THE CLIFFS of Moher stretched before her like the edge of the world, Atlantic winds carrying salt that carved paths down her cheeks. Auden pulled her wool coat tighter, watching waves devour themselves against ancient rock three hundred feet below. This was her third day away from Dublin, the first morning she'd woken without the phantom of his breathing beside her.

That first night had been a revelation wrapped in terror.

She had abandoned her car at the airport – left it like a shed skin in the fluorescent wasteland of short-term parking. The rental Fiat felt foreign beneath her hands, its unfamiliarity a small rebellion. No destination programmed, no plan beyond the animal instinct to move. West first, then south, following roads that curved through landscapes she'd ignored despite nine years of proximity. Names she couldn't pronounce beckoned from weathered signs – Oughterard, Clifden, Roundstone – each syllable pulling her further from her marriage.

When exhaustion finally conquered momentum, she found herself in a village that seemed to exist by accident, tucked between hills like a secret someone had forgotten to bury.

Mrs. O'Brien's bed and breakfast was a stone cottage that sat on three acres of green that seemed to glow even in the dawn light, with sheep dotting the hills like scattered pearls. She had emerged from her garden as Auden pulled into the gravel drive – compact, silver-haired, wearing a cardigan that had weathered decades and wellington boots caked with earth that smelled of rain and growing things. Her eyes were winter sky, soft gray that held no questions about why a woman traveled alone with empty hands.

"Ah, love," she said, as if they'd known each other through lifetimes. "You look like you haven't slept a wink."

The jar of blackberry jam pressed into Auden's palms held warmth that traveled up her arms like a benediction. The room Mrs. O'Brien offered smelled of eucalyptus and time itself – whitewashed walls, a window overlooking pasture that rolled like green waves, a bed that dominated the space with its ancient oak frame and quilts that whispered of hands that had loved their work.

Her phone, when she finally faced it, held a single message from Emma: Landed. At yours. Go find what you need to find. But come back. Followed by a photo – Catherine at the kitchen table, gap-toothed and unbothered, grinning at the camera with toast crumbs on her chin.

Nothing from Cillian. The silence felt like an open wound.

She made the photo her lockscreen, then placed the phone face down on the writing desk, its dark screen reflecting nothing. Her bones felt filled with lead as she collapsed onto the bed fully clothed. The quilts smelled of grass and sunshine, of a life lived at a pace that allowed for small luxuries like line-dried bedding. She pulled the covers over her head like a child hiding from the world and fell into sleep so deep it felt like she was dead.

Part of her wished to be.

Twenty-three hours, Mrs. O'Brien informed her with satisfaction the next day, setting tea on the desk by the window. Twenty-three hours of uninterrupted sleep – more than she'd managed in months of lying awake beside Cillian, counting his breaths, measuring the distance between their bodies in the dark.

"You're catching up on a debt," the older woman said, settling onto the bed's edge. "Sometimes we don't realize how tired we are until we finally give ourselves permission to rest."

The full Irish breakfast that followed tasted like resurrection – eggs from chickens with names, bacon that carried the memory of smoke and salt, black pudding she'd been too squeamish to try until hunger stripped away her pretenses. She ate with the ferocity of someone who'd been starving without knowing it, while Mrs. O'Brien watched with approval and spoke of time moving differently here, of city minutes that pushed and country hours that simply were.

In the village's single boutique, Auden selected clothes as if she were choosing a new skin. Cotton shirts that felt soft against flesh too long wrapped in armor, jeans that didn't cut into her waist, underwear chosen for comfort rather than seduction. At the grocer's, she gathered toiletries that smelled of herbs instead of artificial chemicals – shampoo with rosemary, soap that promised to contain actual oats and honey. She loaded her hand basket with provisions that felt more like treats: Irish crisps in flavors she'd never dared try, local cheeses that crumbled and melted on the tongue, a case of craft beer to pair it with.

When she prepared to leave, Mrs. O'Brien walked her to the car with the air of someone accustomed to farewells.

