The teal front door had belonged to her mam before it belonged to her.
It was the kind of colour that looked optimistic even in winter — a stubborn slash of brightness against the constant Derry grey.
Tonight, the rain came sideways, and the wind kept trying to shove its shoulder into the lock like it had something to prove.
Saoirse pressed her forehead to the cool wood for half a second, breathing in the faint smell of old paint and lemon polish, and counted to three.
One.
Two.
Three.
Then she lifted her head, set her jaw, and went back to being the version of herself that didn’t crack.
Inside, the kitchen light was warm and blunt. The kettle clicked off with a soft metallic clack — familiar, domestic, maddening.
Mabel trotted in tight circles at her feet, tail whipping, the little cavapoo’s merle phantom coat catching the light like smoke and caramel.
'You’re excited about literally everything,' Saoirse muttered, toeing off her boots.
Mabel sneezed, as if offended, put both front paws on Saoirse’s shin and made a small, pleading noise that meant pick me up, I have suffered terribly, you’ve been gone for forty-six seconds.
'Aye, all right,' Saoirse said, and lifted her.
The dog settled instantly into her arms, warm and trusting, her chin resting under Saoirse’s collarbone like she belonged there.
Saoirse didn’t. Not. Not since—
The thought tried to get in. She shut it out, the way she always did.
Her phone buzzed on the counter.
CONTROL ROOM: UNAVAILABLE — missed call.
Her stomach tightened. She’d only been off shift an hour. She stared at the screen, thumb hovering, pulse telling on her.
Then the phone rang again.
Saoirse answered on the first ring, voice snapping into place like a seatbelt.
'Ambulance Service, Control.'
'Saoirse.'
That voice.
Not a colleague. Not a supervisor.
Low. Calm. Derry-soft at the edges, like he’d grown up with rain in his mouth and knew how to speak around it.
She closed her eyes. 'Who is this?'
A pause. A smile she could hear without seeing. 'Cian O’Rourke.'
Her brain offered a file: firefighter, Derry station, steady hands, blue eyes, the one everyone said you wanted on scene because he didn’t panic and he didn’t shout.
She’d heard his name a hundred times through the headset, always attached to the sort of calls that left her staring at a wall afterwards.
She hadn’t expected him to ring her at home.
'Why are you calling me?' Saoirse asked, sharp on purpose.
'Because I’m not meant to, technically,' he said, like it was an apology and a joke at once. 'And because I’m stuck.'
Her gaze flicked to the window. Rain streaked the glass in slanting lines. The streetlight outside turned it into silver threads.
'Stuck where?' she said.
'On your street.'
Saoirse’s spine went rigid. 'My street?'
'Aye.'
And, softer, like he’d lowered the volume for her: 'Before you bolt — I’m not at your door. I’m in the engine, parked down by the corner. We’ve just cleared from a job nearby.'
'So why—'
'I need a favour.' His voice stayed even. 'Not work. Not an emergency. … a human favour.'
Saoirse laughed once, humourless. 'You’ve the wrong number.'
'I don’t,' he said. 'Your number’s on the incident log. You handled a call last week. You said something.'
What had she said? A hundred things. A thousand.
'You told the wee woman on the line to put the kettle on,' he continued, and something in his tone gentled. 'You told her she could do one small thing while she waited. That she could keep her hands busy. That she could be brave for thirty seconds at a time.'
Saoirse swallowed, throat tight. She remembered that call. She remembered the trembling voice, the smell of smoke that didn’t exist in the control room but somehow got into her lungs.
'Aye,' she said, because she couldn’t deny it.
'I’ve a wee girl here,' he said, and the words changed the air in her kitchen. 'My niece. Keira. She’s three. She’s with me tonight because my sister’s on a night shift. The sitter cancelled. It’s a whole thing.'
Mabel lifted her head, ears pricking, as if she understood the word girl.
'And?' Saoirse said, careful.
'And Keira has decided she’s not leaving the cab until she gets a proper cup of tea like Uncle Keep makes.'
Saoirse blinked. 'Uncle… Keep?'
A low chuckle. 'She can’t say Cian. Or she won’t. Depends who you ask. I’m Uncle Keep now. It’s official.'
In spite of herself, Saoirse felt the corner of her mouth twitch.
'Right,' she said, trying to keep it flat.
'Right,' he echoed. 'She’s in her pyjamas, she’s cranky, and she’s got me wrapped. If I try to move her, she’ll wail loud enough for the whole Bogside to hear, and I’m not in the mood to add traumatised toddler to my evening.'
'So what’s the favour?' Saoirse asked.
Another pause. She could hear a faint child’s voice in the background, bright and bossy: 'Uncle Keep, I want your hair.'
Saoirse frowned. 'Your hair?'
Cian sighed — a man surrendering. 'She’s after my curls.'
And, like he couldn’t believe he was admitting it: 'She wants to brush them. And put clips in. And—'
A new sound: tiny nail polish bottles clinking.
Saoirse stared at the phone.
'Tell me you’re not letting her paint your nails in a fire engine,' she said.
'I am,' Cian said simply. 'Because she’s three. Because she’s tired. And because when she looks at me like I hung the moon, I can’t be bothered disappointing her.'
The image landed in Saoirse’s mind with cinematic clarity: a 6’3 firefighter built like a rugby player, sitting in the cab of an engine, brown curls falling over his forehead, those stupidly stellar blue eyes fixed on a toddler’s hands while she painted his nails like it mattered.
Something in her chest went tight and strange.
Because it wasn’t sexy, exactly — though God knew it was. It was… safe.
Men didn’t do safe. Not in her experience.
Not when people were watching.
'So?' she said, voice softer despite her best efforts. 'What do you want from me?'
'A minute,' he said. 'Just one. If you could step outside — not to me. Just outside. Look down the street.'
