The first thing London gave Niamh was mould.
Not the glamorous, cinematic London from her dad’s movies—all glossy night streets and lit-up bridges—but the very real old-house kind, in a streak along the wall behind a stack of boxes in the new hallway.
“Add that to the list,” Aoife muttered, shouldering past with a crate marked KITCHEN like it contained state secrets.
Niamh squinted at the smear. “Very art-house of you, moving us into a place with atmospheric damp.”
Aoife snorted. “Wait till I start shootin’ in it, you’ll be callin’ it ‘texture’.”
Behind them, someone shrieked with unbothered delight.
“Da, up again! Up again, up again, up again—”
“Sophie, Jesus, give the man’s spine a chance,” Aoife called over her shoulder.
Four-year-old Sophie ignored her entirely. She was wrapped round Cillian’s torso like one of those baby slings, arms locked round his neck, legs hooked around his waist—pure marsupial. He had one arm under her to stop her sliding and the other trying to steer a box labelled NIAMH – BOOKS through the doorway without knocking anything over.
“I warned ye,” he puffed at Aoife as he side-stepped a rogue shoe. “We should’ve called her Joey and been done with it.”
Sophie buried her face in his neck, curls tickling his jaw. “I am not a Joey,” she said, muffled. “I’m Princess Sophie of Shoulders.”
“That’s worse,” Niamh said. “So much worse.”
“Is there wi-fi yet?” eight-year-old Jimmy demanded from somewhere near the stairs, where he was half lying under a box, half inspecting the underside of the banister like it had personally offended him. “You said there’d be wi-fi. You said if we moved again there’d be wi-fi immediately.”
“There will be,” Cillian said, the way people said there will be peace in our time. “As soon as the nice man from the company comes and presses whatever button it is that makes your wee brain stop melting.”
Jimmy groaned dramatically and flopped all the way onto the floor. “My brain is already melted. It’s over. Tell my story.”
“Your story is that you were too lazy to carry a box and died tragically at the age of eight on the hallway rug,” Niamh said. “The end.”
He stuck his tongue out at her from under his fringe and then rolled out of the way as one of the movers came in with another box.
“Where do you want these ones?” the man called, holding AOIFE – UNI at an awkward angle.
Aoife paused mid-stride. Her fingers tightened around the crate she was carrying.
“Spare room for now,” she said. “We’ll sort them later.”
The box disappeared up the stairs.
Later, Niamh thought. That was the language of their family. Later we’ll explain. Later we’ll go back. Later we’ll tell you.
She’d been raised in later.
“What can I do?” she asked, because watching them run themselves ragged made her itchy.
“Unpack your room,” Aoife said automatically, then, softer, “and keep an eye on your brother before he starts disassembling the bloody house. We’ll do the rest. You’ve school visits and all that next week, you need your head.”
Niamh nodded. “Come on, melted brain,” she said to Jimmy. “Help me find my stuff.”
“Only if I can have the top drawer,” he bargained, already scrambling to his feet.
“In my room?” She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a hate crime.”
He grinned and bolted up the stairs anyway.
Cillian shifted Sophie higher on his hip. “You want down, pet?” he asked.
She tightened her grip. “No.”
“Of course you don’t,” Niamh muttered, watching the way Sophie was practically welded to him. “Why walk when you can live on Dad like a backpack?”
Sophie heard that and stuck one foot out, wiggling her toes. “I am a very glamourous accessory,” she informed them. “All the movie stars have one.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said as he passed. “It’s called a stylist.”
Cillian laughed, even as he winced. “Right, somebody convince your sister to relocate to ground level before I end up in physio.”
Sophie considered this. “Only if Niamh carries me instead,” she decreed.
Niamh made a face. “Absolutely not. I’m twelve, not a forklift.”
Sophie frowned, then sighed with the kind of weary resignation that suggested great betrayal. “Fine,” she said, sliding down at last. She immediately grabbed the back of Cillian’s T-shirt like she was still attached by an invisible string, trotting after him as he headed kitchen-wards.
