by Sienna Blake
Room 204.
I didn’t actually promise I’d stay in the truck.
The hallways were mostly quiet as I slipped down them, trying to keep my school shoes from clacking against the floor. What was Diarmuid going to say to Mr Fletcher? What would he do?
I neared Room 204 and heard an angry voice coming from the crack in the door. Diarmuid’s voice. I glanced around the hallway. Seeing no one paying me any attention, I leaned against the wall near the door.
“Have you even spent five minutes talking to her properly?” That was Diarmuid. I’d know his rough, gravelly voice anywhere. “She’s a goddamn genius. You’d know that if you did.”
He was talking about me.
“Mr Brennan,” Mr Fletcher’s nasally voice sounded strained, “you are not her parent. You have no right to come in here and demand I unfail her. Now if you don’t leave, I will call campus security.”
I heard a bang. I jumped and spun, pressing an eye to the crack of the door, my heart banging away in my chest.
Diarmuid had slammed his fist on Mr Fletcher’s desk and was now leaning across it. “I’m giving you a choice, Mr Fletcher. You can give Saoirse the full marks and recognition she deserves. Or I can arrest you.”
“You can’t threaten me—”
“I can smell alcohol on your breath. If I took you down to the station for a breathalyser, how much do you think you’d blow?”
Mr Fletcher sank back in his seat, stammering incoherently.
Diarmuid cut him off. “What do you think the headmaster would say? The parents, huh? You’d be fired. You’d not get another teaching job. Not anywhere in Ireland.”
“Mr Brennan,” Mr Fletcher said, his face going red, his breath coming out in short pants, “let’s not be hasty.”
“Do the right thing, Mr Fletcher. Give Saoirse the marks she deserves. Quit drinking on the job.” He leaned in so close, I thought for a second that Diarmuid was about to kiss Mr Fletcher. “Or I will make you pay.”
Diarmuid turned towards the door, conversation over. I gasped and ran back to the truck, only realising when I got there that I couldn’t get in by myself.
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck.” Diarmuid’s voice boomed out behind me.
I spun, my heart in my throat. I disobeyed him. I knew what my ma’s boyfriends did to her when she did something they didn’t like.
“S-sorry,” I managed.
His face was still stormy, but it softened just a touch.
He held out a hand. “Let me help you in.”
This time I didn’t mind him holding my arm as he helped me into the truck. His touch was warm and firm, but not too firm.
I think I liked that the cab smelled like him. Leather and the hint of his woodsy cologne. I took a deep breath while he was walking around to the driver’s side.
Despite that inner voice that told me not to trust him, I wanted to.
Diarmuid got in. He turned on the truck and the familiar folksy music came out of the speakers. I blinked as I stared at the radio buttons. He’d left it on the station I liked. Why would he do that? I glanced over to Diarmuid but his eyes were on the road.
“You shouldn’t have any more trouble with Mr Fletcher.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
He knew I’d snuck into school after him. He knew I’d heard what he said to Mr Fletcher.
A hot ball lodged in my throat. No one had ever done anything like that for me before.
I wanted to tell him thank you. I wanted to let him know how much his sticking up for me meant to me.
But I could not speak.
Diarmuid pulled up in front of my apartment block and I found myself sagging into my seat. The trip seemed like it was over in a second.
I stared at the concrete block through the window. I didn’t want to go into that place. In here with Diarmuid, I felt…hope. I felt like my life had potential. When I walked into the hovel I called “home”, I remembered that my life was just shit.
Diarmuid turned off the engine and turned his torso to face me. “If that eejit gives you trouble again, you tell me, okay?”
I nodded.
“Right,” he said straightening up in his seat. “I’ll see you here tomorrow, same time as today.”
Was he serious? He had to be lying. Why would he want to take me to school again?
I stumbled out of the truck and walked up the building stairs as if on autopilot. I didn’t see the piles of junk on the balconies. I didn’t see the cigarette butts littering the dusty, unclean floor or the crusty vomit stain that’d been in the stairwell corner so long it’d dried to cement. I barely noticed these things, my mind was a whirl.
And when I entered my apartment I almost didn’t see the dirt and the grime.
I almost didn’t hear my ma’s new boyfriend yelling at her.
I walked into my room and locked the door behind me.
Diarmuid had been worried about me.
He picked me up and took me home, just as he said he would.
I couldn’t help the rush of hope in my heart.
Maybe, just maybe, I had found a friend.
That night, over the sound of my ma and her new boyfriend screaming and plates breaking outside my locked bedroom, I clutched my musty pillow to my chest and whispered Diarmuid’s name over and over into the darkness as if he were a prayer, until I had memorized every note of music in every letter.
12
____________
Diarmuid
Now—Limerick, Ireland
“Brennan.”
Claddagh, my supervisor’s PA, called out to me as soon as I walked into the Limerick Garda station the next morning. She stood at the reception, hand on her bony hip. She reminded me of a school marm, greying hair pulled back tight, slim glasses pinched onto her sharp nose attached to a chain that went around her neck.
