“We can absolutely ban Balloon Man,” Declan said. “Let the minutes show it.”
“No clowns,” Niamh muttered, without looking up. “Add that to my contract.”
“We’re doing contracts now?” he asked.
She gave him a look. “You brought a solicitor onto your committee, Hayes. This is what happens.”
By the time they reached point four—Biscuits—the room had warmed up in more ways than one. People were arguing over whether the hot chocolate stand should move (“closer to the stage so people don’t have to pick between sugar and music”) and if the nativity needed real sheep this year (“absolutely not, last time they shat on the Mayor”).
“Right,” Declan said at last, when the sugar levels were threatening to boil over. “Before we all fall into a diabetic coma, one last thing.”
He glanced at Niamh. She raised an eyebrow like she knew he was about to say something stupid.
“Morale,” he said. “We can crunch all the numbers we like, but if this feels like a funeral, nobody’s going to want to fight for it. So we need… I dunno. A mission statement.”
“Jesus.” Brian snorted. “He’s been reading management books.”
“Shut up,” Declan said mildly. “Seriously. Why are we doing this? Why does the festival matter to you lot? I know why it matters to me, but if it’s just ‘Decks loves Christmas’, they’ll say I can feck off and decorate my own gaff.”
He expected silence, or embarrassed jokes. Instead, Mrs Doyle spoke up straight away.
“It’s the only time of year I see my neighbours’ faces,” she said simply. “Properly, like. Not just the side of their head as they’re running for the bus.”
“The little ones get out of the flats,” the youth worker added. “They run round that square and spend fifty cent on a lucky dip and think they’ve gone to Disneyland.”
“When I was on my own that first year,” the GAA mam said, “I brought the kids down because I couldn’t afford anything big. We stayed for three hours. It got us through.”
Niamh’s pen hovered over the page. She didn’t say anything.
Declan looked at her anyway. “You?”
She met his gaze, expression unreadable. For a second he thought she’d deflect with a quip. Instead, she said, quietly, “It’s where my neighbours looked me in the eye after. When everyone knew.” She cleared her throat. “It mattered that they still did.”
The room went still. The “after” didn’t need unpacking. Everyone here had been there the night the tree became a stage for someone else’s cruelty.
Declan’s throat tightened. He wanted to reach for her hand. Instead, he nodded.
“Right,” he said. “So we’re agreed. We’re not just saving a few fairy lights. We’re fighting for the only night some people remember they belong to a place.”
He could feel them leaning in, that shared stubbornness he loved this patch of Dublin for. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t polite. But it was fierce.
“So here’s my proposal,” he went on, feeling something reckless spark in his chest. “We don’t just scrape by. We make this year the best version we’ve ever done. We give them such a show they’d be ashamed to kill it. And we give ourselves a night we can point to and say, ‘Look. Look what happens when you let us mind each other.’”
“Ambitious,” Orla said. “I like it.”
“We’ll need more volunteers,” Brian warned.
Liam and his mates exchanged a look. “We’ll help,” Liam said grudgingly. “If I can DJ.”
“You’re not playing that shite you call music over a nativity,” Mrs Doyle declared.
“We’ll negotiate,” Declan said quickly, before that turned into a generational war.
He turned back to Niamh, buoyed by the room’s response. Stupid idea number two was already forming.
“And while we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to fix your Christmas.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.” The spark of recklessness flared into something else—a challenge, equal parts genuine care and self-defence. If he made it a joke, maybe it wouldn’t be terrifying. “By the time the tree lights go on, you’re going to say the words ‘I love Christmas’ and mean them.”
The room ooohed like a bunch of kids in a playground.
“Oh, absolutely not,” Niamh said. “Absolutely—no. Take it back.”
“Too late,” he said. “Witnesses.” He gestured round the circle. “We’ll take affidavits.”
“You’re deranged.” She turned to the others. “Does he do this every meeting?”
“Only when he’s fond of someone,” Mrs Doyle said.
“That’s not helping,” Niamh hissed.
Declan leaned back in his chair, enjoying himself now. “We’ll make it interesting.”
