knew exactly who she was, even when the whole world tried to shake it. And Christ, he remembered what it felt like to be steady under that gaze.
âFiona.â Her name left him quiet, ragged at the edges, as though saying it cracked something open in his chest. The accent came sharper now, less dulled by years of American whiskey and smoke. âChrist above.â The wallet he slid back across the table, but the photograph⊠that he set down with care, as if the paper itself might break. He couldnât keep it in his hand, not when his palms were scarred, ruined. Not when he felt like anything he touched turned into something less than what it was before.
His eyes lingered on it, not her, because that was safer. Looking at her meant remembering who heâd been, and he didnât believe in that man anymore. Heâd died in the same trench as her brother, only no one had thought to carve his name into a stone.
âDidnât thinkâŠâ He stopped, swallowed hard. Words had always come hard to him, but with her standing there, they felt impossible. âDidnât think Iâd see you again. Not here.â A ghost of a bitter laugh caught in his throat. Heâd crossed an ocean to keep this very moment from happening, and here it was, served up with coffee and neon lights. The kind of fate he never prayed for, because prayers had gone unanswered too many times before.
He dragged a hand down his face, covering the map of scars that crept along his jaw for just a second, hiding behind the curtain of it like a coward. When it dropped, his gaze finally met hersâguarded, yes, but the guilt was there, bleeding through no matter how hard he clenched his jaw.
âYouâve come a long way to lose a wallet,â he said at last, low and rough, reaching for the shield of dry humor that never quite covered the weight beneath. But the thought gnawed at him, hot and bitter: She knows. She has to know. And she sees exactly whatâs left of me.
Fiona's fingers trembled as she took the wallet. The leather felt suddenly foreign, slick with sweat from her palm. She watched his face. The way his eyes refused to meet hers, the tension in his shoulders like he heâd seen a ghost. That voice.
Her breath hitched when the photo slipped free. Time slowed as it fluttered onto his lap. Eoinâs grinning face beside her brotherâs. Younger, softer, untouched by whatever had carved these new hollows beneath his cheekbones.
She saw his throat work when he picked it up. Her eyes traced the scars on his knuckles. White lines against skin leathered by sun and war. The same hands that once lifted her onto his shoulders to watch Belfast parades, now rough-hewn and unfamiliar.
She remembered how theyâd felt brushing against her cheek the night before he shipped out, calloused but gentle. Now they looked like weapons.
"Fiona." Her name sounded like a confession dragged from him. Raw. Bruised. Her knees threatened to buckle. She gripped the edge of the booth. Desperate for hold.
The silence stretched, filled with everything unsaid. He slid the wallet back like returning evidence. But the photo... he set it down with a care that cracked her chest open.
He remembers.
She forced her gaze upward, past the collar of his worn shirt, past the jagged scar disappearing into his hairline. His eyes held hersâdark, guarded, but with a flicker of something raw beneath the steel. Recognition wasnât a question anymore.
It was Eoin. Eoin, whoâd vanished into the warâs smoke alongside her brother. Eoin, whose letters never came. Eoin, whoâd been dead to her for years.
His attempt at humor fell like lead. Fiona's mouth went dry. Shock and disbelief evident in her expression. Eyes wide open. The letter in her pocket suddenly burnedâher father's spidery script, the plea that brought her across an ocean. To find the unthinkable.
âEoin.â
Outwardly a quiet whisper. Inwardly a loud scream.
A long pause.
âChrist all mighty. Itâs you! Itâs really you!â, she uttered, her voice steadier than she felt. The Belfast lilt thickened, wrapping around the words like fog off the Lagan. âYou⊠Youâre alive.â
