Stand-In
But I also dream of betrayal. Of a fiancé who walked away without looking back.
The two tangle inside me, hope and dread, until I don’t know which voice to trust.
It all comes to a head at my cousin’s engagement party. The family’s gathered in another over-decorated hall, music blaring, fairy lights strung like promises across the ceiling. I’d sworn I’d attend alone, but when Eamon showed up with a grin and said, “Need a plus-one?” I didn’t say no.
The whispers start the second we walk in. Clare’s moved on. Clare’s found someone new. Clare’s honeymoon stand-in.
I flush, wishing I’d been braver, wishing I’d told him not to come. But then he’s spinning me onto the dance floor, his hand steady at my back, and the music lifts me out of shame.
“You worry too much,” he murmurs, twirling me under his arm.
“Easy for you to say.”
He chuckles. “Not that easy. You think I don’t hear them? The whispers about me? About how I’m not good enough for a woman like you?”
The honesty shocks me. I stumble, but he catches me, smooths the moment like he always does.
“You’re more than good enough,” I blurt, heat rushing to my cheeks.
The look he gives me then — steady, searching, as if weighing whether I mean it — nearly undoes me.
When the song ends, I cling to him longer than I should.
Eamon
She’ll break my heart. I know it. And still, I can’t stay away.
Because when Clare laughs, it feels like the world makes sense. And when she lets herself lean on me, even for a heartbeat, it feels like a kind of forever I never thought I’d get.
I want to tell her. Want to strip it bare, lay my heart in her hands. But she’s not ready. So I wait.
I’ll keep waiting, if it means someday she’ll look at me the way she once looked at him. Not with need, but with trust. With faith.
Because this time, she won’t be borrowing love. This time, it’ll be hers to keep.
I tell myself I’ll be grand on my own at the flower market, but dawn arrives damp and bossy and I’m already behind by the time I kick the shop door shut with my heel. The trolley squeaks. The crates of eucalyptus bite my palms. Dublin’s morning has that soft grey that makes every colour pop — tulips like sherbet, ranunculus the exact blush of my embarrassment at the thought of last night’s dance.
I nearly ram the trolley into a stack of hydrangea when a familiar hand reaches around me and catches the wobble before it collapses.
“Steady on,” Eamon says, low, amused. He smells faintly of sawdust and rain. “You’re late. Thought you’d need the extra pair of hands.”
“I’m not late,” I say, breathless. “The market moved itself earlier.”
He grins. “That’s not how time works.”
“It is in my universe.” I gesture at the crates. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Good morning to you too.” He tips an invisible cap at the wholesaler, who’s already eyeing him with approval. In two minutes flat he’s bartering like he’s been buying peonies all his life, and I hate him a little for how easy he makes it look.
We fall into a rhythm: he lifts, I choose, he asks if we need another hundred stems of ruffled ivory things and I tell him not to disrespect the cloud-like miracle of lisianthus. The wholesalers start greeting him like he’s one of ours. Someone calls him “the flower fella.” He bears it with dignity.
“Roses?” he says, bracing as I point to a tower of pale apricot. “Go on then. Break my back. I like the challenge.”
“Heroics before breakfast,” I say, trying not to stare at the way his forearms flex as he hoists. “You’re going to be insufferable later.”
He slides me a coffee from a van I didn’t notice, steam curling into the damp morning. “I’m already insufferable, O’Shea. Keep up.”
“Tell me something true,” he says at a red light, eyes forward. “Something you haven’t said out loud yet.”
“That’s an ambush,” I protest, but the amber flips and I’m still thinking about it as we roll.
“The thing is,” he adds, voice gentle, “I don’t mind the quiet. If you’d rather not.”
I don’t trust the quiet. Not anymore. Quiet is where I hear Darragh’s voice in my head, reasonable and careful, explaining how opportunities don’t wait, how timing is everything, how a man has to know himself and be brave enough to walk away from what isn’t right. I grip the cup harder. The lid gives a warning squeak.
“He wanted a perfect life,” I blurt. “White plates, white sheets, wedding photos that matched the walls. We colour-coordinated our future.”
Eamon lets out a soft sound that might be a laugh. “And you?”
“I wanted to build a life that could get messy and still be beautiful.” I swallow, surprised at myself. “And he… he didn’t. He wanted the mess managed. He wanted me managed.”
The van hums. He turns the corner as if the road asked politely. “You don’t look manageable.”
“Rude.”