“You are not a gameshow host.”
“Yet,” he said. “Give it time. Look, I’ll even put something on the line.” He tapped the table. “If I can’t do it—if we get to Christmas Eve and you still hate the whole thing—I’ll…”
He cast about for something suitably awful. His eyes landed on the suggestion jar Orla insisted on keeping by the till, currently half-full of folded paper.
“I’ll wear whatever jumper your ma picks for me to the finale,” he said, inspiration—or madness—striking. “And I’ll stand up on that stage and tell the entire square I was wrong and you were right and Christmas is a capitalist scam.”
“You already wear awful jumpers,” Niamh said. “That’s not a sacrifice.”
“You haven’t seen what Deirdre can do with sequins,” Orla put in. “Take the bet. For academic interest alone.”
Niamh looked around the room like she hoped someone would save her. Traitors, all of them, stayed silent, grinning.
“What do I get,” she said slowly, “if you win?”
He hadn’t thought that far. The obvious answer sat between them, crackling like static. He swallowed.
“Anything you want,” he heard himself say. “One wish. Within reason.”
“Within law,” she corrected automatically.
He spread his hands. “Within law.”
The challenge hung in the air between them. Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, assessing. If he knew her—and he did, better than was good for either of them—she was mentally writing the clauses already. The safest option was to refuse. Walk away. Call him an eejit and sulk off into the night.
“I’m not making a legally binding agreement in a room full of Tayto,” she said at last.
“Scared?” he asked lightly.
Her chin lifted. Dangerous. “I don’t scare that easily.”
“Then say no,” he said, as gently as he could manage. “Tell us all you’re done. That you hate it, every bit of it, top to bottom, and you don’t want any part in saving it.”
The room went very, very quiet. It wasn’t fair, and he knew it. But fairness had never been the main currency here. Stubbornness was.
She stared at him. He could practically see the argument in her head: self-preservation versus the part of her that had walked into this café tonight instead of pretending she hadn’t seen the letter.
“Fine,” she said finally, voice steady. “But I want terms.”
“Of course you do,” he said softly. “Lay them on me.”
“If I win,” she said, “you take a break.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You heard me. If we get to New Year’s and I still don’t love Christmas, you stop.” She ticked it off on her fingers. “No more weekly Santa gigs, no more twelve-hour days fixing everyone’s broken boilers, no more saying yes every time someone on this road cries. You take—” she hesitated, searching for something that sounded both generous and realistic. “Two full weeks off. No volunteering. No organising. You go somewhere that doesn’t know your name and you rest.”
He laughed, startled. “That’s… that’s not a punishment.”
“That’s the point.”
He wanted to protest, to tell her that the whole reason he did all this was because the thought of doing nothing made his skin crawl. But her eyes were fierce, and there was a tremor under the fierceness that made his chest ache.
“And if you win?” she asked. “What’s your wish?”
He thought of a dozen flippant answers. A lifetime supply of Tayto. Free legal advice for the rest of his days. Her wearing one of those ridiculous Christmas jumpers she always mocked.
“Leave it open,” he said instead. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“That’s not how contracts work.”
“It’s how daft bets between friends work,” he replied. “Come on, Kelly. Live dangerously.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then, to his eternal shock, she held out her hand.
“Two witnesses,” she said. “Verbal agreement. No written clauses. I reserve the right to argue about the definition of ‘love’ later.”
“Oh, that’s a given,” he said, and took her hand.
Her fingers were cool and small in his. The room murmured approval. Somewhere near the biscuits, Mrs Doyle sighed like she was watching a soap.
“Right,” Orla said briskly, cutting through the fog that had descended. “That’s enough romantic tension for one evening. Meeting adjourned. Eat your body weight in sugar and then go home and sleep on it.”
Chairs scraped again. People stood, stretching, reaching for coats and biscuits. Plans were made in clusters: who’d talk to which businesses, who’d dig out old photos, who’d bully the school into lending their sound system.
Declan let go of Niamh’s hand reluctantly. The imprint of it lingered on his palm.