“Leary,” I replied, using her surname exactly as she used mine.
Claddagh’s gaze went disapprovingly to the tats that peeked out from my rolled-up sleeves.
“Would you like a closer look at them?” I snapped.
Her grey eyes flicked to mine, the hint of a smirk on her thin lips. “Coilin wants to see you in his office. Now.”
I snorted and pivoted on my foot.
“Hey!” she called out behind me. “Where’re you going?”
I didn’t bother answering her.
If Coilin wanted to see me, that only meant one thing. He wanted to chew my ass out about something.
This was going to take coffee. Stat.
There was a small coffee shop next door to the station which did a roaring trade delivering decent coffees to the Garda station. We had a coffee machine in our break room, but it only seemed to produce undrinkable sludge.
I pushed through the door into the warm, cosy café that reminded me of a granny’s living room, mismatched tea sets and lots of floral pillows. The two girls behind the counter spotted me and I nodded to them in greeting.
By the time I squeezed my way through the chairs and tables to the counter, Marla already had my usual order, a takeaway flat white, ready. She was a sweet-looking girl, long red hair tied back in a ponytail, matching freckles across her pale cheeks. Slender and willowy, she was almost as tall as me.
I handed her cash and she handed the takeaway cup to me, a ritual we’d perfected over the last year or so.
“Marla,” I said to the girl behind the counter in thanks.
She flushed and lowered her chin. It seemed the less I said to her, the more she blushed. She seemed sweet. But I had too many fucking problems to allow her, or anyone, too close.
I nodded to the other girl before striding out of the café.
Coffee in hand, I was ready to face whatever Coilin wanted.
“You’re several reports behind,” Coilin O’Connell, the Limerick area supervisor barked from behind his huge tidy desk, pens all packed neatly in a holder, papers in perfect stacks,
the books on the shelf behind him in alphabetical order by author name, it looked. Made me want to go and put Boland in with the S’s and O’Malley up with the A’s just to cause some chaos.
I sat opposite Coilin in one of his cushy bucket chairs, long legs stretched out in front of me.
I folded my thick arms across my chest and grunted. “Don’t I do a good job with my kids?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t I have the lowest reoffender rate in this whole goddamn country?”
“Yes—”
“Then what’s your fucking problem?”
My supervisor rubbed his forehead, curse words coming out from under his hand. “Diarmuid, you are the best damn Juvenile Liaison Officer that I’ve ever had, but you can be such a cunt sometimes.”
I shrugged. Not denying that.
“The reports will get done if I have the time. The kids come first. They’re all I care about.”
“Yes, but in order to continue to care about those kids, you need to submit your reports for each one. Each one, Diarmuid. Or the committee will come down on my ass and I’ll have to fire you. I don’t want to have to fire you. Got that?”
I glared at Coilin. He wasn’t a bad guy. Just a pencil-pushing suit who never spent a night on the street and cared more for dotting i’s and crossing t’s than anything else. I suppose that’s why they gave him the supervisor job.
“Are you done?”
Coilin let out an exasperated sigh. “Jesus, just go. Get out of my fucking sight.”
Finally.
I raised my bulk out of the chair and strode to the door.
“Your newest assignment is at your desk,” Coilin called out as I opened his door. “Her father should be here by now. I want your reports on her submitted on time.”
I gave him the Hitler salute just to piss him off, then slammed the door between us before he could yell at me some more.
Claddagh gave me a wary eye as I strode past her desk. The walls weren’t soundproof. She probably heard everything. Not that I gave a shit.
Officers leapt out of my way as I barreled down the hall. I knew I had a reputation as an asshole. I preferred it this way. Adults were fucking stupid. Prejudiced, set in their ways, pride-driven eejits most of the time.
I preferred kids, even the lost ones. Kids were easy, open, respectful if you just listened to them, if you first gave them the respect that they deserved as young adults. They were so willing to do better, be better. They just needed the right direction. They just needed someone to care.
Adults could learn a lot from kids.
I entered the “bullpen”, as I liked to call the main open office area.
“You got a reoffender,” Nina, the office girl, said. She threw a file at me as I passed her desk.
I caught it and let out a snort. “You give me all the good ones.”
Nina gave me a smirk. “I put her in room seven. Enjoy.”
I dismissed her with a wave and strode down the hallway to room seven, a cosy living room-style space where we put witnesses and families of victims to make them feel more comfortable. I pushed my way in and halted at the doorway.
Standing at the window was a tall woman, her back to me, fluffing her long waist-length blonde hair with her hands. Her small waist on display in her tight white jumper and her denim shorts hugging the curve of her rounded ass. My reoffender.
She must have heard me enter, because she spun to face me.
The blood drained from my limbs as our eyes locked.
The familiar steel glint like the edge of a blade, a blade I felt tangled in my guts. Her pink lips parted and I could hear her gasp even from here.
Oh dear God.
That was no woman.
That was Saoirse Quinn. The girl I left behind three years ago.