This was the bit that made no sense to other people, Niamh knew. You saw her dad on talk shows and in films and on billboards and you thought wow, movie star. You didn’t see him being used as a human climbing frame while arguing with an internet provider about installation dates. You didn’t see her mother ordering movers round like a general while Sophie tried to hang off her, too, and Jimmy nicked biscuits when he thought no one was looking.
You also never saw the kids anywhere near cameras.
She’d thought about that more and more lately. The premiere the night before had been the worst of it. Aoife on one side of the velvet rope, Cillian on the other, lights popping, people shouting their names.
“And this is the famous family man,” one presenter had trilled, hand on Cillian’s forearm. “Your wife, your parents back home… anyone else watching tonight?”
Niamh had been in the green room with Jimmy and Sophie, watching the live feed on a small TV in the corner. Screen Cillian had smiled that careful, polished smile that meant he was playing himself, and said, “Ah, sure, there’s always family watching,” in that maddeningly vague way he did whenever the subject got close.
Jimmy had rolled his eyes. “He means us,” he’d said, chewing crisps. “He just doesn’t want them to know he means us.”
“Suspicious,” Niamh had replied. “Extremely suspicious.”
Last night, in the car after, when they thought the kids were asleep, she’d heard Aoife say, dry as anything, “And what do we tell them if we go back? ‘Oh, we’ve three beautiful babies and we’ve kept them out of the light for a reason’?”
Now, in the mouldy hallway of the London house that was meant to fix everything, the line echoed in Niamh’s head like dialogue from one of Aoife’s films.
We’ve kept them out of the light for a reason.
She wasn’t sure if she was more offended by the secrecy or impressed by the sheer long-term commitment to the bit.
Upstairs, her new room was at the back—boxy, with a view over a strip of gardens and the backs of other houses. Somewhere, a dog barked. Somewhere else, a baby cried. Ordinary sounds. The kind that, apparently, were supposed to make people feel safe.
Jimmy barrelled in after her and immediately flopped on the bare mattress.
“I call this side,” he declared.
“You don’t live in here,” Niamh reminded him. “You have your own room. Remember? The one with the wallpaper you already hate?”
He pulled a face. “It’s got flowers. It’s like sleeping inside Nana’s curtains.”
“Tragic,” she said. “A real hardship story. We’ll alert the media.”
He grinned, then hopped back down. “I’m going to see if there’s a garden hose,” he announced. “Just to know my options.”
“That’s a very worrying sentence,” she called after him as he vanished.
Unpacking could theoretically start now. She dragged her suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it, pulling out her headphones, a stack of T-shirts, the hoodie from her old school in Vancouver. The familiar things made the unfamiliar walls feel slightly less like they were closing in.
Voices drifted up from downstairs—Aoife barking instructions about where the plates should go; Sophie chattering in a running commentary about the colour of everything; Cillian on the phone with someone in his terribly polite voice, probably his agent, spinning the move as a strategic decision rather than what it actually was: they were tired and wanted somewhere the kids could put posters up without wondering how long they’d stay.
Kids. Plural. Real, existent children, not theoretical ones he coyly referenced as “family” on TV.
Niamh shoved her socks into the top drawer of the wardrobe and shut it with a thud. The noise echoed oddly. The house felt hollow, full of other people’s absence.
Unpacking, she decided, could wait.
Down the hall, a door stood slightly ajar. The spare room. The one the movers had dumped AOIFE – UNI in, along with half the life her parents had lived before she was old enough to remember it properly.
She hovered.
Aoife hadn’t said “don’t go in there.” She also hadn’t said “help yourself to all my emotional baggage, pet, I’d love that.” But curiosity had always been louder in Niamh’s head than other people’s implied boundaries.
She padded down the hall and nudged the door open with her foot.
The spare room was chaos. Boxes stacked to shoulder height, a rolled-up rug leaning drunkenly against one wall, an old desk shoved under the window. Dust motes hung thick in here too, undisturbed.
