By nine o’clock, Maeve had recovered her second boot, lost her temper in three separate institutional settings, and learned that someone had leaked a photograph of a seventeen-year-old hospital form to every gossip account in Ireland.
The boot arrived by taxi, delivered by a driver who looked personally wounded by her abandonment of footwear. The temper went first at the hospital administrator who suggested “media people usually handle these things internally,” then at Finn’s producer when he called asking whether Finn could record a short reassurance clip from bed, and finally at herself in the disabled toilet mirror where she found mascara under one eye and the haunted expression of a woman who had become the story before breakfast.
She did not look in the mirror for long. Mirror scenes were for people with time to narrate their cheekbones. Maeve had a crisis, an ex-husband with head trauma, a leaked medical document, a production company about to combust, and a personal history being diced into shareable portions by strangers with ring lights.
Outside the toilet, her assistant Tara rang for the seventh time.
Maeve answered. “Give me facts, not panic.”
“I can do facts in a panicked voice.”
“Accepted.”
“The photo first appeared on DublinAfterDark at seven forty-two. It spread to three media WhatsApp groups by eight. Someone tagged Liffey Lane, Harbourlight, Finn, you, and for reasons I cannot spiritually defend, the official account for a brunch place in Ranelagh.”
“They thrive on chaos.”
“The caption says, ‘Which divorced media darling never took his ex off the emergency contact form?’ Then people found the old clip of you bringing him soup on set.”
“There is no clip of me bringing him soup.”
“There is now.”
Maeve closed her eyes. “Of course there is.”
“It’s cute, for what it’s worth.”
“It is worth nothing.”
“You’re wearing a red jumper and threatening him with a spoon.”
“He had flu and tried to present a live segment.”
“Comments are loving the spoon.”
“Tara.”
“Right. Facts. Legal says if the document is genuine medical paperwork, the leak is serious. HR says old Harbourlight archives were migrated during the acquisition. IT says they warned management about access controls. Management says they are shocked. I say management has been shocked so often recently they should consider grounding themselves before touching metal.”
Despite everything, Maeve smiled. “Good. Keep that energy.”
“Also, Declan wants you in the ten o’clock emergency meeting.”
Declan Byrne, chief executive of Liffey Lane Studios, had the gift of sounding calm while making everyone else bleed internally. He wore trainers with suits, described layoffs as “weather events,” and thought empathy was best delivered in bullet points. Maeve had survived him for eleven months by being better prepared and less impressed than anyone in the room.
“I’m at the hospital,” she said.
“He knows. He says remote is fine.”
“Generous.”
“He also says Finn should not speak publicly until we align messaging.”
“Finn has a concussion. Finn should not speak publicly because a doctor with a degree said so.”
“I’ll put that in corporate.”
“Please don’t.”
“Too late, I’ve written: medical stakeholders recommend silence.”
Maeve pinched the bridge of her nose. “Where is the physical package now?”
“Legal sealed it. Well, legal put it in a sandwich bag because evidence bags are apparently not part of our current stationery supplier agreement.”
“Where?”
“Boardroom fridge.”
Maeve opened her eyes. “The package is in a fridge?”
“Beside oat milk. I did say sealed.”
This, Maeve thought, was why prestige television lied. Real institutional crisis did not look like shadowy men in car parks. It looked like a possible criminal evidence package chilling beside a communal yoghurt with SARAH written on the lid.
“Do not let anyone touch it,” Maeve said. “Do not let Declan hold it up in a meeting as a visual aid. Do not let social clip it. Do not let reception sign for anything else without photographing the courier, the label, and their own shoes if necessary.”
“Copy.”
“And Tara?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re doing well.”
The line went quiet for half a second. “That’s rude. I’m emotionally vulnerable now.”
“Use it later. I need you sharp.”
“Sharp as a tiny legal knife.”
Maeve hung up and returned to Finn’s bay.
