I swell with the kind of pride that’s dangerous. The kind that is supposed to come before a fall. I can’t help it.

The librarian comes out as we finish packing up. She has the stern, rigid look of someone who commands order and quiet without ever having to say, Ssshhh. Like the policewoman who questioned me when I arrived back in Dublin. Just procedure, she said. Which turned out to be the case since Iris had already sent them the recording, the morning she died. “The only reason Terry came was to try to change my mind,” she said in the video.

The librarian stops just beyond the reach of my arms as if she has heard about my propensity for physical contact. “You got a great crowd today,” she says.

“Thanks so much for letting us use the car park,” I say. I hug her. She looks startled and two bright red circles bloom on her cheeks.

“You’re leaving now?” she says, more of an order than a question. I nod. She looks behind me, at the writing on the side of the bus.

“Who is Iris Armstrong?” she asks.

Her image appears like a flare, sudden and vivid. Iris.

Sometimes the loss of her is glaring. Sharp to the touch. Sometimes, the world feels impossible, wrong, without Iris in it.

Today I don’t feel sad. I feel grateful. That I knew her.

That I loved her. That she loved me.

She is grinning at me, her hands on her hips as though she is waiting to hear what I might say, with her paltry store of patience. She stands straight and tall without her sticks, and there is something so gloriously vibrant about her, it seems absurd that nobody else can see her.

Who is Iris Armstrong? There are so many things I could say. So many stories I could tell. So many attributes I could list.

In the end I say one thing.

“Iris Armstrong was my friend.”

ISBN-13: 9781488056307

Rules of the Road

First published in 2019 by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd., United Kingdom.
This edition published in 2020.

Copyright © 2019 by Ciara Geraghty

Chapter-heading lines taken from Rules of the Road RSA Rule Book © March 2015.
Reprinted by permission of the Road Safety Authority.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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