The AOIFE – UNI box was on top of another, slightly caved inward from the years. Someone had reinforced it with brown tape at some stage. The handwriting was younger, loopier than Aoife’s current sharp scrawl.
Niamh stepped closer. Her heart had already started that stupid fast-but-heavy thing it did whenever Belfast snuck into a conversation. As if her body knew something before her brain caught up.
She peeled at a corner of tape with her nail.
Voices downstairs. A burst of Sophie’s laughter. Jimmy yelling something about slugs. No one coming up the stairs yet.
“If you didn’t want me to look,” she muttered, “you’d have set the room on fire.”
She pulled the tape free and folded back the flaps.
The smell hit her first. Old paper and damp and a faint trace of something chemical, like developing fluid. Beneath a layer of yellowing newspaper there were notebooks—spiral-bound, battered—script drafts with crossed-out titles, a rolled-up film poster with Aoife Kane – Written & Directed by at the bottom in a font Niamh had always found secretly hilariously earnest.
She lifted the poster out carefully and set it to one side.
Underneath, wrapped in a T-shirt so old the cotton had gone almost translucent, was a small stack of photographs and a flat, black-covered book.
Her fingers went for the photos first. They always did.
The top one was a bit sun-faded, corners soft from handling. Two boys leaning against a car that had seen better days. One of them was unmistakably her father, even without the uneven haircut and the tracksuit top giving him away as teenage and skint. Same eyes. Same mouth tilted in a grin that said he’d talk his way out of anything.
The other boy—
“Oh,” Niamh breathed, as if someone had punched the air out of her.
He was taller than her dad, broader across the shoulders, with the kind of swagger that seemed to radiate off the glossy surface. Union Jack scarf looped loose around his neck. Bottle in his hand. Head tipped back mid-laugh. He looked like he owned the street they were on, maybe the whole city.
It was like looking at a funhouse-mirror version of her father—same bone structure, same eyes, but harder, edges sharpened.
Someone had scribbled on the white border in blue ink.
GARETH & CILL – SUMMER 08
Her stomach dropped.
Uncle.
The word felt foreign. There was no uncle in her vocabulary. There was Mam’s sister in Galway, who sent chaotic voice notes and knitted jumpers too big. There were friends-who-might-as-well-be-aunties, actors who’d bounced her on their knees on set and camera ops who’d taught her how to hold a boom without hitting anyone.
But there’d never been “this is your uncle.”
She flipped through the rest of the photos with numb fingers.
Gareth on a sofa, half-asleep, mouth open, remote on his chest. Gareth on some cliff edge, arms spread, wind grabbing at the Union Jack on his back like a cape. Gareth with an arm around a younger Cillian, both of them flushed and sweaty in rugby jerseys, some match or other, teeth bared in wolfish smiles.
In every one, Cillian looked at the camera like it was a friend.
In exactly none of them had he ever mentioned that Niamh had an uncle who’d vanished into thin air.
At the bottom of the pile was one last photo, smaller, more hastily cut. The composition was off, as if whoever’d taken it hadn’t meant to take that shot at all. Gareth in the foreground, half-turned away, expression sharper, mouth pulled sideways like he’d just spat something. Behind him, out of focus, Aoife at what must have been sixteen or thereabouts—hair longer, face rounder—but with the same eyes. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at Gareth. And whatever was in her gaze was not friendly.
Niamh set the photos down before she smudged them with her thumbprint and reached for the black-covered book.
It wasn’t a notebook like the others. It was heavier, leather soft with age, elastic band loose around the middle. A cheap diary, the kind you got in newsagents around January for people who meant to start keeping track of their lives.
There was no lock. That felt like an omission. Aoife locked everything important now—her phone, her laptop, her scripts—thumbprints and passcodes and encrypted folders. Sixteen-year-old Aoife, apparently, had trusted paper more than passwords.
Niamh slipped the band off and opened it.
The first pages were blank. Whoever Aoife had bought it for, she hadn’t started on time. A few weeks in, the handwriting appeared—crowded, urgent. Not the neat lines Niamh had seen on scripts, but something rawer.
