The boats were the first thing Nell saw. Three of them on the windowsill behind the ketchup, folded out of sugar packets, sharp at the bow, the stern tucked under the way only Fionn tucked them.
She picked one up. “He was here again.”
“Same as yesterday.” Mara didn’t look up from the menu, which she knew by heart. “Same as the whole week.”
The back table at Birdie’s was theirs the way the wall by the green was theirs. No sign said so; it had just been true for years. Every summer morning went the same way: in from ten o’clock, the day argued into shape over toast, Birdie landing the pot on the table before anyone asked. Except that for three weeks now they’d been arriving to a table that had already been sat at. A chair pushed back not-quite-straight. A plate gone from the rack before nine. And now boats on the sill.
And no Fionn, or hardly. He’d slope in around noon with his eyes somewhere else, stay twenty minutes, and go.
Nell carried the boat to the counter, where Birdie was writing the specials in marker, in the careful capitals of a woman told long ago that her handwriting was a disgrace, and who had decided the world could have capitals or nothing.
“Birdie. Who’s been at our table in the mornings?”
“People sit where they like. It’s a café.”
“You know who, but.”
Birdie clicked the lid onto the marker and looked at Nell over her glasses and said nothing at all, in the way she had that was better than a locked door.
Rian was in Limerick with the athletics development squad until August, which everyone agreed was the only reason the summer still had no shape, and arguing about whose fault that was used up most of the toast. It didn’t touch the other thing. The other thing sat at the table with them, in the chair nobody mentioned.
That evening the group chat did the thing it had started doing.
Fionn is typing…
Then nothing. Then, at 17:42, the grey italics: This message was deleted.
“K,” said Mara, reading over Nell’s shoulder on the wall by the green. “Ollie. K. Ollie once sent me nine messages about a moon.”
That was the thing: it wasn’t only Fionn. Ollie had gone quiet the same fortnight, Ollie, who could no more leave a message unanswered than leave a fact about Saturn unsaid. Somebody would put up a plan and the chat would thin out. Half of everything got typed and unsent. You could nearly hear it, all over the Rise: thumbs hovering, then not.
Thursday, coming back from the pool with their hair still dripping, Nell and Mara saw him. Fionn and Deano Ryan were outside Zappi’s with their heads bent together over Deano’s phone. Deano said something and Fionn laughed. Properly laughed, the way he hadn’t around any of them in weeks.
Nell’s walk home was one long sentence. Mara got maybe four words into it.
Friday, Fionn made his noon appearance and Nell was out of her chair before he reached the table.
“Are you going to tell us what’s going on,” she said, “or will we ask Deano?”
Fionn’s face shut like a drawer. “Ask Deano. Ye seem sure enough already.”
He left his hot chocolate untouched. Fionn had walked away from exactly nothing in his whole life; he was the one who walked toward things, usually while everyone shouted at him not to. They watched him do it now, through the window, all the way up the Rise.
The new group appeared that night: KILCURRA ☀️ (no F). The cinema run to Ballindrum got planned in it over the weekend. Nobody said don’t tell Fionn. Nobody had to.
Niamh stayed in both chats and said nothing in either. Once she typed maybe ask him first into the new one, looked at it for a while, and deleted it.
Niamh had been noticing things all along; noticing was what she did instead of talking. On Saturday night she went back through three weeks of chat with a pencil and the back page of last year’s homework journal, and wrote down the times.
The deleted messages: 17:42. 17:38. 17:51. 17:34. 17:47.
They were weekdays, every one. There wasn’t a Saturday or a Sunday among them, and none was later than six.
Whatever Fionn couldn’t say, he nearly said it at half past five, Monday to Friday, and then didn’t. She looked at the little column of numbers until her mother called her down. She didn’t know yet what happened at half five on weekdays. She only knew something did.
The mornings were easier, because of Ollie.
She sat on his wall on Sunday while he gave her the Perseids: the full schedule, the peak nights, where the radiant would sit over the Clancys’ chimney. Ollie relaxed into facts the way other people relaxed into armchairs. Then, mid-orbit, his face changed channels.
“You’d want to be up before five for the space station, by the way. I was, two Tuesdays ago. Best pass of the summer.” A pause. “I never saw anything after, though. Down at the harbour. I never saw anything down at the harbour.”
“Okay,” said Niamh.
“Because I wasn’t even looking that direction.”
“Okay.”
The relief came off him like heat off a road. She asked about the meteors again and let him talk until his shoulders came down from around his ears.
Tuesday, twenty past five, Niamh walked the strand road.
There was nothing down there, only the old boat club with its shutters bleached and its green paint gone to powder, and the shelter beside it that faced the water. A man was sitting in the shelter: Eoin, Fionn’s brother, nineteen, in his grey Dowds Electrical fleece, bag between his feet.
She slowed along the sea wall.