"Where are you heading, love?"

"South, I think. I don't really have a plan."

"Good. Plans are overrated." The older woman's weathered hands clasped together. "Whatever brought you here – running toward something or away from it – just remember the road always leads somewhere. The trick is making sure you're the one deciding where."

"I left my family." The words escaped before Auden could cage them, raw and immediate. Heat flooded her cheeks. "Not permanently – at least, I don't think so. But I left. I was supposed to... to disappear completely. But somehow I ended up here."

Mrs. O'Brien's expression remained steady, as if confession was just another conversation. "And how do you feel about that choice now?"

The answer surprised Auden with its clarity. "Less desperate. More like myself, I think. For the first time in years, I can breathe."

"That's a start." Mrs. O'Brien withdrew a wrapped bundle from her cardigan pocket. "Scones for the road. And some advice from an old bat who's seen too much."

She pressed the package into Auden's hands, fingers briefly covering hers with surprising warmth. "The people we love need us whole, not perfect. Sometimes we think we're protecting them by disappearing ourselves, becoming nothing but what they need us to be. But children especially learn love by watching how we love ourselves. If you go home empty, what are you teaching your children about what it means to be a woman? What it means to matter in a world like this?"

Auden glanced away, feeling her bottom lip catch between her two front teeth.

"You don't even know me," she whispered.

"I know you slept for almost an entire day. I know you ate my breakfast. And I know you're planning to keep driving instead of turning around and running back to whoever you left behind." Mrs. O'Brien shrugged, letting go of Auden's hand. "I know you're just a woman who's trying to find her way back home, whatever that looks like in the end."

As she pulled out of the gravel drive, she caught sight of Mrs. O'Brien in her rearview mirror, standing among her sheep with one hand raised in blessing or farewell. The cottage grew smaller behind her until it disappeared entirely, but her words – you're just a woman trying to find your way back home – settled into her bones like a compass finally finding true north.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Cork arrived like a fever dream – narrow terraced houses painted in colors too bright for her grief, walls thick enough to muffle the sound of her own unraveling. She spent the evening curled on an unfamiliar bed, scrolling through photos that belonged to people she used to be: Catherine at her birthday, hair plaited with white ribbon, wearing gossamer that made her look like she was made of light. A selfie with Cillian from their anniversary dinner, when they still believed love could be performed convincingly enough to become real again.

Emma's updates arrived like small knives: C ate all her vegetables. Asked when you're coming home.

When tears came, they were different from the desperate sobs that had become her nightly ritual. It wasn't those raw sounds that left her throat burning and chest hollow. These tears fell clean, like a storm that clears rather than destroys. She cried for what she'd almost lost, for what she'd almost thrown away, for the woman she'd been before exhaustion hollowed her out and filled the empty spaces with other people's hungers.

By morning, the tears had washed something away, leaving behind a mirror she could finally see herself in.

She explored Cork with the mindset of someone learning to see again. The streets felt different from Dublin despite two hours' distance narrower, more intimate, filled with students and street musicians who played for joy rather than survival. On the university campus, she watched young couples walk hand in hand along the Lee, and found herself thinking of Cillian not as the man who shared her bed but as the boy he'd been here. Who had grown up here, unknown and unremarkable, before fame carved him into someone she could love but never quite reach.

In a bookshop, she spent an hour browsing shelves, fingers grazing worn spines among those that hadn't even been cracked. But even there, surrounded by authors and university press publications, she found herself constructing alternate histories: What if he'd never left Cork? What if he'd stayed, become a teacher, written novels instead of inhabiting other people's stories? They could have lived here in a terraced house like the one she was renting, close enough to walk to lectures on art history, Sunday mornings at the farmer's market, evenings at community theaters where he might have directed local productions for audiences who saw him as simply Cillian rather than a face that belonged to screens and red carpets and endless interviews.

