“We’re okay,” “We’re more than okay.” “Don’t get soft on me.”
By the time they got back to the suite, the internet had already decided it owned them.
Niamh felt it before she saw it - the shift in the air, the kind that made her skin go watchful. Tara stood in the sitting room with a phone in one hand and the boys’ discarded suit jackets in the other, expression caught halfway between outrage and fascination.
“Don’t react to this like a lunatic,” Tara said.
“That sentence has never improved any situation in the history of mankind,” Áine replied, taking the phone off her anyway.
The headline was already doing laps.
CONALL KAVANAGH HAS KIDS???
Niamh stared at it for a beat too long. Even the wrong name made her want to throw something. It was not Conall. It was not some vague famous-man silhouette for public use. It was Ciarán. It was the boy she had once loved in school corridors and bus shelters and rain-heavy evenings when Belfast felt too small to hold all the wanting in them.
Only now he was standing in the middle of her hotel suite with his hands loose at his sides, as if he knew one wrong movement might send the whole thing to ash.
The boys were feral with adrenaline.
“Da’s famous-famous,” Ruairí announced, climbing onto the arm of the sofa like a pirate who’d located treasure. “Not just local newspaper famous. Proper internet famous.”
Declan, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a hotel notepad, frowned. “That is not a compliment. The internet has no manners.”
Ciarán’s mouth twitched despite the colour drained from his face. “Aye. Accurate.”
Niamh’s phone buzzed.
Unknown Number: I saw the video.
Then, before she could breathe around that:
You’ve been busy.
Her hand closed around the phone so hard her knuckles hurt.
Áine saw it instantly. “Who?”
Niamh turned the screen down. “Nothing.”
“That is absolutely not a nothing face,” Tara said.
Ciarán’s gaze sharpened. He did not step toward her. Somehow that made it worse. “Niamh.”
She hated how her own name sounded in his mouth - not because it was ugly, but because it still knew exactly where to land.
“I said it’s nothing.”
Áine’s eyes narrowed, then dropped to the phone in Niamh’s hand. She understood one second before anyone else did, and her whole body changed.
“Jason?” she asked, low and lethal.
Silence.
Ciarán went still.
Ruairí, who missed nothing and respected boundaries only in theory, looked between them. “Who’s Jason?”
“No one that concerns you,” Niamh said too quickly.
Declan’s eyes flicked to her face. “That means it concerns us.”
The room held for half a second.
Then Ciarán crouched in front of the boys, bringing himself level. “Here’s what concerns you,” he said, voice steady. “You two need pyjamas, toothbrushes, and something to eat before your nana starts a coup. Can you handle that?”
Ruairí brightened. “Can we have crisps?”
“Not as a meal,” Tara said.
“Not as the only meal,” Ciarán corrected, deadpan.
Ruairí considered this and accepted the compromise. He bolted for the bedroom with Declan on his heels and Heaven, the treacherous dog, following like a furry bodyguard who had already chosen her side.
The second they were gone, the room lost its pretence.
“Show me,” Áine said.
“No.”
“Niamh.”
“No.”
Ciarán spoke very quietly. “Are you frightened of him?”
The question landed under her ribs like a blade finding a seam.
She hated that he’d said frightened. Hated more that part of her wanted to lie and keep the dignity of her own survival intact. Fright belonged to the version of her that had stayed too long, apologised too often, learned to read a house by the sound of a footstep.
“I’m not giving him that word,” she said.
Ciarán held her gaze. “That wasn’t my question.”
Something hot and bitter rose in her throat. “He doesn’t get to matter now.”
“That wasn’t my question either.”
Áine stepped in before Niamh could either cry or throw the phone at the wall. “He does this. Unknown number. Nice little messages. Just enough to say he’s watching. Not enough for the police to move unless he gets bolder.”
Ciarán’s face changed so cleanly it was almost frightening. The softness went first. Then the charm. What remained was older, colder, and far more dangerous than the smiling public man the world knew.
“How long?” he asked.
Niamh laughed, because otherwise she would have screamed. “What, as a hobby? On and off since I left.”
Ciarán said nothing.
That silence was worse than shouting. It had weight. Blame. Self-blame, maybe, but she was in no mood to sort his conscience for him.
He straightened. “Are they on passports?”
Niamh blinked. “They’re five. They’ve been on planes more than most grown men.”
“We fly tomorrow,” he said.
Áine folded her arms. “Commercial.”
“No.”
Niamh looked at him. “You don’t get to say no to me.”
“I’m not saying no to you.” His voice sharpened for the first time. “I’m saying no to a man who now knows where you are, what hotel you’re in, and that there are children in this.”
Tara muttered, “Fair point, unfortunately.”
Niamh’s spine went rigid. “I am not sneaking home on your charity.”
His jaw flexed. “This isn’t charity.”
“What is it, then?”
“Me doing the first useful thing I should’ve done years ago.”
The room went dead quiet.
There it was - not polished, not safe. The wrong note struck hard enough to make everyone in it wince.
Áine’s eyes flashed. Tara stared at the carpet. Somewhere in the bedroom, Ruairí yelled that he’d found two identical socks and life was worth living after all.
Niamh’s laugh came out thin and ugly. “Useful? That’s what we’re calling fatherhood now?”
Regret flickered across his face, but he did not back away from what he had said. “No. I’m calling it late.”
“Late,” she repeated. “Aye. That’s one word for it.”
