They didn’t call the first night.
On the ferry, Aoife sat on a plastic seat that smelled of old salt and spilled chips, the sea a black smear outside the window, and watched Cillian try to unlock his father’s number on his phone three times.
The fourth time, he pressed the screen dark and put it face-down on the table.
“Wait until we’re somewhere that isn’t still echoing,” he said, voice hoarse. “We’ll make more sense there.”
Somewhere-that-isn’t still echoing turned out to be a dingy room above a kebab shop near Connolly Station in Dublin. The wallpaper peeled in the corners. The mattress dipped in the middle. When Aoife lay down, she felt her spine curve around the child inside her, the three of them fitted into a space barely big enough for two.
“We can’t stay here,” she murmured into the dark.
“We won’t,” he promised, hand spread over her belly. “This is just the first stop.”
He always said it like that, as if their life was a line of train stations and they just had to keep getting back on.
***
Three months later, the first stop had turned into three.
The Dublin bedsit was slightly less dingy – actual carpet, a window that opened without a fight – but the air still smelled of cooking from other people’s kitchens and the hallway was always either too loud or too quiet.
Aoife stacked plates in the tiny café two streets over, learning the rhythm of “what can I get ye, love?” with a Dublin lilt over her Belfast vowels. Cillian pulled pints at the corner pub on nights he wasn’t sneaking into the college library to sit in on film studies lectures he technically wasn’t enrolled in yet.
He came home one evening, cheeks pink from the wind, eyes too bright.
“They’re taking late applications,” he blurted, dropping a leaflet onto the table between the baby bottles and the pile of crumpled napkins covered in her storyboard squares. “Film school. Proper. You should see the cameras they’ve got, Aoife. You’d cry.”
“We can’t afford—”
“I asked. There’s bursaries. Grants. They’ve a whole thing for… disadvantaged backgrounds.” He made a face at the wording. “They said sure, send in a portfolio.”
She looked down at the leaflet. The glossy images of studios and edit suites might as well have been another planet. Her fingers were still red from the café’s hot water.
“I haven’t got a portfolio,” she said quietly.
“You have a notebook full of shots and that wee camera,” he said, immediate, fierce. “You’ve more of an eye than half the people that’ll apply. We’ll make one.”
They did. For a week, between shifts and feeds and the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that made her head fizz, Aoife shot everything.
The way light fell over the river. A man feeding pigeons with the care of a surgeon. Their tiny bedsit, messy and soft, Cillian asleep on the sofa with the baby on his chest, both of them open-mouthed and oblivious, a football match murmuring on the telly with the sound off.
She posted the USB stick herself, palms sweating as if it were evidence.
When the acceptance email came – we are delighted to offer you a place – she cried into a tea-towel in the café kitchen, shoulders shaking over the tray of scones.
That night, she told Cillian she couldn’t go. That it was too selfish. That one of them had to work and it might as well be the one the world was more likely to hand things to.
He listened, jaw tight, then calmly took the acceptance letter out of her hand, folded it, and slid it back into the envelope.
“We didn’t run so you could spend the rest of your life asking strangers what kind of toast they want,” he said. “We ran so you could do this. I’ll pick up extra shifts. I’ll manage.”
“You can’t carry us forever, Cill.”
“I won’t have to,” he said. “Because in a few years, you’ll be the one hiring me.”
It should have sounded ridiculous. It sounded like scripture.
She went.
***
The next years blurred, but some frames stayed sharp.
Aoife, twenty, on a soundstage for the first time, the cavernous dark smelling of dust and possibility. Her skin prickled as she watched a lecturer break down blocking like choreography.
“This is just another kind of marching,” she thought, remembering bonfire nights and parades. “Only here, we choose the music.”
Cillian’s hands, ink-stained, as he filled out yet another application for a side job: extra shifts behind the bar, leaflet drops, a grim Christmas stint in a grotto where he wore a fake beard and took photos with children who burst into tears if he so much as spoke in his actual accent.