It was a seductive fantasy, this quieter life. But even as she imagined it, she felt its impossibility. The man she'd fallen in love with – whose dedication burned so bright it lit up rooms, whose need for recognition had been both magnetic and ultimately consuming – wouldn't have been content with gentler pleasures. His drive was fundamental, the engine that had brought him to her and ultimately carried him away. Without it, would he even be recognizably himself? And if not, would their paths ever have crossed?

For dinner, she ate fish and chips cross-legged on the bed, watching When Harry Met Sally with the sound low, letting familiar dialogue wash over her while her mind constructed conversations she and a hypothetical Cork version of Cillian might have had – about students, research, Catherine's school projects. Simple words about simple things, unweighted by the performance their Dublin life had become.

But simplicity, she realized, had never really been possible for them. They'd never had the chance to be those kinds of people.

She found herself restless in a way she hadn't been with Mrs. O'Brien, unable to settle into the hint of peace she'd discovered there. Cork held too many ghosts. Not just of Cillian's actual past, but of all the versions of their life together that existed only in her imagination. By morning, after one day, she was ready to leave, to continue toward towns that didn't remind her of the fundamental incompatibilities she'd spent years trying to ignore.

This is when she'd stopped checking her phone compulsively. The Cliffs of Moher worked their way into her bloodstream with its ethereal viridescens punctuated by gray stone older than memory, white cottages perched like afterthoughts, sheep that regarded her rental car with the mild interest of locals watching tourists pass through.

It was here that she'd found a rhythm that felt sustainable in ways her Dublin life never had. She woke when her body wanted to wake, ate when hunger called rather than obligation demanded, drove until something caught her eye, then stopped for as long as it held her attention – sometimes minutes, sometimes hours.

In Dingle, she'd discovered a restaurant with the best mussels she'd ever tasted, swimming in white wine and garlic, accompanied by brown bread still warm from the oven. The owner explained the provenance of everything – mussels from that morning's bay, wine from a vineyard her cousin visited in France, bread from her grandmother's recipe written in handwriting that had yellowed with time.

"Food tastes better when you know its story," the woman said, and Auden lingered over the meal, savoring not just flavors but connection to place, to hands that had prepared it with care rather than speed.

She sat alone by the window, watching fishing boats dance with tides, feeling something that might have been contentment settle into spaces that had sat empty since Catherine's birth. The wine helped – not the desperate, numbing drinking that had sometimes become routine, but the deliberate savoring of something good paired with something better. She'd begun asking servers for recommendations instead of ordering safe choices, discovering that her palate had been sleeping, waiting for permission to want things again.

Auden began to hunt down local wines she'd never bothered to try before. On her last night in Dingle, a bartender had introduced her to an Irish red that was complex and earthy, full of tannins that couldn't be gulped down while doing three other things simultaneously. She'd sat at the bar for two hours, nursing that single glass while reading one of her new books, occasionally chatting with other patrons about nothing consequential – the weather, the music, recommendations for places to visit.

The next morning brought her to Killarney, where she booked a room above a tea shop and fell into a routine that felt almost domestic. Mornings began with the smell of baking rising through floorboards, breakfast with the owner Siobhan, who treated her like family after the first day.

"You're looking better," Siobhan observed, refilling tea without being asked. "More color in your cheeks."

Here, her afternoons were spent in parks, where it revealed to her the uncomplicated pleasure of walking, of movement for its own sake rather than efficiency. Her body began to feel like her own again rather than a vessel made for other people to fill – Cillian's desires, Catherine's requirements, the endless demands of a life that had grown too small for the woman inhabiting it.

At the National Gallery, she moved through centuries of Irish art with the leisurely pace she'd adopted, letting herself absorb beauty for its own sake, while occasionally jotting notes in her phone with ideas that she could take back to Brigid.

But it was in the contemporary wing that everything shifted – a large abstract piece in blues and grays that seemed to breathe with life. The composition was sophisticated, layers revealing themselves like looking into deep water.

Her eyes slid to the placard beside it.