“You realise,” she said under her breath as the room buzzed back to life, “that if you lose, I’m booking you on a two-week yoga retreat in Mayo with no phone signal.”
He grinned, dizzy with something that felt too much like hope. “And if I win,” he said, “you’ll have to stand under that tree with me and admit it was worth it.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
But she didn’t take her name off the agenda. And when she put her coat back on, she picked up the council letter and folded it into her pocket like something she intended to fight, not hide.
On the way out, Mrs Doyle patted her arm. “We’ll mind you this time, love,” she said, almost offhand, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
Niamh’s throat worked. “We’ll see,” she repeated.
Outside, the streetlights glowed on wet tarmac. As they spilled out onto the pavement in twos and threes, breath fogging in the air, the overhead decorations flickered on—the cheap council ones and the nicer ones Declan had bullied the businesses into buying between them.
Beside him, Niamh tilted her head back to look at them. Just for a second. Just long enough for him to see reflected light catch in her eyes.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and forced himself to look away, in case he believed in wishes too hard and scared them off.
One step at a time, he told himself as she said goodnight and headed up the road towards her mam’s. One meeting. One bet. One light at a time.
The thought followed her out of the room and into the quieter corridors of her own head, refusing to soften just because the lights had. By the time she reached the doorway, it sat there waiting for her like a coat she was going to have to decide whether to put on or leave behind.
Deirdre Kelly’s stew could have ended wars.
It bubbled in the pot like lava, thick with potatoes and carrots and whatever cut of beef had been on special at the butcher that morning. The smell filled the tiny kitchen and drifted down the hall, doing battle with the faint damp that never quite left the old terrace.
Niamh sat at the table with her laptop open and the council letter spread out beside it, highlighter in hand. The edges of the paper were already softened from overhandling. Between the legalese and the steam from the stew, her glasses kept fogging.
“You’re not eating,” her mam said, turning from the cooker with a wooden spoon in hand like a weapon. “That’s your second bowl.”
“That was your second bowl,” Niamh corrected. “You’ve been ‘just tasting’ it for twenty minutes.”
Deirdre sniffed. “Chef’s privilege. And don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t aware we had a subject.”
“We do.” Her mam pointed the spoon at the letter. “That.”
Niamh glanced at the offending document. Northside Winter Festival Committee – Funding Review. “I thought we’d covered this.”
“You covered it with yourself,” Deirdre said. “Which is not the same as covering it with me.” She dropped two generous ladles of stew into a bowl and plonked it in front of Niamh. “Eat while you explain.”
There was no arguing with that tone. Niamh picked up her spoon. The first mouthful burned her tongue just enough to remind her she was alive.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“How doomed we are.” Deirdre sat opposite, apron still on, hair dragged back into a clip. She’d taken her makeup off but left the earrings in, small gold hoops catching the light when she moved. “In small words, please. I’ve had a long day.”
“You and me both.” Niamh chewed, buying a second. “Short version: they’re looking to cut anything that doesn’t justify itself in a spreadsheet. The festival included.”
Deirdre’s shoulders slumped. “I knew it.”
“But,” Niamh said, before that could run away into full despair, “they can’t just pull the plug without consultation. We’ve time. Not a lot, but some.”
“We.” Her mam latched onto the word like a terrier. “You said ‘we’. You and…?”
“And the committee,” Niamh said warily.
“And Declan,” Deirdre translated, far too pleased.
“He’s part of the committee, yes.”
“He’s the committee,” she scoffed. “The rest of them just orbit him like he’s the moon. Did he come to see you? He said he would.”
“He did,” Niamh said. “At work.”
“Oh, at work,” Deirdre repeated, as if that made it romantic. “Very professional of him. Did he bring one of those coffees with the hearts in the foam?”
“He brought a council letter that might kill your precious market,” Niamh snapped, sharper than she meant. “Very romantic.”
Deirdre’s face softened. “I know, love. I know. I’m only messing with you.” She reached across the table and squeezed Niamh’s wrist. “Tell me what you decided.”
Niamh stared at the thumbprint of stew on the tablecloth. “I said I’d co-chair the bloody thing.”