It was the boots she kept coming back to, after. Site boots in July should be destroyed: scuffed white, dust in every seam. Eoin’s were clean as Sunday.
Fionn came down the strand road at half five exactly, one hand on the handlebars, the other holding a paper bag she’d have known anywhere: Birdie’s, the corners folded twice. He dropped the bike on the grass, sat in beside his brother and handed it over, and the two of them looked at the water the way men look at a fire.
The wind carried up scraps.
“…have to tell them, Eoin.”
“Friday. I’ll tell them Friday. It’ll be like a natural break.”
“You said Friday last Friday.”
Niamh walked on, the long way round by the harbour, and let herself in at home and sat at the kitchen table for a good while doing nothing at all, which for Niamh was thinking.
She was at the back table at twenty to eight the next morning when the bell over the door went.
Fionn stopped dead, one foot in the café.
“There’s tea in the pot,” said Niamh.
He stood there long enough that Birdie, without turning from the toaster, said, “In or out, Fionn Dolan, the heat’s going.”
He sat. He looked at the teapot instead of her. His hands found a sugar packet and started folding it without him.
“I was out by the boat club yesterday,” Niamh said. “I didn’t stop.”
Fionn’s ears went red. Then the rest of him sagged, tired, like something set down.
“He got let go,” he said, to the teapot. “Three weeks back. Last in, first out, it wasn’t anything he did. And he never told them at home. He’s up at seven every morning, gear on, out the door like always, gone into Ballindrum all day where nobody’d know him.” The boat took shape in his fingers. “First Monday of the holidays I was down early for the astro pitch and there he was at the harbour at half nine. Sitting. In the fleece.”
“The mornings,” said Niamh.
“He won’t take money off me. So I buy two rolls out of the grass-cutting money and tell him Birdie does a deal.” A breath. “And half five I sit with him below at the shelter, so he’s walking up the road at the right time and not on his own. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“And Deano?”
And here, which Niamh would not have believed, Fionn nearly smiled. “Deano’s uncle Martin does the groundworks out the Ballindrum road. I asked him did Martin want anyone. He asked, Martin said send him out Monday.” He looked at her for the first time. “Deano never asked me one question. Not one. And ye after making him the villain of the summer.”
“You kept starting to tell us. Half five.”
“Sitting beside him with the day going on normal over our heads.” He shrugged, and the shrug didn’t come off. “I’d get it half typed. But it wasn’t mine to tell.”
Niamh poured the tea.
“I’m not telling them either,” she said. “That bit’s yours and Eoin’s. The rest of it I’m fixing, because it’s stupid, and I’ve had enough of it.”
Fionn looked at her the way people always eventually looked at Niamh, like they’d walked past a door a hundred times and only now noticed the house went back further.
She got them to the wall by the green that evening. Nell, Mara, Ollie.
“He was never with Deano’s crowd,” she said. “He’s been minding something at home. It’s nearly done, and it’s not ours to know. That’s all I’ll say and it’s all you’ll ask.”
“That’s… you can’t just…” Nell was up off the wall. “Three weeks, Niamh. He let us think…”
“He let you think,” said Mara, who was picking paint off the railing, “what you were quick enough thinking.”
“Oh, so it’s my…”
“You made a group called no F, Nell.”
Nell stood with her jaw working. Somewhere down the Rise a door went, and a dog had opinions about it, and everyone found somewhere else to look while the worst thing anyone had said all summer sat out in the open being true.
“If he’d just said…” Nell started, and heard it, and stopped.
The (no F) group had gone by nine. Nobody announced it; it was just gone, the way it had come. At ten past nine, in the real chat, Nell posted a photo with no caption: the windowsill at Birdie’s, the little sugar boats all in a row.
Fionn is typing…
It stayed up this time.
Saturday, the table was full for the first time in three weeks. Ollie got in beside Fionn and started on the Perseids from the top, at a speed no listener could survive. Fionn ate his way through the big breakfast like a man doing honest work. Nell went up to the counter with her own money and paid, and Birdie rang it in and gave her the change and asked no questions, the same as she’d asked no questions all summer.
“He told them Thursday night,” Fionn said into a lull, to his plate. “Mam cried. Da went very quiet, then rang Martin to thank him for taking him on, which nearly finished Eoin off altogether.”
“Starting Monday?” said Mara.
“Half seven Monday. Real boots and all.”
Deano went by the window with his gear bag while they were on the second pot. Fionn rapped the glass with one knuckle and lifted his chin, and Deano lifted his back, the smallest nod there is, and kept going toward the pitches.
Nell watched him the whole way past and said nothing. For Nell, that was fluent.
Ollie was explaining that in August you could see four planets before breakfast if you knew where to stand. Fionn, without looking up, folded his sugar packet over, tucked the stern under the way only he tucked them, and slid the boat across the table to Niamh.
She put it in her pocket and let Ollie tell her where to stand.