Tidal Memory by Patrick Haynes.

She stared until her vision blurred, the name on the placard swimming with unexpected recognition.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

He was exactly as she remembered but somehow diminished, hair threaded with silver, new lines around his mouth, crows feet that had deepened. Patrick's face cycled through expressions – shock, pleasure, concern, guilt – before settling on cautious warmth.

"Auden. Christ. How are you?"

This was a conversation she'd dreaded, imagined in countless variations, and now that it was happening, she felt strangely calm. Perhaps it was the wine from lunch, the week of solitude, or simply time's strange alchemy, but she found herself smiling.

"I'm okay," she said, meaning it for the first time in months.

They'd moved away from his painting, settling on a bench in the center of the gallery where they could talk without blocking other visitors' views.

Auden sighed, running her palms down the top of her jeans. "How are you?"

Patrick was doing well. They talked about surfaces – his life in Killarney, his recent marriage to a woman whose photograph showed contentment. He showed her a photo on his phone as he spoke, an image of a woman with caramel colored skin and almond shaped eyes, with glossy hair that reminded Auden of melted chocolate. She had one hand pressed against his chest, her head tilted so her flushed cheek hovered over his. It was an expression of comfortability that Auden recognized but couldn't remember feeling.

"She's beautiful," Auden commented, her own head mimicking the tilt she saw. "You look happy."

"I am," he replied with a laugh. "It's different this time. Easier, I suppose. We're both old enough to know what we want, what we can actually give each other."

There was an implicit apology in those words, an acknowledgment that what they'd had – that brief, intense affair that had felt so significant at the time – had been based on her self-destruction rather than compatibility, on the dangerous thrill of transgression rather than genuine connection.

Patrick let his eyes linger on the photo one last time, before locking his phone with a sigh.

"I read somewhere that you had a child," Patrick noted, as he turned to her. "A girl, yeah?"

Auden nodded once. "Kittie – or I mean, her name is Catherine. Catherine Rose."

"That's a great name," he clicked his tongue as if remembering something. "Rose? Isn't that your middle name?"

"Yes," she blinked before laughing. "I can't believe you remember that."

Patrick shot her a lopsid-ded smile. "How old is she now?"

"Almost seven," Auden found herself smiling without thinking about it, describing her daughter's imagination, the elaborate spy games involving garden gnomes and walkie-talkies, the pure joy of a child who believed adults when they said the world was full of magic.

"She sounds wonderful," Patrick said simply. "You were always going to make a good mother."

It was such an undemanding statement, delivered without agenda or subtext, and yet it hit her – not because his opinion mattered anymore, but because she realized she believed it too. Whatever mistakes had driven her to nearly board that plane to Chicago, Catherine was proof that some essential part of her had remained intact, capable of love without condition, of protection without possession.

When they parted, she knew with certainty she would never see him again, and that this was exactly as it should be. Auden left Patrick with the understanding that what they had done was what it had always been: a symptom rather than a solution, a way of destroying herself that had felt like bitter salvation.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

In Kerry, she rented a house overlooking Kells Bay, accommodations more luxurious than her previous stop. It was renovated with modern amenities, hallways painted pale blues and muted oranges, Swedish furniture with clean lines that made space efficient rather than extroverted. Here, her days became ceremonial: morning coffee on the terrace watching families cross cobblestoned sidewalks on their way to their own lives, afternoons exploring craft shops and buying groceries, evenings cooking meals with ingredients from the cookbook she had purchased in Cork.

She'd found a fishmonger who sold the most incredible salmon that was wild and caught that morning, its flesh bright orange and rich with the taste of cold Atlantic water. She'd prepared it with lemon and herbs from the farmers market, paired with purple potatoes and spinach. Auden purchased a wine that held notes of green apple and a finish that lingered sharply on her tongue. She opened the living room's windows, sat with the bottle until late into the night, reading and letting the ambiance of the quiet city fill the silence rather than take it for granted it.