He was sitting up too straight, phone in his hand, expression blank in a way she knew meant noise had got under his skin. His hair was flattened on one side. The dressing at his temple made him look less like a beloved broadcaster and more like a man who had lost a fight with the city and was pretending the city had cheated.
“Give it to me,” she said.
He looked up. “Hello to you too.”
“Phone.”
“I’m an adult.”
“You’re a concussed adult trending under Emergency Contact Ex.”
His eyebrows moved, then one regretted it. “That’s the tag?”
“Apparently.”
“Not terrible.”
“Finn.”
“From a branding perspective.”
“I will unplug something vital.”
He handed over the phone.
Maeve did not look at the screen. That was discipline. That was growth. That was also because one glimpse of strangers using the word goals about her divorce might cause a felony.
“Your sister is on her way,” she said.
“Did you call Nessa?”
“No, the hospital did. Because I made them add her like responsible adults.”
He leaned back. “She’ll panic.”
“She’ll bring food.”
“She panics through food.”
“Then we’ll be well fed in the ruins.”
A smile came and went. “Are we ruins?”
Maeve hated him a little for asking softly. Soft Finn had always been worse than charming Finn. Charming Finn could be resisted with sarcasm and hydration. Soft Finn slipped past the barricade holding a candle.
“We are divorced,” she said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It’s the available answer.”
He accepted that with a small nod, and the fact that he accepted it made her want to offer something kinder, which annoyed her. Emotional generosity around an ex was how people ended up at Christmas markets making poor decisions beside handmade soap.
“Tell me again about the package,” she said.
“I already did.”
“You gave me the injured-man edit. I want the full producer cut.”
He gave a faint laugh. “God, I missed that.”
“Don’t.”
“Right.”
“Package.”
He rubbed his thumb against the edge of the sheet. The movement was familiar. Finn did it when he was trying not to say the thing that mattered. Maeve had once loved that she could read him. Now it felt like owning a key to a house she no longer lived in.
“Cormac in post rang me,” he said. “Old Harbourlight staff, moved over in the acquisition. He said there was a weird package addressed to you but marked private archive. He thought it might be connected to a retrospective segment they’re doing on Dublin media scandals.”
“We are not doing a retrospective on Dublin media scandals.”
“Someone is.”
Maeve filed that. “Why ring you?”
“My name was on a photocopied release form inside.”
“You saw it?”
“He sent a photo.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Deleted after I realised what it was.”
Maeve stared.
“I know,” he said.
“You deleted evidence?”
“I panicked.”
“You?”
“I can panic.”
“No, you perform composure until everyone else mistakes it for morality.”
“Maeve.”
The rebuke was quiet. Fair, possibly. She looked away first.
“Sorry,” she said, and hated that it came out real.
He nodded again. “I deleted it because it felt… intimate. Like someone had broken into a room I forgot existed.”
That she understood. The old form was absurd and bureaucratic, yes, but it was also theirs. A stupid relic from the first day. Her handwriting on the back. His wrist under hospital light. The beginning of a story the internet now wanted to edit into a meme.
“What did you do then?” she asked.
“I told Cormac to give it to legal. Then I got a blocked call telling me to come alone to the quays if I wanted to know who had access to the archive.”
Maeve’s whole body went cold. “You went?”
“I was going to meet them in public.”
“At six in the morning in February?”
“There are joggers.”
“There are also murderers with excellent time management.”
“I didn’t think—”
“No. You didn’t.”
He shut his eyes. Pain tightened his mouth. Maeve forced herself to pause. Concussion. Shoulder injury. Public humiliation. Possible blackmail. The man did not need her shouting the plaster off the wall, satisfying as it might be.
When he opened his eyes, he looked stripped down. “I thought if it was about you, I should stop it before it reached you.”
There it was. The old wound wearing fresh clothes.
“You don’t get to make decisions for me anymore,” Maeve said.
“I know.”
“No, you know it legally. You don’t know it in your bones yet.”
His face changed, a flinch too quick for television. “That’s true.”
Again with the honesty. Deeply inconvenient. She missed dodging. Dodging had handles.
