I get out of the pub, heading toward my grandfather’s house on foot. He lives across the village, not terribly far, and I need the fresh air to sort my mind. I hear footfalls behind me, but I don’t slow down. Kiki appears by my side. She is wheezing.

“You’re actually going through with this?”

“Why not?”

It should bother me that Kath has been eavesdropping on my conversation. She’s had her nose stuck in my business as long as I can remember. I chalk it up to Kath being Kath. You take the bad with the good in people.

The good: she’s a grand friend, protective, and never steers me wrong.

The bad: she’s mad as a box of slimy frogs and likes it when I torture her with mixed signals. If I stop, she crumbles and enters a state of depression.

“It’s crazy. You live on different continents. She will never leave America and move here permanently. What kind of future do you have with her?”

“We’ll work it out.”

I round a corner. She’s at my heel.

“That’s just something people say when they can’t figure out how to make something work.”

Kath is practically running to match my stride. We are at my grandfather’s door now. I fish the keys out of my pocket—I have a key for granda’s lock, because his cat, Saoirse, needs taking care of sometimes when he’s on one of his week-long church things.

Kath grabs my arm and yanks me back, jumping in front of the door. “Don’t!” She flinches. “Don’t call her.”

I give her a slow once-over. Christ on a bike, Kath’s oddness has an extra shine today.

She pushes my chest away from my grandfather’s door, her eyes shimmering. “She is not the girl for you, Mal. I am. I’m the right O’Connell girl.” She slaps her hand against her chest, full-blown crying now. “And I don’t care that you probably slept with my half-sister. And I don’t care that you have feelings for her. And I don’t care that she told me you were nothing but a fling to her. I still want you, and I’m tired of waiting.”

I’ve always known Kathleen had a crush on me. I discouraged it any way I could without rejecting her, by being unavailable and cutting our interaction to the bare, acceptable minimum. But I always thought it was the crush of the same variety I had for Miss Flynn, my middle school teacher, when I first discovered my penis was good for more than pissing—one where you feel attraction toward a person, but also recognize how deeply mental the idea of actually being with them would be.