The baby – their baby – toddling between their legs, then running, then sulking at the childminder’s door. She had Cillian’s eyes and Aoife’s stubborn chin. They named her Niamh, because Aoife had always loved names that meant more than they said.
Their first flat with actual doors that closed properly. The first time the electricity went out because they’d misjudged the bill. The first time Aoife fixed it herself, swearing at the online form until the lights flicked back with a grudging hum.
The first time Cillian auditioned for something.
He came home with a fluorescent sticker still half-stuck to his T-shirt, a number scrawled across it. His hands were shaking so hard he spilled tea everywhere.
“I thought I’d be grand, you know?” he said, staring at the table. “I talk to people all night. But when I got in the room, I could barely say my name.”
“What was it for?” she asked, mopping the tea with a dishcloth.
“Some crime thing. I was ‘Thug Two’.” He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Didn’t get it. They said I wasn’t scary enough.”
“You? Not scary?” She arched an eyebrow. “You should have told them about your Da.”
He snorted. Then, more quietly, “They asked about my family. I nearly… I nearly said ‘I’ve a brother’ like it was still true.”
The air in the kitchen changed. The ghost of Gareth pulled up a chair.
Aoife set the cloth down. “You do have a brother,” she said, picking each word carefully, like glass from a wound. “He’s just not here.”
“And we’re the reason no one knows where ‘here’ is,” Cillian muttered.
The guilt never left. It just learned where to sit so they could walk around it.
***
O’Connell Street one winter, lights strung like constellations. Aoife in a too-thin coat, script pages clutched in her gloved hands. The short film she’d written for her final year had been chosen for production. At the table read, the lecturer introduced her as “our director-writer.”
She liked how it sounded. Heavy and sharp, both.
“You’re scowling,” Cillian whispered that night as she practised lines of direction under her breath, Niamh asleep between them in the bed.
“I’m concentrating.”
“You scowl when you’re happy too,” he said fondly, thumb tracing the line between her brows. “Little crease there gives you away.”
“Shut up and read it again,” she ordered, tossing the script at his chest. “You’re standing in for three different actors tomorrow.”
It was always like that. If she needed a body to block a scene, he was there. If she needed a fight to test choreography, he’d throw himself around with more enthusiasm than sense. If she needed someone to talk back at her like a Hollywood diva so she could practise not flinching, he gave her his best ridiculous American accent.
“You know you should just do this for real,” she said one evening, watching him pace her tiny camera frame with a bottle of beer doing double duty as a prop.
“What, be a gobshite professionally?” he said.
“Be an actor.”
He rolled his eyes. “Aoife, the world’s not exactly short of tall lads who can say ‘howaya’ convincingly.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it’s short of lads who can make crying look like a religious experience.”
She didn’t say: and if you get big enough, maybe it’ll make it harder for them to drag you back. Harder for the story to swallow us all.
***
London was louder, harsher, easier to disappear in.
By then, Aoife had two short films on the festival circuit. They travelled on cheap trains, shared beds with friends-of-friends, ate half-soggy sandwiches in green rooms while strangers told her, effusively, how fresh her “voice” was.
One night in a cramped cinema in Soho, someone from a streaming platform took her aside and said the word “feature” like it was a sacrament.
“We could build something around you,” the woman said, all sharp eyeliner and sharper smile. “Writer-directors are gold. Have you thought about longer-form narrative?”
Aoife thought about Belfast. About one night and a fire and an absence that had stretched into a decade.
“I think about narrative all the time,” she said simply.
Out in the lobby, Niamh sat on the carpet with a book, headphones on, oblivious to the small orbit her parents were starting to form.
Cillian leaned against the wall with a complimentary beer, watching Aoife talk. He caught her eye over the woman’s shoulder and gave her a look that said, See? Told you.
He’d found his own inroad at last. A casting assistant at the Q&A afterwards had recognised him from a short he’d done as a favour to one of Aoife’s classmates.
