Page 118 of Try Line Hearts
She leaned closer to the screen, heart pounding.
Luke looked past the reporter.
Maeve followed his gaze as the camera did.
She saw Eli.
And then Luke looked straight back at the camera.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Maeve screamed.
A full, feral, unladylike sound tore out of her as she slapped the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the cutlery drawer.
“Oh my God,” she whooped, already laughing, already crying. “ABOUT TIME, YA FUCKING EEJIT!”
She didn’t even register the mic hitting the mud. She was too busy watching him walk — straight past the reporters, straight across the pitch like a man possessed.
“Yes! … Yes!” she crowed, pointing at the screen. “Go on. GO ON.” She hadn’t even been this animatedduringthe match.
Her eyes burned as Luke stopped in front of Eli. As he cupped his face. As his mouth moved, words swallowed by the roar in Maeve’s ears but not by her heart.
“Oh, Luke,” she breathed, the laugh breaking into something wetter, softer. “You stupid bastard. I love you.”
When Luke kissed him, Maeve made a strangled noise somewhere between a sob and a bark of laughter and dropped heavily into the nearest chair.
“Jesus,” she said hoarsely, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, will you look at him.”
The crowd erupted.
Maeve laughed harder, shaking her head, tears streaking down her cheeks as she took a long pull straight from the bottle.
“Would you look at that,” she sniffed. “The whole country is clapping because youfinallygot your head out of your arse.”
She raised the bottle toward the television in a mock toast, voice thick but steady.
“Finally,” she said, pride shining through every rough edge of the word. “I was starting to think I’d have to lock em in a room together.”
She took another drink, wiped her mouth, and smiled — wide, fierce, and impossibly fond.
“God help anyone who tries to hurt you now,” Maeve murmured, eyes never leaving the screen. “They’ll have to go through all of Ireland first.”
She leaned back in her chair, jumper swallowing her whole, whiskey warm in her chest, and laughed softly to herself.
“About time,” she said again, quieter now. “About bloody time.”
On the other side of the world, in Auckland, it was just after dawn.
Grey light crept through thin curtains — but there were far too many people in the Kaine family home for anyone to notice the sunrise properly. The house had spilled past its own walls hours ago. The front door had been propped open since before kickoff. Shoes were piled in chaotic heaps by the entry like an offering. Someone’s chilly bin sat by the back step with a handwritten label on masking tape that simply read: DON’T TOUCH (AUNTIE’S).
They were hosting a watch-party. Not the quiet, polite kind where everyone pretended rugby was background noise.
The huge kind.
The kind where neighbors you hadn’t seen in years arrived with foil trays of food and kissed you on both cheeks like no time had passed. The kind where cousins dragged extra plastic chairs in from the garage, where kids fell asleep in a tangle of blankets on the floor and were carefully stepped over like sacred obstacles. The kind where the kettle never stopped boiling, where someone shouted “WHO WANTS TEA?” every ten minutes and no one ever said no. Where the lounge was packed shoulder to shoulder and the hallway was packed too and someone had set up a second screen in the dining room because there were simply too many bodies to fit.
The television blared from the front of the lounge, volume unapologetically high, rugby roaring through the speakers like weather. A second TV — slightly smaller, slightly crooked — played in the dining room, where aunts leaned on the table with plates in hand, eyes locked to the screen. Someone’s phone had been propped up on a stack of coasters with a livestream running as backup “just in case,” because no one trusted anything important to the mercy of a single connection.