Saoirse’s skin prickled. 'Why?'
'Because,' Cian said, and his tone sharpened into seriousness, 'there’s someone at the corner, watching your house.'
Silence filled the kitchen.
Mabel went against her, sensing the shift in her body.
'Who?' Saoirse whispered.
'I can’t see his face clear in the rain,' Cian said. 'But I can see the posture. The way he’s hanging about like he has a right. And I’m not ringing you to frighten you. I’m ringing because I don’t like it.'
Saoirse’s heart thumped hard enough to shake her breath.
In Derry, your street was your business. Your front door was your boundary.
And she’d sworn nobody would ever have her standing exposed in one again.
She set Mabel down gently. 'Stay,' she told the dog, like the word had power.
Mabel didn’t listen. She followed anyway.
Saoirse crossed the kitchen, each step too loud, and put her hand on the teal door’s handle.
It was cold. Familiar.
Her pulse hammered.
'Saoirse,' Cian said, and there was no humour in it now. Only steadiness. 'Don’t open it if you don’t want to. I’m here. The door can stay shut.'
Her fingers tightened.
Outside, the rain pressed against the glass like impatient hands.
Inside, the kettle clicked as it cooled.
Saoirse breathed once, deep and shaking.
And she turned the lock.
For one sharp second, Saoirse considered pretending she had misheard him.
It would have been easier. She could have laughed into the phone, called him dramatic, told him firefighters were wasted on neighbourhood watch and hung up before the fear found a proper shape. Easy things had always been her weakness. Not because she chose them, but because easy things let you stay untouched.
Outside, the streetlamp hummed in its halo of rain. The terrace opposite was dark except for Mrs Donnelly’s front room, where the television flickered blue against the net curtains. Derry looked ordinary. That was the cruel trick of it. The worst moments never arrived with music. They arrived wearing the coat of an ordinary Thursday night.
Cian’s voice stayed in her ear. “You still with me?”
“Aye.”
“You don’t have to be brave for the whole night,” he said. “Just the next breath.”
Something in the phrasing snagged. She had said nearly the same to callers. To strangers. To frightened men lying on kitchen floors while their wives counted compressions. To children hiding in wardrobes after someone downstairs forgot what love was meant to sound like.
She had meant it for them.
She had never once thought it might apply to her.
Saoirse looked down at Mabel, who had planted herself between Saoirse’s slippers and the door as if she weighed more than eight loyal pounds. “If this is nothing,” Saoirse said, keeping her voice low, “I’m blaming you for the heart attack.”
“I’ll take that,” Cian said. “Firefighters love paperwork.”
“Do they?”
“No. But I’ll suffer heroically.”
A stupid breath left her. Not a laugh. Not quite. But enough that her hand eased on the handle.
She turned the latch only as far as the chain allowed, opened the door a careful two inches, and let the rain speak first.
The man at the corner moved once.
That was all. A shift of weight. A turn of his head. The smallest proof that Cian had not invented him out of overprotective instinct and Saoirse had not imagined him out of trauma. He was there. A shape in a dark jacket under the leaning rain, trying to look casual in the way guilty men always tried to look casual when they had been caught owning space that was not theirs.
Her stomach folded in.
“Is it Mark?” Cian asked.
Saoirse hated that he knew the name. Hated more that the question was careful, not hungry.
“I can’t tell.”
“All right. Don’t stare. You don’t owe him your face.”
That sentence steadied her more than it should have. You don’t owe him your face. She had spent months feeling as if every passer-by had a right to it: her expression, her humiliation, her answer to questions they had no business asking. She eased back from the crack in the door and let the chain take the tension.
Down the street, the engine’s interior light came on. Keira’s small voice carried faintly through the weather, complaining about a clip that had gone “badways.” Cian murmured something to her, then came back on the line.
“I’m going to step out where he can see me,” he said. “I’m not going near him unless he comes toward the house. You keep the door where it is.”
“You’re making it sound like a scene.”
“It is a scene. It just doesn’t have to become a disaster.”
Cian opened the engine door. Saoirse saw him then: tall, broad in his dark uniform, one hand holding the phone, the other visible and empty. He did not swagger. He did not shout. He simply stood beneath the rain and looked down the street with the stillness of a man who had decided a line existed.
The figure at the corner saw him.
For two seconds, nothing moved.
Then the man turned away.
No confrontation. No cinematic punch. No proof that would satisfy anyone else.
Only retreat.
Saoirse’s knees weakened anyway.
Before she shut the door properly, Saoirse let herself look once more at the street.
The corner was empty now, but empty did not mean harmless; it meant the danger had moved somewhere she could not see. That had always been the worst of it. The visible thing was almost a relief. It could be named. It could be watched. It could be measured against a doorframe and a chain.
Cian’s engine idled down the road, a red shape holding its place in the rain. Keira’s small hand appeared in the window, pressing a sticker against the glass. A star, maybe. Or a flower. Saoirse could not tell through the water, but the gesture was so unguarded that it cut through her.
“She’s waving,” Cian said.
“I see her.”
“You don’t have to wave back.”
Saoirse lifted her hand anyway.
The child’s answering joy was immediate, whole-bodied, ridiculous. Saoirse felt it reach the house before she could defend against it. Not because it fixed anything. Nothing fixed that quickly. But because fear had expected the night to end with her alone behind a locked door, and instead there was a child in a fire engine waving at her as if she had been added to the map.
When she closed the door, it was not retreat. It was choice. The distinction was small enough for no one else to notice and large enough for her whole body to learn.
She leaned her back against the wood and felt the old house hold. The teal paint, the chain, the dog at her feet, the engine down the street — none of it erased the danger. It gave her a shape to stand inside while the fear passed through.
Enough.
For now, enough.