On the Ring of Beara, she followed routes recommended by locals rather than guidebooks, finding villages that revealed Ireland's fervent beauty to anyone patient enough to seek it. In Allihies, she met an elderly man who painted watercolors of coastline he'd known all his life.

"Most people rush through," he said, gruff but not unkind, gesturing toward tourists taking selfies during ten-minute stops. "They want to say they've seen it, but they don't actually look. You're looking, though. I can tell."

His voice carried the particular gravity of men who had worked with their hands all their lives, and something in his weathered face reminded her suddenly of her father. Not in his features, necessarily, but in the way he held himself, the quiet pride of someone who created beauty without expecting recognition for it. Her father had been like that in, during all those sweltering summer afternoons when the Art Institute was one of the only places where admission had been free, with air conditioning along with it. She remembered how his calloused hands had been surprisingly gentle as he pointed out brush strokes in paintings they couldn't afford to own, teaching her to see the way light fell across canvas, the way color could carry emotion deeper than words.

She bought one of his paintings – an unbecoming watercolor of the view from his cottage, something that wouldn't impress gallery visitors but captured life in Allihies in the way her father had taught her to notice it, with patient attention to moments that passed too quickly for most people to catch.

Walking back to her car, the painting tucked under her arm, Auden felt something shift. Her father had said something similar once, standing before a Monet at the Art Institute, when she'd been fidgeting and ready to leave. Most people see what they expect to see, Audie. But you – you see what's actually there.

The restless energy that had driven her west and south for ten days suddenly stilled. She had never been one for divine signs, but standing there in the salt air, she wondered if her father – wherever he was – had somehow guided her to this moment, this man, this reminder that home wasn't something you ran from, but something you learned to see clearly.

She drove to Kenmare shortly after, taking inventory of what this journey had given her. Not really answers or resolution, but rather something more valuable: perspective. The ability to see her life from a distance, to recognize which problems were genuinely insurmountable and which were simply the inevitable friction of trying to build something meaningful with another damaged person.

The next day, she spent the afternoon buying gifts that felt like promises to herself. Auden found a purple sweater for Catherine and a book about Irish history for Emma. They were all tokens of intention to return, to be present. She wanted, so desperately, to bury the woman she'd almost become: another mother who disappeared when love became too difficult to distinguish from self-destruction.

Which brought her to this moment, sitting in a restaurant, with a reservation for one that she'd made without embarrassment. Auden did her makeup, had curled her hair, and adorned her body in a baby blue dress with long, cashmere sleeves. She ordered the tasting menu because she wanted to savor everything, to fill herself up with flavors and sensations that belonged only to her, if only for one last time.

The oysters arrived with champagne mignonette, and she ate them slowly, tasting not just shellfish but memory – standing on cliffs breathing salt air, afternoons watching boats navigate waters that had sustained communities for generations.

The sommelier suggested Sancerre, and the first sip stopped her mid-thought. Perfect, crisp, mineral, with brightness that reminded her of Burgundy during that long weekend they claimed as their honeymoon. When Catherine was barely two and still napped in afternoons. When she and Cillian had walked through vineyard towns talking about everything except the dailiness their life had become.

It was that exact trip where she had first sipped this wine and could think of nothing else afterwards.

She'd been so young then, though she'd felt ancient – worn down by sleepless nights and the constant vigilance early motherhood demanded. Sitting here now, watching sunset paint water gold, she could see that thirty-year-old version of herself with something approaching tenderness. She'd been doing her best with tools she'd never been given, trying to build a life while simultaneously learning to be a mother, a wife, a woman she could respect.

The John Dory arrived with samphire and brown butter, and as she ate, her thoughts lingered on Cillian. It was the complicated grief of someone mourning a relationship while the other person was still breathing. The fight that precipitated her near-departure felt inevitable now – the culmination of months of parallel living. But the slap, that moment when her hand connected with his cheek and his face registered shock and something like fear, still burned in memory. Not the physical act but what it represented: how desperate she'd become, how completely she'd lost sight of the woman who'd fallen in love with his laugh, his gentleness, his ability to make her feel seen rather than consumed.