“All admiration,” he says, a smile tugging. “You look… alive, Clare.”
Alive. The word lands in my chest like a candle lit in a dim room.
Back at the shop, we unload with the efficiency of a pair who know each other’s steps. I show him the trick of cutting at an angle; he shows me how to brace a bucket so it doesn’t tip when I’m elbow-deep in stems. He whistles under his breath as I build the first of the bridal bouquets — wild, airy things that look like they drifted in on the morning.
“I still think there’s too much ivory,” he says, and I flick a droplet of water at him.
When he leaves, I expect the room to sag around me, emptier than before. It does. But it’s a good empty, the kind that invites movement. I put on music. The day rushes in.
By lunchtime, I’ve forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, forgotten to call the bride whose mother’s convinced baby’s breath is the height of elegance. I’m trying to wedge the phone under my ear while binding a bouquet when the bell over the door rings and a voice I don’t recognise in the moment because my body drops temperature first says, “Clare.”
The flowers in my hands go still. Somewhere in my head a cupboard slams shut.
“Clare,” he says again, surprised at himself, as if he’d expected a trumpet fanfare instead of the smell of wet roses and eucalyptus.
He looks the same and not at all: Darragh, in a coat that cost a month’s rent, hair product attempting the impossible. He has that Marbella tan, that sheen of a life curated for a grid. I’m suddenly acutely aware that my apron is smeared with green and my hair’s half out of its bun.
“What are you doing here?” I say, and my voice is civil, which feels like treachery to myself.
He glances around, as if the shop has changed position while he was gone. “I tried to call.”
“You did not.”
“And yet here you are, corporeal as ever.”
He exhales, scanning for a stool that isn’t covered in ribbon. There isn’t one. Good. “I heard you went to Venice,” he says, as if we’re trading postcards. “It’s good you didn’t waste it.”
“Wonderful you care about carbon footprints now.”
He flinches, marginally. “I came to apologise,” he says quickly, like he’s being timed. “I should have — ”
“Ahead of the wedding?” I supply.
He winces. “I’ll be honest. The firm… the timing…”
“There it is,” I say, too bright. “The firm. The timing. The Brave Decision. Well done, you.”
He looks at his hands. “I handled it badly.”
“You handled it like a coward.” The bouquet I’m binding goes tight. “You’re not sorry you left, Darragh. You’re sorry you look like a man who did.”
His gaze snaps up. For a heartbeat, he looks dangerously close to anger — the old, careful kind that never raised its voice and still managed to make me small. Then he smooths it. “I am sorry I hurt you.”
“You hurt our mothers,” I say, because that stings worse. “Do you ever think of them? Of my aunties cancelling trays of sandwiches?”
The shop bell gives a soft chime. Again, Eamon steps in with a crate I didn’t order and a timing I didn’t either, and the air reconfigures. Darragh straightens. Something performative fastens to his face, the unruffled charm he wore at fundraisers.
“Hello,” he says, cool.
Eamon looks between us, takes in my jaw, the clipped edges of the room. He sets down the crate and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Alright?”
“I’m grand,” I say, which is Irish for not at all. “Darragh was leaving.”
“I hadn’t finished,” Darragh says, and the old battle lines hum under my skin.
“Let’s not,” I say. “Let it be tidy in one place, for once.”
His gaze flickers to Eamon. “You moved on fast.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say before I can stop it. It lands between all three of us with an ugly clatter.
Eamon’s voice, when it comes, is soft. “Clare, I can — I’m happy to — I can go get the coffees.”
I want to thank him and I want to pull him to my side and I want to throw the coffee at Darragh’s shoes. “Stay,” I tell him, and something in Darragh tightens, because I’ve never told a man to stay in front of him.
The apology concludes. It is nothing and it is a lot. When he finally leaves, the room breathes like it’s been waiting to exhale.
I’m shaking. Stupid, ridiculous. I’m the one who asked him to go.
Eamon steps closer, careful as if approaching a frightened bird. He doesn’t reach for me. He lets the potential of reaching do the work.
“I hate that I shook,” I whisper, furious at my own body. “I hate that I gave him that.”
Shame is a mean river. It wants to pull me under. He is a rock in it, patient as water works itself out around him. I lean, barely, and he bears my weight like he was made to.
***
When the door shuts behind him, I stand there for a second with my hand still on the counter, as if the varnished wood might tell me what to do with the shaking that’s left.
Eamon doesn’t fill the silence. He stays — one step to my right, not crowding, not leaving.