Before she could answer, the curtain snapped open and Nessa O’Rourke arrived carrying three tote bags, a wild scarf, and the expression of an older sister prepared to resurrect and kill her brother in one continuous motion.
“Jesus, Mary, and every data protection officer in the land,” Nessa said. “Finnian.”
Finn groaned. “Don’t full-name me in hospital.”
“I’ll full-name you in the morgue if you keep crossing roads like a poet with no peripheral vision.” She dumped the bags on the chair, then saw Maeve. Everything in her face softened and complicated itself. “Maeve, love.”
“Hi, Ness.”
Nessa hugged her before Maeve could decide whether they were still people who hugged. The contact was fierce, warm, and smelled of rain and cinnamon gum. Maeve stood stiff for one second, then melted despite herself.
“You came,” Nessa whispered.
“The form came for me.”
Nessa pulled back, eyes bright. “He’s an eejit.”
“Medically confirmed.”
“I brought sandwiches.”
“Also medically expected.”
Finn looked between them. “I’m the patient.”
“And yet,” Nessa said, taking a wrapped sandwich from the tote, “not the victim of your own life choices.”
Maeve liked Nessa. That had been one of the crueller parts of the divorce. You could leave a marriage, but nobody told you how to leave the sister-in-law who remembered your preferred tea and sent birthday texts with no emotional invoice attached.
Nessa handed Maeve a sandwich. “Egg mayo.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
“You arrived with one shoe. Time is a social construct.”
Finn smiled, then winced again.
Nessa’s face sharpened. “Pain?”
“Manageable.”
“Liar.”
“Family trait.”
Maeve’s phone buzzed. This time it was Declan Byrne.
She considered letting it ring. Then she remembered the package in the boardroom fridge and answered.
“Maeve,” Declan said, smooth as polished concrete. “We need you on the call.”
“I’m in a hospital.”
“Yes. I appreciate the optics are challenging.”
“The optics?”
Finn and Nessa both looked at her. Maeve turned slightly away before her face gave too much away.
Declan continued, “The board needs reassurance that your personal connection to Finn won’t compromise our response.”
The old Maeve, the married Maeve, the woman who had protected Finn’s softest parts from the machinery of public appetite, might have answered carefully. The new Maeve had slept badly for fourteen months and arrived at hospital with one shoe.
“My personal connection,” she said, “is why I know exactly how bad this can get.”
“I don’t doubt your judgement.”
“You’re about to.”
A pause. “We may need you to step back from the internal review.”
Maeve looked at Finn’s hospital bracelet. The white band circled his wrist like a dare from the past. Some people never update the person who saves them.
Then she looked at Finn himself: bruised, foolish, frightened beneath the manners. Nessa beside him with sandwiches and wet eyes. Tara at the studio holding a crisis together with sarcasm and inadequate stationery. A package in a fridge. A leaked form. Someone reaching into the beginning of Maeve’s love story and turning it into leverage.
“No,” Maeve said.
Declan’s voice cooled. “No?”
“No, I won’t step back.”
“That may not be your decision.”
“It became my decision when my name, my handwriting, my divorce, and my company’s archive were used to manufacture a public spectacle.”
“Careful.”
“I am careful. That’s why you hired me.”
Across the bay, Finn watched her with something like awe and something like fear. Good. Let him be afraid. Maeve was afraid too. But fear had always made her practical.
Declan said, “This is a governance issue.”
“No,” Maeve said. “This is an emergency contact issue.”
She ended the call.
For a second, nobody spoke.
Then Nessa took a sandwich from the bag, handed it to Finn, and said, “Well. That sounded expensive.”
Finn’s mouth twitched. “She’s better than television.”
Maeve looked at him. “You are not helping.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
Her phone buzzed again, not a call this time. A message from an unknown number.
No link. No greeting. Just a photograph.
The image showed Maeve’s green velvet chair in her flat, taken from inside the room.
Below it, one line of text appeared.
You saved him once. Now choose who saves you.