For one dangerous second she thought he might push back. Defend himself. Explain. Make it about youth and ambition and distance and all the lovely polished nouns people used when they wanted to make an old wound look elegant.
Instead he said, very low, “Be as angry as you need. We still fly tomorrow.”
The infuriating part was that it worked on her because it wasn’t a performance. It was a line held under pressure.
Her phone buzzed again.
Enjoy the gala aftermath. Private doesn’t mean invisible.
The floor seemed to move.
This time she handed Áine the phone without argument.
Áine’s mouth flattened. Tara swore softly. Ciarán read nothing because he didn’t need to; he could see it in all three of their faces.
“Fine,” Niamh said, voice scraped raw. “Fine. We’ll take your jet.”
The next day arrived bright and false, the kind of clean Vancouver afternoon that made catastrophe feel badly lit.
Debbie Kavanagh was waiting on the tarmac in a pilot’s uniform and mirrored sunglasses, looking like she’d been born unimpressed. Beside her stood a dark-haired woman in a camel coat with a phone in one hand and the expression of someone who had not slept enough to tolerate foolishness.
“About time,” Debbie said. “I’ve got fuel, weather clearance, and exactly eight minutes of patience left.”
“This is Sinead,” Ciarán said. “My manager.”
Sinead’s handshake was crisp. “I’m sorry we’re meeting under circling-vulture conditions.”
Ruairí pointed to the jet stairs. “That’s a rich-person staircase.”
Declan corrected him. “All staircases are stairs. Wealth is context.”
At the top of the steps sat an Irish setter like a duchess in exile.
Heaven lifted her head, considered all of them, and then rose with sovereign deliberation. She ignored the adults entirely, walked straight to the boys, and sniffed them each like a customs officer. Whatever she found, she approved. Her tail thumped once. Then she crossed to Ciarán and leaned against his leg as if returning to a fact.
“They’re… they’re me,” he said quietly, watching the boys laugh as the dog nosed through their pockets in search of biscuits or secrets.
Niamh heard the crack under the words and hated her own heart for noticing.
Inside, the cabin was obscene in the way expensive things often were - cream leather, polished wood, silence softened by money. The boys reacted as expected.
Ruairí yelled, “WE LIVE HERE NOW.”
Declan, peering into a cabinet, said, “This is impractical.”
Tara laughed. “That’s the most O’Callaghan response possible.”
Niamh stayed standing a second too long, one hand on the seatback, suddenly aware of how trapped the sky could make you feel when there was nowhere left to step.
Ciarán noticed. Of course he did. “You can take the seat nearest the galley if you want more space.”
The gentleness of it made her more brittle, not less. “I can sit in a chair without coaching, thanks.”
A pause.
Then he nodded once. “Right.”
Áine shot him a warning look sharp enough to skin paint. “You don’t get to treat her like she’s fragile because you’ve just discovered consequence.”
“I know that,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
It was the first time Niamh had heard steel answer steel between them without somebody softening it with a joke. Good, a mean little part of her thought. Let him feel uncomfortable. Let the whole elegant machine creak.
The jet taxied. The boys were strapped in with snacks and headphones. Tara had fallen briefly, blessedly silent. Debbie’s voice came back over the cabin system, all dry command and weather updates.
And just as the plane lifted, Niamh’s phone vibrated once more.
You can’t hide on a plane forever.
She went cold all over.
Áine saw it. “Give me it.”
“No.”
Ciarán was already unbuckling, then stopped himself like a man hauling back a worse instinct. “Niamh.”
“No.”
He stood anyway, bracing one hand on the seatback in front of her. Not looming. Not quite. But too close to neutral for comfort.
“I’m not taking your phone,” he said. “I’m asking whether this man has ever put a hand on you.”
The question hit so hard it made her vision sharpen.
Áine answered before she could. “Yes.”
Silence again. Dense, oxygenless.
Ciarán closed his eyes once. When he opened them there was murder in them, banked and civilised and therefore much worse.
“He won’t come near you again,” he said.
Niamh let out a laugh that came out wrong. “You don’t get to make promises like that.”
“I know exactly what I get to promise.”
“Do you?” she shot back. “Because your record with promises is not exactly sparkling.”
That landed. She saw it land. Good.
Sinead, from across the aisle, looked between them like someone assessing structural damage. “We need a plan before we land. Security at Belfast. No public route. No posting. No school schedule online. No last-minute heroics.”
Áine nodded. “And no manly stupidity.”
Debbie’s voice crackled over the intercom. “If by manly stupidity you mean punching a stalker on a tarmac, I’d prefer you save that for after I’ve landed.”
Ruairí pulled off one headphone. “What’s a stalker?”
Declan answered before anyone else could. “A man who doesn’t understand no.”
The cabin went still.
Niamh looked at her son - really looked - at the seriousness in his wee face, the way children built truths out of the pieces adults dropped when they thought nobody was watching.
Ciarán sat back down very carefully, as if he had just understood the actual size of what he had missed.
Later, when the boys had finally fallen asleep and Tara was pretending not to eavesdrop, he spoke without looking at Niamh.
“I won’t take anything from you,” he said.
She kept her eyes on the oval window, on the cloudbank below, on anything that was not his face. “You already did.”
His breath left him.
She hated that the truth still felt so alive in her mouth.
The phone buzzed one last time.
See you soon, Niamh. Next time answer the door before I let myself in.