Chapter 1

The kettle in the cooperage always sounded like it had opinions. It huffed as if the steam might file a complaint on behalf of every oak atom that had given itself to patience. Jamie poured, silently, the way he did everything. Niamh perched on a stool that had survived three generations of boots and a thousand tea rings, her notebook open, her pen parked like a soldier in a trench. “Milk?” he asked. “Drop,” she said, and when he made it perfect without looking, she had to stop herself writing that down, too. He set her mug beside the ledger. She watched him reach for his pencil and print DOLORES: HANDLE REPLACED in neat block capitals, like a man speaking to the future and refusing to mumble. “You named the hoop driver Dolores,” she said, delighted. “I didn’t,” he said, not looking up. “You did, love.” He took a quiet sip. “You named her. I entered the change so the next poor soul knows what they’re swinging.” “That poor soul being you,” she said, and smiled into her tea. They drank under the radio’s low murmur—Clannad in the background, a forecast that promised rain that didn’t need promising. Outside the cooperage door, the distillery steamed and breathed and went on doing the work it had always done. Inside, the hammers sat with a patience that felt like warning and welcome at once. “Right,” she said, tucking the notebook into her cardigan pocket. “Before the board drags me upstairs with PowerPoints and visible disappointment, can I borrow three ex-bourbon casks from Warehouse D for a citrus-finish trial?” He set his mug down with the consideration of a man who knew that life hinged on the millimetres. “No.” “No?” “Not until the staves on the D lot have another week. The seasoning’s nearly there.” “It’s two degrees cooler in there. The angels will barely lift an eyebrow.” She leaned forward, hands on knees, bright cardigan a flag. “If I toast a touch heavier and we pull a small sample for a finishing test—” “Not until the wood is ready, Niamh.” She straightened, that stubborn little part of her flaring like a match. “The board wants a flagship in twelve weeks. The investor’s coming at the end of Week Twelve with a chequebook and a checklist. The only way I hit numbers is if we start building blends now, not Week Ten.” “Then build with what’s ready.” She stared at him, at the stillness that was not stone but oak—living, rigid for a reason. “You’re immovable.” “On unseasoned staves? I am, yeah.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is this integrity or is this… control?” His mouth twitched. “Bit of both.” “Fine,” she said. “I’ll work with B. I’ll just have to coax the laugh lines out of the minors.” He huffed a small laugh—there, and gone. “People can’t see laugh lines if you paint them neon.” “Was that a marketing dig?” “That was a fact.” He rolled his sleeves, the tendons in his forearms drawing a beautiful map she tried not to read too closely. “Tell Orla what you like. She’ll hear it and spin it and wear a sharp suit while she does.” “Your contempt is showing.” “My job is showing.” He lifted his mug. “We keep the craft clean. If the craft’s clean, everything else is easier.” “And if we don’t get the pre-orders,” she said softly, “there won’t be a craft to keep.” He looked at her then, properly. Storm-grey eyes with a line between them that said he’d stared down too many compromises and learned to count to ten instead of breaking something. “You get your numbers,” he said. “I’ll keep the wood. Both of us do it right, and we might have something left to hand to the next lot.” She nodded, the knot in her chest pulling and loosening at once. “Deal,” she said, and stuck out her hand, formal as an oath. He didn’t shake it. He picked up her wrist and adjusted her tasting bracelet—thin leather, a gift from a scent-maker friend in Utrecht—so the loop sat flush. “You were going to catch it on the adze,” he said. “Her name is Bríd.” “God save us,” he said dryly, and let her go. The boardroom had windows like eyes that never blinked. Someone—Orla, almost certainly—had put fresh flowers on the credenza: eucalyptus and something yellow and structurally optimistic. Orla herself sat at the far end of the table with a laptop open and a smile that belonged on a magazine cover. The Chair, Mr. Dwyer, looked tired in a moneyed way. Councillor Grace was there for optics and leverage. “Niamh,” the Chair said, as if she might have forgotten. “Thank you for making the time.” “As distinct from living at the distillery?” she said, brightly, and sat. Orla’s smile sharpened. “We’re all living here, darling.” “Some of us live here and lift things,” Niamh said, then regretted it. The Chair flinched by a millimetre. She inhaled, exhaled, and put her hands under the table where they could only fidget at her skirt. “The investor visits on the Saturday of the centenary weekend,” Mr. Dwyer said. “We’ll need a product in bottle, a story that sings, and proof that people want it before it exists.” Niamh nodded. “I’ve scoped four blend concepts. I’d like to lead with a sherry finish—” “The signature must be authentically Kilbracken,” Orla said, tapping the laptop. “Our research indicates the market is saturated with sherry finishes. We need a twist or we need tradition. Pick one. Don’t be woolly.” “Tradition is not a static object,” Niamh said, and saw Mr. Dwyer’s eyebrow twitch with the ghost of amusement. “It’s a practice. The cooperage is the practice. You can taste it.” “You’ll have your chance to say so,” Orla said smoothly. “We’ve drafted a ‘Cask Conversations’ programme for Saturdays. Live blending in the tasting room. Live cooperage demonstration on the courtyard. Visitor-centre upsells. QR codes. TikTok.” “TikTok,” Mr. Dwyer repeated, as if it were a disease one got on a ferry. Orla’s smile never wavered. “We need content. We need eyes. We need to show that Kilbracken is both heritage and modernity.” She turned the laptop and a slide beamed onto the wall. KILBRACKEN 100: A Century in Cask. “Niamh, you’ll lead the tasting with approachable language. Jamie will hoop a cask, show the difference between char and toast, talk through the re-char