Deirdre’s inhale was pure drama. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Niamh, that’s… that’s…” Her mam flapped a hand, as if the right word was somewhere just out of reach. “That’s brilliant.”
“It’s idiotic,” Niamh said. “It’s volunteering. You know how I feel about volunteering.”
“You love it,” Deirdre said serenely. “You just prefer to call it ‘strategic pro bono engagement’ so it sounds posh on your CV.”
Niamh couldn’t help the huff of amusement. “You’ve been reading my LinkedIn.”
“I don’t know what a LinkedIn is,” Deirdre said. “But I do know my daughter’s tells. You don’t do anything halfway, Niamh. If you’re in, you’re in.”
“That’s what worries me,” she muttered.
Her mam tilted her head, studying her. “Is it just the work that’s worrying you?”
“Isn’t that enough? Fundraising, sponsorship, risk assessments, dealing with that eejit from the council who loves an acronym. I’ll have to learn what a PLI certificate is.”
“Declan’ll know all that,” Deirdre said. “He’s been doing it for years.”
“Declan ‘I’ll sign anything if it keeps the fairy lights on’ Hayes cannot be trusted with paperwork,” Niamh said. “He thinks a deadline is a suggestion.”
Deirdre smiled into her tea. “You always did make a good team.”
Niamh’s spoon clinked against the bowl. “Mam.”
“I’m only saying,” her mam said, entirely unrepentant. “You played to each other’s strengths when you were ten, you’ll do the same now. He’ll charm them and you’ll frighten them. It’s perfect.”
“He made a bet,” Niamh blurted, before she could stop herself.
Her mam’s eyes lit. “Now we’re talking.”
“It’s stupid,” Niamh said quickly. “It’s a joke. We were trying to get the committee to stop panicking and he opened his big mouth and… anyway. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters if you bring it up in my kitchen.” Deirdre folded her arms. “Out with it.”
Niamh shoved stew around her bowl. “He thinks he can make me love Christmas by the time the lights go on.”
Deirdre’s hand flew to her mouth. “He didn’t.”
“Apparently he’s under the impression he’s some kind of festive therapist,” Niamh said. “He says if he succeeds I have to give him one wish.”
“Oh ho.” Deirdre’s eyebrows practically left her face. “And if he fails?”
“I get to make him take two weeks off. No Santa, no fixing everyone’s burst pipes, no twelve-hour days at the café.”
Deirdre sat back, impressed. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s not cruel, it’s humane.”
“You know that man hasn’t had a proper holiday in about ten years?”
“I know.” Niamh poked a potato. “That’s why I picked it.”
Her mam’s expression softened. “You’re looking after him.”
“I’m negotiating,” Niamh said stiffly.
“Mm.” Deirdre sipped her tea. “And are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Going to let him try.” She held up a hand before Niamh could protest. “I don’t mean are you going to pretend. I mean are you going to walk into it with your fists up, ready to prove him wrong, or are you going to… you know.” She waggled her fingers. “See what happens.”
“That’s not very legal of you,” Niamh said. “’See what happens’ is how people end up in my office crying.”
“That’s relationships,” Deirdre said. “This is fairy lights.”
“Same thing,” Niamh muttered.
Her mam’s gaze went gentle, and that was worse than the teasing. “He was here, you know,” she said quietly, “after.”
“I know.” Niamh kept her eyes on her stew.
That night was carved into her bones: the knock on the door, the way she’d stood on the other side of it, back pressed to the wood, breath shallow.
“Open it,” her mam had whispered from the sofa, eyes red. “Love, please.”
“If I open it I’ll fall apart,” Niamh had whispered back. “And I can’t. Not yet.”
She’d listened to Declan’s voice through two inches of painted timber. Ni? Just… let me in, yeah? I brought blankets. And that film you like where nothing happens for two hours. Please. She’d stayed silent until he gave up and left. Afterwards, she’d slid to the floor and pressed her forehead against the cool wood, fingers splayed over the letterbox, and hated herself for being a coward.