“You’ve got a good face,” the casting assistant said, blunt. “Use it. There’s a period romance shooting in Wales that needs men who can ride horses and look tragic.”
“Can he fall off the horse?” Aoife asked dryly. “Because he’s very good at falling off things.”
He got the role. One of a cluster of soldiers in the background. He had three lines and died in the rain. In the finished film, his death lasted all of four seconds.
Four seconds was enough.
A still from that scene – Cillian on his knees in the mud, face streaked, eyes huge with some raw, torn emotion – did the rounds on fan Tumblrs and Instagram accounts dedicated to “random British and Irish actors who should be in everything.”
Someone gif-ed it. Someone else wrote a breathless caption about how those eyes deserved better than the third row of the credits.
The next audition, they knew his name.
***
Years slid forward.
Aoife’s first feature. Then her second. Reviews that used words like searing and intimate and quietly devastating. In interviews, she talked about small towns and women whose lives never made it into headlines. She never talked about the night she climbed out her bedroom window or the boy who didn’t come home.
Cillian’s roles grew too. Bit parts in bigger films. Then supporting roles where the camera loved him even when the script didn’t know what to do with him. An American series shot half in London, half in Toronto. A film that flopped everywhere except a handful of European festivals, where juries kept circling his name.
One delicate, brutal indie romance changed everything.
He played a widowed father who fell in love again too slowly. Aoife watched from behind the monitor as he sat on a cheap sofa, hands clasped so hard his knuckles went white, lower lip trembling just enough.
“I can’t…” he whispered, voice breaking on the word, and something in her chest cracked open all over again.
The film didn’t make much money. It made his career instead.
Overnight, he was Cillian Rowan, breakout star. The big studios came sniffing. They offered him clean, silly romcoms and slick action films where he got to run in slow motion from explosions. He said yes to just enough to pay for decent rent and school fees and the occasional emergency flight when a relative got sick back home.
He said no whenever they wanted Aoife as an add-on.
“She’s not my plus-one,” he told a PR rep who kept trying to book them as a package deal. “She’s the one you’ll be begging for in a year.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Aoife’s third feature – the one about the teenage girl in a small town who refused to forgive her father just because the script wanted her to – broke through hard. The critics wrote thinkpieces. The word “Oscar” got whispered in low tones in places that used to ignore her emails.
At the premiere, on the carpet that wasn’t red so much as a deep bruised plum, a journalist asked her:
“Your films and his roles both deal a lot with grief and family. Is that something personal for you? Is there a big story there?”
Aoife smiled. The cameras flashed. She thought of Gareth’s scarf, flapping in the smoke.
“There’s always a big story,” she said. “I just tell mine with actors and lenses instead of headlines.”
Later, in the car, she sat forehead-to-forehead with Cillian while Niamh scrolled on her phone across from them, pretending not to listen.
“We should go back soon,” he murmured. “Even just for a visit. Mam keeps asking. Da… doesn’t ask, but you know.”
“And say what?” she replied, low. “What do we tell them? Oh, we’ve three beautiful babies and we’ve kept them out of the light for a reason?”
He huffed out a breath that was half-laugh, half-winced agreement.
“That’s not how I’d phrase it in the wee tourist brochure, no,” he said. “But I keep thinking… if we don’t go back on our terms, the story’ll drag us home on its own.”
“It always does,” she said, and kissed him anyway. They’d built too much on that first decision to let themselves fracture over a wound they still didn’t know how to clean.
Across from them, Niamh pretended to be engrossed in her screen. The reflection of their faces in the tinted window looked like a family from a magazine spread: handsome father, poised mother, clever, self-contained teenage girl.
The part the camera didn’t catch was the way Niamh’s thumb kept hovering over the search bar, one half-typed phrase blinking back at her:
Gareth Rowan Belfast missing
She deleted it before she hit enter.
For now.