By three o’clock, Maeve Hart’s face was on every phone in Emerald Harbour, which meant the town had achieved peak productivity and would now accomplish nothing useful until Mass or dinner, whichever came with better gossip.
Cillian Byrne learned about the gold star while standing on a ladder in a half-gutted front room, scraping ninety years of wallpaper from a wall that had seen more family secrets than paint. His apprentice, Dara, held up his phone with the solemnity of a priest presenting relics.
“She’s bleeding on the internet,” Dara announced.
Cillian did not look down. “People do that.”
“From the hand.”
“Still counts.”
“With a star.”
That made the scraper pause.
Dara knew it. The little bollocks had the survival instinct of a mayfly and the timing of a county final whistle. “Gold thing. Like a badge. She picked it up outside the Royal. Pap got the shot. Very symbolic, apparently.”
“Apparently,” Cillian said.
He went back to the wall.
The house breathed around him, old timber shifting in damp weather, pipes knocking with theatrical resentment. Hart House sat two streets up from the harbour, narrow-fronted and stubborn, its windows facing the sea as if ready to argue with it. The front room had once been a place where children practised piano, where fishermen’s daughters learned scales, where old Mrs Hart kept a tin of biscuits for anyone brave enough to sing through a cracked note. Cillian had first walked through the door at twelve, dragged by a music teacher who believed grief could be tuned if you caught it early.
He had been wrong about that.
But he had been right about the room.
Dara climbed onto the bottom rung. “You know she’s coming here, yeah?”
“No, she isn’t.”
“She absolutely is. Her mam sold the place without telling her. That’s not a conversation you have over text unless your family is emotionally sponsored by petrol.”
Cillian gave him a look.
Dara held up both hands. “I am but a humble observer of generational chaos.”
“You’re twenty-two.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain crisps. Get the dust sheets.”
Dara hopped down, grinning, but his glance slid to the window. Outside, rain silvered the street. Two women had slowed in front of the gate pretending to admire the cracked stone wall, which would have been more convincing if one of them hadn’t held her phone sideways. Emerald Harbour had always been a town of witnesses. It saw births, debts, kisses, relapses, kindnesses, hypocrisies, and whose bins went out too early. Fame only gave it better resolution.
Cillian climbed down, wiped paste from his hands, and looked at the room.
He had bought Hart House because nobody else should have. That was the clean version, anyway, the version fit for solicitors and town councils and his sister’s raised eyebrow. The fuller truth was less tidy. He’d bought it because the For Sale sign had gone up while he was walking home from the harbour, and the sight of it had made something inside him go dangerously quiet. He’d bought it because his mother had learned to breathe here after his father left. Because Mrs Hart had let him sit under the piano on afternoons when his own house had shouting in the walls. Because a small Maeve with two missing teeth and a voice too big for her ribs had once marched into this room wearing a gold star pin and declared she would sing until the windows apologised.
He’d laughed then.
She’d glared.
Then she’d sung, and he had never laughed at her voice again.
His phone buzzed.
AISLING: There are photographers outside your gate.
Then:
AISLING: I am not saying I told you so.
Then:
AISLING: But imagine me not saying it beautifully.
Cillian typed: Lock the shop if they bother you.
His sister replied with a thumbs-up, a knife emoji, and a loaf of bread. Aisling communicated like a hostage negotiator raised by bakers.
The bell over the front door rang.
Dara froze in the hallway with dust sheets in his arms. “That’s either her or a journalist, and I’m emotionally unlicensed for both.”
Cillian wiped his hands again, uselessly. “Stay back.”
He opened the door.
Maeve Hart stood on the step in a black coat, wet hair tucked behind one ear, sunglasses on despite the rain and the fact that Emerald Harbour in November had the light quality of a pewter spoon. Behind her, Nessa O’Rourke stood with a phone, an umbrella, and the expression of a woman prepared to commit elegant crimes. A black car idled at the kerb. Two photographers hovered near the corner pretending to be architecture enthusiasts.
Maeve took off the sunglasses.
There were faces the camera loved because it could simplify them. Maeve’s was not one of them. The camera flattened the mischief, sharpened the cheekbones, sold the eyes as tragic when they were furious, and missed the stubborn softness around her mouth entirely. In person, she looked less like a star and more like a woman who had been forced to become weatherproof and was deeply tired of being praised for the coating.
“Cillian,” she said.
“Maeve.”
A beat.
Dara whispered from behind him, “Jesus, the chemistry has entered the building.”
Cillian did not turn. “Go sand something.”
Maeve’s mouth flickered. Not a smile. Memory’s ghost passing a window.
“I need to come in.”
“You do.”
That surprised her. She had arrived armed for battle, he could see it: chin lifted, shoulders squared, anger polished into a public instrument. Agreement left her momentarily without choreography.
He stepped aside.
The hallway smelled of plaster dust, old wood, and the faint lemon oil Mrs Hart used to put on the banister. Maeve noticed. Her hand went to the newel post before she could stop it. Cillian saw her fingers tighten. Saw the tiny plaster on her palm.
The gold star was pinned crookedly back on her coat.
It looked absurdly small.
It changed the room anyway.
Nessa came in behind her. “No interior photographs, no filming, no recording, and if anyone leaks anything I will know because I was raised by aunties and surveillance is cultural.”
Dara, wisely, saluted with a dust sheet and vanished.
Maeve walked into the front room and stopped.
The wallpaper was half stripped. The carpet was gone. Floorboards lay exposed, scarred and beautiful beneath the neglect. The old upright piano stood against the far wall under a sheet, its shape unmistakable.
“You kept it,” she said.
“It came with the house.”
“No.” She looked at him then. “Things come with houses and men throw them in skips because they don’t know what ghosts cost.”