“He kept ringing for weeks,” Deirdre said now. “He left those ridiculous voice messages, you know the ones? Telling you about the specials in the café as if you were going to pop down for a fry.”
“I know.”
“You never went.”
“I know that too, Mam.”
The silence between them filled with all the things neither of them were saying: You were hurt. You shut the door. You didn’t just lose him, you locked him out.
Finally, Deirdre cleared her throat. “I don’t want you to do this for me,” she said. “Or for the road. Or even for him. I want you to do it for yourself. Because you deserve to stand in that square and not feel like you’re about to be laughed at.”
Niamh’s throat tightened. She took a steadying breath. “I’ll be busy,” she said. “Clipboards help.”
Deirdre smiled. “Oh, I know. God forbid you experience an emotion without an agenda attached.”
“Trauma-informed agendas,” Niamh corrected. “Very modern.”
Her mam reached across and tapped the council letter. “Whatever happens, I’m proud of you, you know that?”
“It hasn’t worked yet.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Deirdre said. “You said yes. That’s the hard bit.”
Niamh thought of Declan’s face in the café when she’d agreed. The way his whole body had lit up, like someone had plugged him straight into the mains. It made something inside her ache and unfurl at the same time.
She stabbed a carrot hard enough to split it. “I’ll email them tomorrow,” she said. “Ask for a meeting. We’ll need to see their numbers before we can do anything. And I’ll start organising surveys, business feedback, footfall counts—”
“There she goes,” Deirdre murmured proudly. “My own wee general.”
“Don’t start,” Niamh warned. But a thin thread of something that might have been excitement wound through the dread in her chest.
Maybe her mam was right. Maybe saying yes was the hard part. Everything after that was just… work.
She knew how to work.
The first planning session in the square took place two days later in daylight, because Niamh had insisted.
“If I’m doing this,” she’d told Declan on the phone, “we’re starting in the cold light of day. No twinkly nonsense.”
“You’re no fun at all,” he’d said. “I love it.”
Now she stood at the edge of the cobblestones, scarf wound high, breath fogging in the crisp Saturday air, and tried not to let her feet remember too much.
“It’s smaller than I remember,” she said, mostly to herself.
Declan, beside her, followed her gaze. “You were in heels last time,” he said gently. “Everything looks bigger when you’re afraid you’ll fall.”
She didn’t answer that.
The square wasn’t objectively impressive: a modest patch of open space ringed by shops and flats, the paving cracked in places where frost had got in. The central plinth where the tree went stood bare for now, a stone stump with last year’s metal bracket still bolted on. The lampposts wore old cable ties like bracelets from previous years’ decorations.
Still, there was something about it. The way the light fell between the buildings. The way sound echoed slightly, even with only a handful of people about.
“Right.” Niamh flipped open her notebook, grateful for the familiar weight of it. “Walk me through it. Start to finish.”
Declan shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and nodded towards the far end. “Stage goes up there, same as always. We’ve the panels in storage. Sound system… we’re borrowing the school’s again unless you can magically conjure two grand.”
“Not in this economy.” She made a note. “We’ll need to look at sponsorship. Proper sponsorship, not just Gerry from the pub promising us fifty quid and a keg he never quite gets round to delivering.”
“Leave Gerry to me,” Declan said. “He owes me for that time I helped him fish his brother out of the canal.”
“I’m not putting that in the minutes,” she said, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
They walked the perimeter slowly. He pointed out where the electrics ran, where the hot drinks stand usually went, where the kids’ rides had nearly taken out half the crowd one windy year.
“We’re not having the waltzers back,” Niamh said firmly, making another note. “Health and safety.”
“They were grand.”
“They made three children vomit in a ten-minute period.”
“That’s what wipes are for.”
“And the operator made inappropriate comments about every woman over fifteen.”
“Okay, he’s gone,” Declan conceded.
At the far corner, near the entrance from the main road, she paused. This was where he’d stood with the microphone that night. This was where the spotlight had hit her like a search beam.
The phantom echo of that particular humiliation flickered in her chest, sharp and hot. Her breath hitched.
“Hey,” Declan said quietly. “You all right?”