She flicked ahead until a date jumped out at her.
11 July
Her chest tightened. She sat down on the edge of the bare spare-room bed without meaning to. The springs squeaked in protest.
She read.
Mam keeps sayin’ I should write things down. Get them “out of my system” so I’ll stop “makin’ myself sick with worry.” As if that’s how that works. Here. Have some paper. The fear’ll evaporate.
It’s too warm to think. The whole estate smells like smoke already and they haven’t even lit the bloody thing yet. Gareth’s been round twice, bangin’ on the door like he owns it, shoutin’ up about how I’m “keeping Cill on too tight a leash.” As if he’s a dog I’m after training to sit.
He came Into the kitchen earlier when Mam was at Mass and Da was out…
The words tumbled on. Niamh felt her mouth go dry as she read about Gareth blocking the drawer with the knives, about his hand on Aoife’s wrist, his breath in her face, the disgusting, lazy little threats about “doing your Da a favour” and “getting rid of the problem.”
Her problem.
The baby.
Her.
She read about Aoife’s knee slamming up, about Gareth folding, about him grabbing her by the hair and spitting we’ll see who gets to stay in this family. About Cillian walking in and seeing his brother’s hands on her and going for him, really going, like she’d never seen before.
By the time she reached the end of the entry, her own hand was clenched so tight round the diary her knuckles ached.
If anything happens later, if things go bad… at least I’ll know I wasn’t mad. It was real. He grabbed me. He threatened the baby. He would have told.
That’s why Cill went for him. That’s why if Gareth disappears, it won’t be the bonfire that did it. It’ll be his own mouth.
Niamh lifted her head. The room wobbled for a second. She drew in a breath until the walls steadied.
This wasn’t just some vague family feud, then. This wasn’t just politics and people being eejits on opposite sides of a flag.
This was her uncle putting his hands where they weren’t wanted, threatening to erase her before she existed, and her dad nearly breaking his hand to stop him.
Downstairs, a door slammed. Sophie’s shriek of laughter floated up, followed by Cillian’s mock-outraged “stop tryin’ to climb me, I’m not a tree.” Jimmy yelled something about slugs again.
Niamh closed the diary slowly and sat with it in her hands, feeling the weight of words written before she was even a smear on a scan.
A photo. A diary. A brother who went missing.
They’d always said “there was a tragedy” in that vague, woolly way grown-ups used when they didn’t want to get into details. They’d never said he’d hurt Mam. They’d never said Da had tried to knock his head off for it.
She looked back at the box. There might be more. More entries. More context. More of the story they’d decided she couldn’t handle.
Her thumb hovered over the edge of the diary, tempted to flick ahead, to devour it all in one go.
Instead, she slid the book into her hoodie, tucking it against her side, under her arm. The photos she stacked neatly, re-wrapped in the old T-shirt and put back exactly where she found them.
When she straightened up, dust on her knees, she caught her reflection in the spare-room window. For a second, with the light hitting her at a slant, she could see the family resemblance—the Rowan bone structure, the Kane eyes, the shadows of people she’d never properly met.
She didn’t feel guilty.
They’d kept her out of the light for a reason, sure. Now she knew at least one of them.
The thing about light, though, was it didn’t just reveal. It developed.
And maybe it was time someone did that with the truth.
“Niamh?” Cillian’s voice floated up the stairs. “Tea’s on if you’re not buried alive up there.”
“And there’s a snail the size of Sophie’s head!” Jimmy added. “You have to see this, it’s traumatisin’.”
“And I’m on Da’s shoulders,” Sophie yelled triumphantly. “Again!”
“Of course you are,” Niamh murmured.
She stepped out into the hall, adjusting her hoodie so the bulge of the diary didn’t show.
“Yeah,” she called back, voice steady. “I’m coming.”
She took the stairs slowly, feeling each tread like a beat.
Later, she told herself again.
Later, she’d read the rest.
Later, she’d type Gareth Rowan Belfast missing into the search bar and not delete it.
But later was starting to feel a lot like now, dressed up in excuses.