Page 96 of The Irish Goodbye

“Fuck it,” he growled. He opened Instagram and brought up her feed.

And there she was. Hair like sunshine. Little rabbit nose. She was holding out a champagne glass to cheers with the person holding the camera—Liz, Niall guessed with relief, based on the neon yellow nails. He didn’t think he could handle it if she was dating someone else. He thought it might actually break him to imagine her sharing those photographs, their time together, with another man.

Her name burst through the dam he’d built up around it, spilling through his mind like water.

“Cordelia,” he whispered. Cordelia, Cordelia, Cordelia …

He sat there scrolling through images of the happiest time in his life, until he reached the very first one she’d posted.

Niall at the Black Fort.

Niall felt something tear inside his chest. He hung his head in his hands and wished more than anything to be back on that cliff.

25

“Cordelia?”

“Hm?” Cordelia snapped her head up and blinked around the small conference room. Kate was looking at her expectantly.

Cordelia had been tuning out a lot. For the past few months it was like her mind couldn’t stay put. It was always floating away, off across an ocean.

“We need more pictures of Niall,” Kate said. “You’ve hardly given us any.”

“There’s the one at the Black Fort,” Cordelia said.

“You can barely see his face. Women love him, Cord. He needs to be featured.”

“Right,” Cordelia said. This was not the first time they had had this conversation.

It had been nice to finally announce the book deal last week. Cordelia was glad she’d gotten everyone on Inishmore to sign waivers for her to use their photos up front, so she didn’t have to go asking for their permission now. She had been selling lots of prints off her website too. And she’d taken the job Liz had offered as some part-time freelance work. Things were looking up in so many ways.

But she wasn’t happy.

She tried. She pretended. And she knew she should be grateful for her change of fortune—it was what she’d wanted after all, wasn’t it? She was grateful. But nothing was going how she’d imagined it. Everything seemed colorless, like a poor copy image of a life when Cordelia had once known the bright and vibrant original.

She should be over Niall by now. It was foolish, not to mention downright masochistic, to cling to the memories of him so tightly. But she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop herself from revisiting their time together in every spare second she had. Or during important meetings where she should be paying attention.

“What did you bring for Pocket?” Kate asked, and Cordelia pulled up the photos on her computer.

“She’s so cute,” Kate’s assistant Miriam gushed. “Did she really just wander around the island?”

“Yeah,” Cordelia said, looking forlornly at a picture of Pocket smiling with her tongue hanging out, sitting on a stone wall with a bunch of sheep behind her. “One time she showed up at my door and herded me to Niall’s house for dinner.”

The memory made her eyes itch and her throat clench. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. But that was what she was here to do—go over the memories of that summer again and again and again.

“Aw! That’s adorable,” Miriam said. Cordelia forced herself to stay present for the rest of the meeting. But she was grateful when Kate said, “All right, I think this is a good start. Get us more shots of Niall by next week, yeah?”

“No problem,” Cordelia said. It felt like a giant fist had clamped around her lungs—the longer she looked at the photographs she’d taken that summer, the harder it was to breathe. She gathered up her things and checked the time. She was meeting her mother for lunch in Brooklyn.

It was one of those cold, clear December days in New York where you could walk on the sunny side of the street and feel almost warm. Cordelia put her earbuds in and headed to the F train, skirting a hotdog vendor and a group of tourists off to see the tree at Rockefeller Center.

Her phone pinged and her heart skittered in her chest. She needed to stop reacting like that. You’d think after three months she’d get that Niall was simply never going to reach out to her. And yet she still clung to the hope that he would.

Why wasn’t she over this? She was never getting into a relationship ever again. No wonder she’d avoided them all those years. It wasn’t worth this pain.

How’d it go? Liz had written.

Good, Cordelia wrote back.