Chapter 20: A habit.

The plane landed after dark.

Declan had made it clear he wasn’t going to hold Cian’s hand through this, and he was true to his word. He sent a business card for the Edinburgh branch office, said figure it out, and left it at that.

Cian dropped the card in the first bin he passed and rang Dr. Keane. "I’ve landed."

Keane came back immediately. "I know. I’ve asked a colleague to meet you."

Declan had presumably shipped Cian off to Edinburgh hoping he’d fall apart and come back apologising, at which point Declan could play the magnanimous father and they could have a reconciliation scene. What Declan hadn’t accounted for was that Keane had done his PhD here, and half his year had stayed on. He’d arranged everything before Cian’s plane had even landed.

The colleague met him outside arrivals and walked him through the practicalities with quiet efficiency, then handed him over to a letting agent. Cian picked a small flat near the water, a five-minute walk from the sea, paid the deposit, and moved in the same evening.

Once he was settled, he sat with his phone in his hand for a moment.

In the original story, the young master, freshly humiliated by being sent abroad, had called Eoin once and then blocked his number.

That was the final plot point.

Cian found a scrap of paper and wrote down the number carefully before he did anything else. Then he went into the phone, found the contact, and pressed block. He held his thumb over the screen for a second before he pressed it.

He opened the notes app and saved the number there. When it came to what to call it, he thought for a while. The original Cian had saved it under Eoin’s name, which was obviously not going to work now. He typed "Belleek."

He looked at it, then changed it to "Mr. Belleek."

It had been a coincidence when they chose the word, something he’d spotted on a shelf and said on a whim. But looking back, it felt right. Eoin had that quality, fine and cool and composed on the surface, but with something underneath that would cut if you weren’t careful. If you handled him badly, you’d know about it. If you were careful with him, he was extraordinary.

He put the phone away and pulled up his timetable for the new term.

Somehow Declan had got him a place in the economics department at one of the better universities in the city, with the parting instruction that if he didn’t graduate, he needn’t bother coming home.

The course was serious. The original Cian had never opened a textbook in his life and had predictably failed to finish in five years. Cian looked at the reading list and started to feel something that might, tentatively, have been called interest.

The system peered at the screen over his shoulder. "Are you actually going to study?"

"Might as well," Cian said. "I’m here."

The system said, "I want it on record that I won’t be connecting to the internet during exams."

"I don’t need you to."

He’d done almost nothing academically in secondary school, for reasons that were not his fault, and there was something appealing now about the idea of doing it properly, just to see if he could.

Edinburgh in winter turned out to be genuinely bleak, which Cian found he didn’t mind. Heavy snow came in from the north, knocking branches off trees. He settled into a rhythm, lectures during the day, back to the flat in the evenings, weekends away somewhere when the term allowed. He’d been living as a rich heir long enough that his cooking skills had gone to rust, and the first few attempts at making something edible in the flat were not encouraging. He started simple, worked out a chicken dish that was actually decent, and moved on from there. By the time Christmas came he could produce several things that didn’t embarrass him.

He had a few classmates over on Christmas Eve, dragged the table into the middle of the room, and threw together a rough sort of stew in the biggest pot he owned. He couldn’t find the right pasta so he used what was in the cupboard, which was technically wrong but tasted fine, and nobody complained.

His classmates had assumed, since he didn’t throw money around or talk about himself, that he was an ordinary postgrad student who’d come over to study. He let them believe it. It was easier, and more pleasant, than the alternative.

After a while the couples drifted off to watch the fireworks in the square, and the others rang home. Cian stayed behind with the washing up, loaded what he could into the dishwasher, wiped down the table, and sat down with a can of beer in the dark.

He didn’t turn the lights on. From where he was sitting he could see the fireworks going up over the rooftops, red and gold and silver, blooming and fading in quick succession.

It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure who he would ring even if he wanted to.

The system said, "You look like a man who has retired from something and not quite worked out what to do with himself."

Cian said, "Don’t you start."

"You know exactly what happens next in the story. You meet someone. A woman, probably, or a man, with some extraordinary background. They drag you into some complicated situation. There’s tension. There’s—"

"I know how those go," Cian said.