Cillian leaned against the doorframe, giving her space because that was easier than admitting he remembered how she took rooms: first with her eyes, then her breath, then ownership. “I’m restoring it.”
“The piano?”
“The room.”
Her laugh was small and disbelieving. “My mother said music room.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I didn’t have your number.”
“You know where my mother lives.”
“Your mother sold me the house. Your mother also told me you wanted rid of it.”
Maeve flinched.
There it was, then. Not anger. Not first. Hurt, quick and humiliated, because betrayal by family always arrived wearing your childhood slippers.
Nessa’s face went still. “She said what?”
Maeve looked at the piano sheet. “Of course she did.”
Cillian straightened. “You didn’t know.”
“No, Cillian, I enjoy learning about major property transfers from my mother during a reputational car crash. Keeps the pores tight.”
The sarcasm was clean. The hand near the newel post had trembled.
He hated that he noticed.
He hated more that he cared.
“I bought it legally,” he said, because somebody had to put a plank over the hole before everyone fell in.
“I’m sure you did.”
“That wasn’t a defence. It was a fact.”
“Facts are adorable. Men bring them out when feelings start chewing the furniture.”
Nessa murmured, “I’m putting that on a mug.”
Cillian’s phone buzzed again. Then Maeve’s. Then Nessa’s twice. The outside world pressing its greasy fingers to the glass.
Maeve ignored hers. “I need something from upstairs.”
“What?”
“A cassette. Maybe notebooks. My father kept a box in the attic.”
Cillian’s jaw tightened before he could stop it.
She saw. Of course she saw. Maeve had made a career of reading rooms full of men pretending not to feel.
“What?”
“The attic’s not safe.”
“I’m not asking the attic to emotionally support me. I need a box.”
“The back section has rot. I found it this morning.”
“Convenient.”
“Annoying, yes. Convenient, no.”
She looked toward the ceiling. He could almost see her calculating risk against need. The public scandal. The blocked song. The stolen files. The chance that proof existed above their heads in a house she no longer owned.
“I’ll go up,” he said.
“No.”
“Maeve.”
“No. I have spent the day watching people handle my life like a borrowed prop. I’m done standing downstairs while men go looking for evidence of my own history.”
The words landed harder than volume would have. Cillian looked at Nessa. Nessa looked back with a face that said, Tragically, she’s right and also likely concussed by stress.
He took a breath. “Then we go together. You step where I tell you. You touch nothing structural. If I say stop, you stop.”
Maeve arched a brow. “Do you always flirt like a building survey?”
“Only with women about to fall through ceilings.”
“Specific market.”
“Underserved.”
There. A real flicker that time. Tiny, reluctant, alive.
Nessa pointed at both of them. “I’m not emotionally available for nostalgia with banter. We have a legal crisis.”
“Then you’ll love the attic,” Cillian said. “It’s mostly boxes and liability.”
He led them up the stairs.
Halfway, Maeve stopped at the landing window. From there the harbour was visible between rooftops, a dark strip of water stitched with rain. The town had hung banners for Saturday’s homecoming concert along Main Street. Her own face smiled from them, enormous and golden-lit, hair blown back by a wind machine that had never met Emerald Harbour’s actual wind, which preferred violence and side angles.
“They’ve put me over the butcher,” she said.
“He asked for Beyoncé, but the council had a budget.”
Another ghost smile.
Then her phone rang again.
LEO.
Cillian saw the name before she turned the screen down. He wished he hadn’t. Not because jealousy had any right to him; it didn’t. He and Maeve were not a story. They were a childhood room, a handful of almosts, and one night thirteen years ago behind the pier when she had kissed him like she was leaving because she was. Then she had left. Then the world had learned her name and Cillian had learned how to build things that stayed where you put them.
Mostly.
At the attic door, he handed her a mask. She stared.
“Dust,” he said.
“I’ve survived celebrity journalism.”
“Dust is honest.”
She took it.
The attic smelled of damp cardboard, timber rot, old paper, and time losing patience. Cillian went first, torch beam moving across joists and stacked boxes. Maeve followed exactly where he told her, which surprised him less than it would have surprised people who mistook glamour for stupidity. Maeve had always listened when it mattered. She just made you earn the category.
“Left,” he said. “Stay on the board.”
“I am on the board.”
“Your right foot isn’t.”
“My right foot is pursuing independent growth.”
“Rein it in.”
Behind them, Nessa muttered into her mask, “This is how people die in prestige dramas.”
They found the box under a rolled rug and a broken lampshade, labelled in Seamus Hart’s slanted handwriting: MAEVE — MUSIC / SCHOOL / STAR NIGHT.
For one second nobody moved.
Maeve reached first.
Cillian caught her wrist.
The contact was light. It still went through him like a match struck in a dark shed.
“Board’s cracked,” he said quietly.
Her eyes were inches from his above the mask. Blue? Green? The kind tabloids called sea-coloured because tabloids had three adjectives and a death wish. He remembered them at sixteen, full of dared songs and hot chips and impossible exits.
“Tell me how,” she said.
So he did.
Together, awkward and careful, they shifted weight, moved the rug, eased the box free. Dust rose. Something skittered in the corner and Nessa said a word that would have wounded several saints.
Maeve held the box against her chest.
Below them, the doorbell began ringing.
Once.
Twice.
Then a fist hammered the front door.
Dara shouted from downstairs, voice cracking. “Cillian? There’s a solicitor here. And cameras. And—uh—Leo Vance.”
Maeve went utterly still.
Cillian looked at the box in her arms, then at the woman holding it like proof, weapon, wound.
The house, which had kept so much silence for so long, seemed to draw breath.
Maeve said, “He followed me home.”
And downstairs, Leo called her name like he still owned the echo.