Chapter 2: Next Door

The rancher sat on a quiet street of nearly identical three-bedroom homes that had all been built the same year for families who’d wanted more grass than the city could offer them, and Étaín had chosen it for exactly that unremarkable sameness — a street where nothing had happened yet, where nobody’s business but her own was written into the sidewalks.

She was waving before she’d even decided to. The woman right next door had come out onto her own porch to watch the moving truck with the frank, unhurried curiosity of someone whose street didn’t get much new to look at, and when their eyes met she lifted a hand in return, easy and unbothered, the kind of wave that asked nothing of you beyond acknowledging you were there.

“Beatrice,” she called over, closing the few steps between the two front yards, one hand extended, the other still holding a coffee mug that had clearly traveled from her own kitchen for the express purpose of watching someone else’s move. “Everybody calls me Bea, though, unless I’m in trouble, and then it’s Beatrice Marie, and you know you’re really in it.”

“Étaín,” she said, shaking the offered hand, letting the accent do what it always did to new acquaintances, which was buy her a few seconds of pleasant surprise before the conversation found its feet again.

“Well, that’s a name I’ve never had to spell for anybody,” Bea said, delighted. “Where’s that from?”

“Ireland, by way of a plane that felt a great deal longer than it needed to.”

Bea laughed, the kind of laugh that came easy and often, and Étaín decided, in the unhurried way she decided most things, that she liked her.

Liam, meanwhile, had inherited exactly one thing from his grandfather that Étaín had never quite managed to talk him out of, and it announced itself the moment he spotted the girl standing on the porch behind Bea — small, quiet, watching the whole business of the moving truck with the same solemn interest her mother was giving it, in a yellow dress that had clearly been chosen for a day she hadn’t known would involve strangers.

Étaín was still occupied with the movers and a coffee table they seemed determined to carry through the door sideways, and so she missed the exact moment her son decided that a pretty girl standing unattended in a front yard was an opportunity no self-respecting Kelly man let pass by, grandfather’s blood being what it was. By the time she looked up, he was already crossing the yard toward the swing set on the side of the house, hands clasped behind his back the way Shamus used to walk, chest out, moving like he had every right to it.

He didn’t introduce himself first. He never did.

“You’re new,” he said, climbing onto the swing and setting it going with two decisive kicks of his legs, which was, in fairness, obvious, and also somehow not an accusation.

Cissy — for that was her name, Bea would explain a moment later, Cecelia, though nobody but her teachers ever used the whole of it — regarded him from a safe distance with the caution of a child raised to be careful around people she didn’t know yet. “You’re on our swing,” she said, which wasn’t strictly true, since the swing had come with the house and belonged to no one in particular, but Liam grinned at her like she’d said something clever and slid off it at once to let her have it.

She sat. Her shoulders climbed toward her ears almost immediately, the small stiff posture of a child bracing against something she didn’t have the words for yet — a new street, a new boy standing too close, or something else entirely, Étaín couldn’t have said which, watching now from across the yard with a hand still resting on the coffee table the movers had finally gotten through the door.