"You know who you’ve actually held more than anyone else in your life?"

The system paused. "Your family?"

"Eoin," Cian said. "Which I’ll admit is a strange thing to realise. But before him, you could’ve counted the times on one hand. I’m not particularly a touching person."

That first night in the hotel, when they’d been in the same bed for the first time, less than a foot apart, he hadn’t slept. He wasn’t used to proximity. He’d lain there in the dark feeling like a wild animal someone had tried to domesticate too quickly.

Later, somewhere in the weeks that followed, without noticing when it happened, he’d stopped thinking about it. He’d reached over in the night without thinking and pulled Eoin closer the way you moved a pillow into a comfortable position, and it had felt entirely natural.

"Later on," he said, "I got used to it. The plot made it necessary and then I just got used to it."

He thought about the smell of old soap and clean cotton. He rubbed his fingers together slowly.

The system said, after a moment, "When you go back, things will be different. You’ll be the one waiting, not him."

Neither of them said anything else for a while. The fireworks kept going up over the square, bright and brief, falling into silence, the next one rising before the last had fully faded, over and over until the last one went up and the sky went dark and stayed that way.

Somewhere in the distance a bell rang out. It was past midnight.

Cian finished the beer and went to wash up. The system came back to life after a bit, rustling through data, then said, "Do you want to know what Eoin’s been up to?"

Cian spat toothpaste. "Don’t dig into his personal life."

"It’s all public. Forum posts, academic announcements. Nothing private."

There was a pause.

Cian dropped the can into the recycling with a sharp clatter. "Go on then."

"His supervisor made the Distinguished Young Scholar list. The whole lab moved to the new building. If you ever wanted to find him again, the old lab address won’t work."

"I’m not planning to go looking for him. What else?"

"His Nana had a difficult patch a few months ago. The Glenmore Fund stepped in and covered it. She’s stable now."

Cian stopped moving for a second, then said, "Anything else?"

"Rory tried to cause trouble twice while you were away. Darragh turned up both times and redirected him."

A short silence.

"That’s as far as I could get."

Cian said, "Right. Good," and turned off the tap.

*

Ten thousand kilometres away, Eoin was not, in any meaningful sense, fine.

He’d been pushing through on about five hours of sleep for months, dividing his time between the lab and the hospital in a way that didn’t leave much room for anything else, including rest. He told himself he was busy. He was busy.

Aoife was packing up the last of her things, moving boxes around the desk she’d occupied for two years, getting ready for the move to the new building tomorrow. She glanced across the room. "Eoin, are you not heading off?"

Eoin’s eyes were on his phone. "Not yet. I’ve still got things to finish."

"You’ve got circles under your eyes like you haven’t slept in a week," she said, which was close enough to accurate that he didn’t argue.

She was right that he’d gone downhill. He could see it himself when he caught his reflection in the lab windows on dark mornings. He looked tired in a way that sleep wasn’t really fixing, a kind of heaviness that had settled in over the months and hadn’t shifted.

Aoife finished folding a lab coat and looked at him with the sort of direct concern she’d never quite learned to disguise. "Seriously. Go home."

Eoin looked back at his phone.

There was a name in his messages with a red exclamation mark beside it. He looked at it, registered the result he’d been expecting, and turned the screen off.

Before Cian, he’d barely used his phone. He’d kept it in his locker during lab hours and checked it maybe three times a day. It was a slow, plain thing, nothing on it he needed urgently. For Eoin, a phone was just a way for people to reach him if something went wrong.

But on the day Cian left, he’d sent a message and waited. No reply. He’d counted the flight time, worked out roughly when the plane would have landed, and checked again. Red exclamation mark.

He’d checked it about two hundred times that night before he accepted what it meant.

After that it became a habit. The wardrobe with the folded clothes in it. The canteen card with the balance on the screen. The beech avenue on the way to the lab. He’d open his phone at each one, look at the red mark, feel whatever he felt about it, and put it away again.

The space in his chest where something had quietly taken up residence was not, it turned out, easy to unfill.