My phone is on the table where I dropped it earlier, screen lit with old history: Darragh’s name like a bruise I kept reopening for sport.
I pick it up. My thumb hovers.
This is the part I always get wrong — where I tell myself being decent is the same thing as being quiet.
I open a new message.
Darragh. Do not come to the shop again. Do not contact me. If you need anything — anything at all — put it through my solicitor. I’m not attending your wedding. I’m done keeping things tidy for you.
I read it once, twice, waiting for fear to talk me out of it.
Eamon’s voice comes soft, as if he’s reading my shoulders. “You don’t owe him courtesy.”
“I know,” I whisper. My throat burns like I’ve swallowed nettles. “But I owe myself the truth.”
I hit send.
The relief is immediate and brutal. My body doesn’t soften — it steadies. Like a chair finally set down on four legs.
“That,” Eamon says, and there’s no romance in it, only respect, “was you choosing yourself.”
I exhale. “I didn’t feel brave.”
He meets my eyes. “You don’t have to feel it. You have to do it.”
***
I am raw the rest of the day. I smash a vase. I cry when a bride sends a photo of her grandmother holding one of my bouquets like it’s the last warm thing in the world. I answer the phone too quickly and too sweetly and then hang up and swear into my apron.
He texts at closing: Are you home safe? Do you need dinner? I’m a terror with a wok.
I text back: Don’t weaponise stir-fry against me.
And because he’s him: I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll cook kindly.
He brings noodles that are better than any apology in the world. We eat on the shop floor in the scent of cut stems, paper rustling, the radio murmuring someone else’s heartbreak. When he leaves, he squeezes my shoulder, and it says everything I can’t trust my mouth with yet.
I sleep. Not well, not long. But I sleep.
Word gets around, because we’re Irish and we pretend it doesn’t. By Sunday, Aunt Maureen is at me with a teapot and a tone, asking if I need anything besides biscuits and vengeance. My mother, bless her, goes very quiet, which is how she sounds when she’s not sure which daughter needs defending more — the one who stayed or the one who ran. Siobhán texts, Tell me what you wish you’d said and I’ll write a strongly worded song.
***
Aunt Maureen arrives with a teapot and a paper bag of pastries like she’s come to stage an intervention in sugar.
She sets everything down, looks me dead in the face, and says, “Darragh’s mother rang.”
My stomach drops. “Of course she did.”
“She wants to ‘have a word’,” Maureen says, doing quotation marks with her eyebrows. “And she wants it at mine, because she thinks I’ll keep you civil.”
“Will you?” I ask, though the answer is already lodged in my ribs.
Maureen’s mouth tightens. “I’ll keep you safe. Civil is your own hobby.”
My phone buzzes again. A missed call. No number. Private.
Niamh’s name flashes next, because my life is a sitcom with lawyers. When I answer, she doesn’t bother with hello.
“Did you send it?” she asks.
“I did.”
“Good,” she says. “Now listen to me. They will try to rewrite the story where you are hysterical and he is ‘sorry’ and everyone can go back to their sandwiches. You are not giving them that.”
My throat works. “I don’t want war.”
“This isn’t war,” Niamh says, voice sharp as truth. “This is boundaries. Tell Maureen no meeting. If his mother wants closure, she can have it in the form of silence.”
Aunt Maureen nods like she can hear every word through the receiver. “Tell her I’m busy,” she says. “I’ve got a life to run and it doesn’t include polishing his halo.”
I laugh — short, shocked. The sound feels like air returning to a room.
Niamh softens. “Clare,” she says, gentler now. “What do you want?”
The question lands clean. No history. No guilt.
I swallow. “I want… peace. I want the right to be happy without permission.”
“Then act like it’s yours,” Niamh says. “Once. Publicly, if you can stand it.”
I glance at Maureen. She slides a pastry toward me like a bribe.
“Alright,” I say, and I mean it. “No meeting. No performance. I’m done being the convenient version of myself.”
***
On my way back, my phone dings.
Fancy a pint? — E
No, I type. Then because I’m not ready to be brave, I add: Maybe.
He replies with a pin to a small pub that smells like wet wool and divorce. He looks up when I come in, that steadying smile doing its treacherous work on my nerves. We take a snug. The glass is cold in my hand. We sit close enough that I could lean if I wanted.
“I don’t want to be somebody’s revenge fling,” he says. He is looking at the wood grain, giving me the dignity of not pinning me with it.