She would need to apologize. They would need to talk – really talk – about what remained salvageable in the wreckage of their marriage. She loved him, yes. That was certain as gravity. But was she in love with him, or simply bound by trauma disguised as intimacy? Their connection layered in guilt and hunger and inevitable pain, darkness that lurked beneath his tenderness, his patience, his beautifully destructive love that pulled her under at full force just when she thought she might surface.

It was then when the lamb arrived perfectly pink at the center, with peppered crust that made her cough and root vegetables roasted until edges caramelized and centers turned sweet. Across the dining room, a mother and teenage daughter shared what appeared to be a celebration dinner. Auden watched the young girl as she wiped up a sheen of grease with a cubed sweet potato. The girl was all gangly enthusiasm, gesturing wildly as she told stories that made her mother throw back her head and laugh.

Her mother looked tired but happy, and when she caught Auden watching, she smiled with the knowing look that passed between women who understood the peculiar joy and exhaustion of raising daughters. Recognition, solidarity, acknowledgment that motherhood was both the hardest and most rewarding thing they'd ever undertaken.

Auden smiled back, thinking of Catherine's cherry grin, the way her eyes went wide learning something new, the fierce joy she felt when her daughter laughed at something genuinely funny rather than polite sounds meant to please adults. How had she convinced herself, even briefly, that loving Catherine meant disappearing? Children learned how to be in the world by watching the adults they loved. What would Catherine learn from a mother who sacrificed herself entirely? That women's desires didn't matter? That love required complete erasure of self?

Not the lesson she wanted to teach. Not the legacy she wanted to leave.

Walking back to her hotel, Kenmare's streets quiet except for traditional music spilling from distant pubs, she paused beneath the glow of a streetlamp and looked up at stars visible here in ways they never were in Dublin.

With her eyes still trained upward, she pulled out her pack of cigarettes and lit one, the flame briefly illuminating her face before settling into the steady burn of ember.

It had been ten days – now almost eleven – since she had been home. Eleven days since her hand had connected Cillian's cheek, since she'd watched blood bloom under skin. The sound of it still echoed in her memory, as loud as glass shattering. She could still see him standing there on their front lawn as she drove away, on his knees, cradling his body in shame. He had looked so tiny then, so miniscule against their big house.

She'd hurt him. Not just with the slap itself, but with the abandonment that followed – leaving him to explain to Catherine why her mother had gone away, why Emma had taken his place while he slept alone in their bed wondering if she was ever coming back. Whatever toxicity existed between them, whatever damage they'd inflicted on each other through years of performance and resentment, he hadn't deserved that. The violence on her end was obvious, but it was more than that – the cruelty of disappearing without a word, without explanation, without even the courtesy of letting him know she was alive.

The cigarette burned down toward her fingers, ash scattering in the night breeze like the remnants of her certainty.

Auden inhaled sharply, before pulling out her phone. Seconds later, her finger hovered over his name in her phone's contact list. It was late – nearly midnight – but she knew he wouldn't be sleeping. He'd be waiting, probably staring at his own phone, wondering if she would ever call, if she would ever come home, if the woman who had hit him and walked away was the same one who used to trace his collarbones in the dark and whisper how much she loved him in a single breath.

She pressed dial.

He answered on the first ring but said nothing. The connection was clear enough that she could hear his breathing. It was slow, hesitant, as if speaking might cause her to disappear again. She could picture him in their bedroom, or maybe downstairs in the kitchen with a glass of whiskey. She saw his eyes bagged with exhaustion, the subtle bruise on his cheekbone fading from blue to yellow.

Auden closed her eyes. Silence stretched between them, dense with nearly two weeks of silent separation, months of growing apart, years of trying to be what they thought the other needed.

"Cill," she said finally. "I'm ready to talk."