Page 2 of Worth a Shot

By the time she arrived at Heuston Station, Cordelia’s stomach was growling. She paid the taxi driver and thanked him, then bought a sandwich and a coffee from a vendor and had just enough time to scarf it all down before they were calling her train for boarding. Once her bag was stowed, she settled in to watch the Irish countryside roll past.

It looked exactly like someone would imagine it if they were told to picture the Irish countryside: lush green pastures and small winding roads, tiny houses and grey-bellied clouds dotting the sky. Sheep everywhere. The weather couldn’t make up its mind; the sun and clouds played tug-of-war so that sometimes the world was muted in dull greens and browns only to suddenly grow jewel-bright, the grass shining in brilliant patches of emerald, the trees limned in gold.

Cordelia instinctively took her camera out of its sling. She’d gotten the image of her father’s thumbprint laminated and pressed as a sticker on the spot where her own thumb rested when she held the camera up to her face. She touched it now and sighed.

A moment later her phone pinged with a picture from Toby, and she smiled at the faces of her niece and nephew. Perfect timing.

Miles with his glasses and mini afro puffing out around his face, Grace with her long delicate features, her hair braided into pigtails. Cordelia wondered how long those would last – Grace was leaving childhood behind and fast approaching the dreaded tweens.

Grace and Miles say we miss you, Aunt Cordie!

Tell them they have to stop growing over the summer, she texted back. Grace looks so big!

Tell me about it, Toby wrote. Nikki says hi.

He sent another picture, this one of him and his wife, a beautiful Black woman with box braids hanging loose around her face, her smile bright but her eyes faintly exasperated. Toby had insisted on communicating with lots of pictures, as if three months in Ireland were a decade on another planet, but now Cordelia was grateful for it.

Three months in a new country. Cordelia couldn’t believe she was actually doing this.

There’d been a photograph on the job listing of Alison Murphy, a pretty woman who looked to be about Cordelia’s age – late twenties – with thick auburn hair, freckles, and a large toothy smile. I run Tigh Na Mara Bed and Breakfast in Kilronan, Alison had written after Cordelia had asked for more details. The summer months there are busy so I won’t be able to make it home much. I need someone to stay in the cottage in case my granny needs anything – she’s nearing eighty and I don’t like the thought of her alone with no one nearby. She gets her mail delivered at the cottage so if you could take it up to the house that’d be grand. I mostly wanted someone to keep the cottage clean and help out Gran while I’m living at the B&B. Her name is Róisín.

Róisín was pronounced Ro-sheen, apparently – Cordelia had had to look that one up.

The job sounded pretty straightforward, though. And in her down time she could clamber around the island with her camera. Her work generally centered around people and city life, but shaking things up wouldn’t hurt. Maybe she would discover an unknown penchant for landscape photography.

The bus ride was less pleasant than the train, with lots of lurching and sharp turns. They drove through simple Irish villages, on roads that seemed too narrow to hold such a large vehicle.

The clouds had officially won the tug-of-war by the time she reached the ferry; she boarded the boat alongside a tall man with jet-black hair and blue eyes, talking in a low, irritated voice on his phone. Cordelia caught the words “I said I’d do it, Dad, isn’t that enough?” before he walked up to the next level. Her heart pinched – what she wouldn’t give to have an argument with her father again or hear his voice over the phone. She found a seat and stared out across the rolling waves, slate-grey and gloomy blue.

The ferry ride was an hour and Cordelia got herself another coffee from the little café on board. The jet lag was setting in, her eyelids drooping, her brain turning to mush. She hoped she wouldn’t be expected to do anything related to grandma or cleaning today. A light rain began to fall, leaving a pretty pattern across the waves, but by the time the ferry had pulled into the dock at Kilronan Harbour, it had faded to a gentle mist.

Cordelia’s heart kicked up a notch as she got her bag and waited in line to disembark. Alison had said she would pick her up, and as she walked down the gangplank, Cordelia saw the same black-haired man descending from the upper deck, still on his phone.

She stepped down onto the concrete pier and headed toward the lot full of cars. Kilronan was the largest town on the island, but that wasn’t saying much. There were several brightly painted houses surrounding the harbour, squares of yellow and pink. She saw a big stone building with large white letters declaring it the Aran Sweater Market.

The harbour was as picturesque as she’d hoped it would be – and bustling with people. See, Liz? Cordelia thought smugly. This was perfect. Two old women were chatting outside the market while a small brown dog sniffed at the entranceway. A young man was leaning against the pink house smoking a cigarette.

Her fingertips tingling with excitement, she reached into her bag to take her camera out. This was the moment. Her photography was about to change, she could feel it.

As she was lifting the strap to secure the camera around her neck, she stepped six inches to her left to get the exact right framing of the two market women. But she was so excited by the prospect of the photograph that she didn’t look where she was going, and she collided with the person behind her. She watched in horror, like an out-of-body experience, as her camera jolted out of her hands and clattered onto the concrete, rolling once, twice, and then coming to a stop, face down on the cement.

“Watch it,” the black-haired man muttered as he pushed past, barely even glancing at her, his stupid phone glued to his ear.

For a second Cordelia was too stunned to speak. She found her breath and shouted, “Hey!” but he was already gone, vanished into the crowds now streaming from the ferry. Cordelia dove to protect her most precious possession from the feet of a hundred tourists, cradling it gently like a baby bird.

She turned it over. Her heart stuttered, and the world shrank in her vision, pinpricks of light making her dizzy.

The lens was cracked.

She brought it to her eye, not caring what she was pointing it at, desperate to know it was okay. But no matter how she adjusted the aperture, the camera wouldn’t focus. Everything was blurry, formless.

Her camera was ruined.

Chapter Two

Niall O’Connor did not want to fucking be here.

He was already in a black mood when some dumb tourist stepped right in front of him in the middle of the bloody walkway to take a picture of the stupid sweater market – an American, probably, they were always stopping in inconvenient places to take the most inane pictures. Her elbow jammed into his ribs and he muttered a terse, “Watch it,” and kept talking to Colin.