But she was no girl anymore. She was a woman. A seventeen-year-old woman.
And my latest assignment.
13
____________
Diarmuid
Of all the police stations in all the country, she had to walk into mine.
We stood there for what felt like an eternity, our pasts weaving around us, between us, pulling up from the soil of buried memories. A rush of affection washed over me so hard that it almost hurt.
Even now when I got a new assignment, especially a girl, I always compared them to Saoirse. They were never as smart as her. They were never as sharp as her. They were never able to pull out the playful side in me like she did. I cared for them but I never cared for them like I did her. Like I still did.
My body vibrated with the familiarity of being in her presence again. Three years. Had it really been that long? And look at her now—pride drew over me like a curtain—she was a woman.
She’d lost the baby fat around her cheeks, her mouth was full and wide, a natural deep pink. Her blonde hair had developed honey tones and hung down to her waist. Her eyes were chips of jade, sharp enough to cut.
“Diarmuid.” Her voice breathed around my name. The way her lips caressed around each syllable tickled something in my solar plexus. An unfamiliar feeling.
I watched as emotions flickered across her angelic face. Surprise, that one was obvious. For whatever reason that the universe decided to throw her my way again, she didn’t orchestrate it, that much was clear. Her shock mirrored mine.
But it was drowned quickly with a longing that I now recognised. The look I had ignored when she was thirteen, never imagining that she could ever look at me that way.
I closed the door behind me so that no one walking down the hall might witness our reunion. Everything seemed to quiet and still as the door shut.
I realised the instant that the door was shut that it had been a mistake. It felt like we were too closed in. This cosy room, set up like a living room with comfortable worn armchairs circled intimately around each other, felt like our very own labyrinth, our personal home, just her, me and the lifetime that had stretched out between us.
I found my voice, finally. Her name, a name I hadn’t spoken out loud in three years —just in the deep recesses of my head—fell from my thick tongue.
“Saoirse.”
I could have avoided this ambush if I had just looked at her file. But I never looked at their file, preferring as always to talk to my kids, to get all my information from their mouths rather than from a typed-up report.
“What…what are you doing here?” I asked. Perhaps she was a figment of my imagination. A fairy from the netherworld.
“Waiting for my JLO.”
Her eyes flicked down then up my body. I found myself standing up taller, holding my shoulders out wider.
“Which looks like, through some strange twist of fate, is you.” Her eyes felt like they reached into me and peeled back my armour as easily as if it were foil.
“I thought I’d never see you again.” The way her voice quieted, so fragile with pain, hit me in the chest.
I thought I’d never see you again. Hot, sticky air sucked into my lungs, coating the inside of my chest.
I hadn’t wanted to leave her. But I’d had no choice. It had been the best thing for her.
The memories of the last time I saw her hit me as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. The pain twisting up her mouth. Her voice, begging me, begging me…
My legs felt weakened. I held out an arm indicating that she take a seat, but it was more for me. I needed to sit down before I fell over.
She strode towards me. Jesus, when had she gotten so tall? When had her legs gotten so long?
She stopped right in front of me. Three years ago, she wouldn’t have been even up to my shoulder. Now her head came up just past my chin.
She looked as if she was going to say something. To hit me. Strike me. I almost hoped she would.
Instead she sat in the chair beside me, crossing her long legs.
I practically dropped into my chair, my legs giving out rather than a deliberate movement.
Her eyes were still on me, still f
eeling like they were peeling strips off me.
I cleared my throat, reminding myself that I had a job to do. That I should stay professional. But there was so much I wanted to say.
“Congratulations,” I began. “For graduating.”
Her mouth parted. “How did you know…?” she trailed off.
I gave her a sad smile. “Just because I couldn’t stay, doesn’t mean I stopped…”
I licked my lips, which had gone dry. Since when had talking to Saoirse become so difficult? When she was thirteen, she and I would never run out of things to say. I never got tongue-tied or unsure of myself.
She wasn’t thirteen anymore.
“You kept tabs on me,” she said, not a question. Just a statement of something she realised.
I had been keeping track of her. Of course I had. I had local Garda friends of mine checking up on her every so often, making sure she was ok. They hadn’t mentioned that she’d moved. It must have been recently.
I checked up on her even though I knew I couldn’t contact her. Especially after the way things had ended…
“What are you doing in Limerick?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I live here now.”
“With your ma?” I frowned.
The memory of Ms Quinn still made me tighten my hands into fists. That woman had no business being a mother. If Saoirse had any other living relative who could have cared for her, I’d have called Social Services in a second and had her relocated. But the foster system was not perfect—I knew that dirty fact from the inside—and chances of her being even worse off in the system were too high for me to risk. I would have taken her in if I could have. But it was clear three years ago why I couldn’t.
She shook her head. “My da.”
He must have been let out of jail. Shit, something I’d failed to keep tabs on. And she was living with him now?
My stomach tensed. “You’re living with your da?”
“Yeah. He came back for me. He never forgot me.”
Guilt stabbed me with her words. She still blamed me for leaving three years ago.