“You’re not,” I say, before the rest of me knows I mean it. “I swear you’re not.”
He nods. “Okay.”
That’s it. No test, no speech. He believes me because I said it like a person who sees herself clearly, for once.
When we leave, we walk the long way, past the neon chipper and the closed charity shop with its mannequin in a ball gown. A woman kisses a man outside a doorway like she got distracted halfway through breathing. The city is kind to lovers in the rain; it hides them in plain sight.
“Come to the workshop tomorrow,” he says, stuffing his hands deeper in his jacket. “If you feel like it. I’m building a bench and it could use a botanist’s eye.”
“Botanists know plants,” I say. “I know unruly bridesmaids.”
“Same thing.”
I promise nothing, which somehow is promising.
In the morning, before the shop opens, I go.
His workshop is a cave of light, if that makes sense — sun like a blessing through high windows, dust turning the air into a slow snow. There are clamps like iron insects and wood stacked in shy, patient piles. The bench is a length of oak that will outlast all of us. He looks different here, shoulders looser, that deep ease that comes when a man is precisely where he belongs.
He gives me a pair of safety specs and I fall a little in love with the way he takes care of absolutely everything without making a fuss of it.
“Hold this?” he says, and I brace the plank. The hum of the planer is oddly soothing. He moves with that accurate economy I’ve come to recognise — nothing wasted, nothing showy. When he cuts the dovetail, he does it like a prayer.
“This is a lot of trust,” I murmur over the noise. “Putting sharp things in my vicinity.”
“I’ve seen you with secateurs,” he says. “I know what I’m about.”
We break for tea and he shows me a sketch. The bench is for a small school library in Inchicore, a donation he shrugged off like it wasn’t the kindest thing I’ve heard all week.
“They lost their old one when the roof leaked,” he says. “Books shouldn’t have to stand up that long.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I say, and his ears go pink in a way I want to bottle.
I stay longer than I mean to. It’s hard to leave that room where wood turns into something gentler under his hands. When I do go, his palm catches mine without thinking as I step over a coil of cable, and we freeze at the same time, looking down at our hands like they’re a prophecy neither of us knows how to read.
“That was — ” I start.
“Instinct,” he finishes, and neither of us apologises.
I carry the feel of his skin back to the shop. I tuck it into the day like a talisman. It hums in my pocket when a bride’s mother tells me she’s heard I’m fragile now, as if love were a leg you could re-break by bumping into a sofa.
By afternoon, the radio has the audacity to play our Venice song (we only had one; the busker under the bridge sang it like an alley cathedral). I swear at it. The shop bell sounds, bright and brief, and I pull my face into something like customer service. It’s not a customer. It’s Mags from the hotel down the road, panic already arriving ahead of her.
“Clare. Five-alarm. The Saturday wedding’s flowers — last-minute venue switch, the ceiling’s lower, the arrangements are too tall. The bride’s mother has threatened arson.”
“On the flowers or the venue?”
“Unclear. Possibly both. Please tell me you can fix it.”
I should say no. It’s Thursday. I have orders stacked up like dominos waiting for a sneeze. My hands are resin-sticky from signing for boxes. And yet — the part of me that loves the rush of triage and beauty in the same breath leaps like a child.
“Yes,” I hear myself say. “Tell them we’ll do a midnight refit tomorrow. I’ll bring a ladder and a man who knows his way around terrible ceilings.”
“Who’s the man?” Mags asks, but she says it like she knows.
“The flower fella,” I say, and the grin she gives me could power the Luas.
I text him: Fancy a midnight raid on a hotel ceiling?
He replies: I thought you’d never ask.
I do the triage talk with the bride and her mother, who is, delightfully, a tyrant in sequins. The bride is white to the lips. The mother is red with a sense of grievance so deep it may be genetic.
“Breathe,” I tell the bride, because no one ever tells the women to breathe at their own parties.
“We’ll chop and drop,” I tell Eamon, under my breath. “Lower everything, soften it, make the room say we meant to.”
“Yes, boss,” he murmurs, all mock-serious.
We work like thieves in the quiet hours: he shortens stands, I rebuild compositions, the hotel porter brings us sandwiches because saints appear in unlikely uniforms. At one point I’m up the ladder and it wobbles and his hands are there without me asking, anchoring it, anchoring me.
“You’ve got me,” he says, very softly.
“I know,” I say, and I do, and I could cry for the simplicity of those two words.