programme. We’ll take pre-orders in the room and online.” Niamh sat still for a beat. “Jamie agreed to this?” “He will,” Orla said. Something in Niamh went tight and bright. “The cooperage is not a circus. It’s a craft. If we’re doing a demo, it’s because it tells the truth, not because it looks nice on a reel.” “Darling,” Orla said, and the word was a blanket and a bind, “I’m not making a mockery of the craft. I’m asking the craft to help save itself.” “By dancing for the algorithm.” “By telling its story aloud.” Mr. Dwyer held up a hand. “Enough.” He turned to Niamh. “The condition stands. A flagship blend in twelve weeks. A launch that lands. If we miss the quality marks or the pre-order targets by launch weekend—” “The cooperage goes,” Orla finished, soft as if it were a kindness to say it gently. Niamh’s stomach dropped as if a lift had misjudged the stop. “You can’t mean that.” “We can’t staff a loss,” Mr. Dwyer said, and his voice creaked. “If we contract barrels, we keep forty jobs. If we don’t… we lose more.” “And if you cut the cooperage,” she said, so quietly the flowers might have leaned in to hear, “you cut the heart. The whiskey won’t taste like us.” “It’ll taste like profit,” Councillor Grace said, far too brisk. “The town needs—” “The town needs the thing that makes it the town,” Niamh said, and the heat rose to her face; she let it, because some heats were not to be apologised for. “Then do your job,” Orla said, lashes low, voice cool. “Make something worth keeping.” Niamh’s hand found the pen in her pocket and clicked it, twice, for courage. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll build a programme. We’ll make Saturdays sing. But I need two things: Jamie’s sign-off on the cask work—no outsourcing anything on the flagship—and you off my back when I use citrus loaf in the tasting room to teach people ester notes.” “Citrus loaf?” Mr. Dwyer said, baffled. “We’re not putting cake on the brand deck,” Orla said, horror soft and immaculate. “We absolutely are,” Niamh said. “We’re going to feed people and teach them and remind them that whiskey is made of mouths and hands, not just marketing.” Mr. Dwyer rubbed the line between his eyes. “Within reason, Ms. O’Shea.” “Within reason,” she agreed cheerfully, and wrote Cake: APPROVED in her notebook for the satisfaction of it. “Go,” Orla said. “Work your magic.” She clicked to a slide about pre-order targets and QR code placement that looked like a city planner’s nightmare. “And remember—if this fails, the cooperage closes.” Niamh left the room on her anger like a wind. Down the corridor, past the framed photos of men in caps and women in headscarves in the bottling hall; down the stairs that steamed because Waterford always thought it was a kettle; across the courtyard where a forklift beeped around a curve like a stubborn walrus. She cut through the visitor centre, dodged a group of Americans debating whether whiskey was spelled with an ‘e’ (she murmured, “With an e here, without in Scotland, welcome, we love you,” and kept walking). She found him back in the cooperage, hands on a hoop as if it were the only thing that would ever anchor him to the floor. “Congratulations,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “You’re a public performer now.” He didn’t look up. “I’ll wear sequins.” “You’ll wear a smile,” she said. “Sometimes.” He lifted the hoop, set it, tapped it into place with the ease that came from ten thousand repetitions and the humility to know you’d never done it right until the cask told you so. “What do you need, Niamh?” “Three things,” she said, stepping in. “One: teach me what you can teach me without me losing a finger. Two: don’t let Orla turn you into a TikTok puppet.” “That’ll be easy.” “And three: sandwiches.” He glanced up. “Sandwiches.” “Ham and mustard triangles at exactly 12:10. Otherwise I forget to eat and then I say rude things in boardrooms.” He huffed. “12:10.” “12:10,” she echoed, solemn. “I’ll bring citrus loaf for Saturdays. We’ll teach notes to people who think they don’t have noses.” He picked up the hoop driver. “The head of marketing wants QR codes. You want cake. I want the right char on the right staves. The Chair wants jobs. The town wants a reason to feel proud.” He balanced the tool, and she watched his hands the way she watched a particularly good pipette—admiring the control. “We all want impossible things.” “Then it’s a fair fight,” she said. “And before you say it, yes, I know: rest the wood.” “It’s a promise your whiskey won’t taste like a bonfire panic,” he said, and his mouth betrayed him again. “You’ll get your laughs from D soon enough.” “Romance me with your grain,” she said, and watched the flush climb like sunrise. “Only quarter-sawn,” he said, deadpan, and Bríd looked on from the bench, not judging. Saturdays began with mops and ended with prayer. Auntie Mairead, queen of the visitor centre, ran a rota with the military cheer of a woman who had birthed three sons and a niece and knew how to make a queue obey. She intercepted Niamh at the tasting-room door with a tea towel and a frown that was ninety per cent approval and ten per cent rehearsal. “Language,” Mairead said. “I’ll say ‘esters’ and ‘aldehydes’ and then translate to ‘apple’ and ‘toffee’ and ‘something your granddad would have a cry over,’” Niamh promised. “No swearing. Unless the projector throws a fit.” “It will,” Mairead said. “We spoke to Father Declan about it. He said that’s not how prayer works.” The tasting room had been polished to an apology. Glasses lined up like a formation. On each place setting, Niamh had placed a small square of her citrus loaf, two almonds, a whisper of dark chocolate. The projector blinked with the stubbornness of a cow in a narrow gate. She pressed the button, coaxed it, muttered a plea. It came to life with a judder. “You’re a miracle worker,” said Kira from the bottling line, rolling a trolley laden with water jugs. Seán followed with a stack of Kilbracken 100 flyers and a grin that put sunshine in his eyebrows. “I’m an engineer whose tools include baked goods,” Niamh said. “Are you two ready for poems tonight?” “Poems & pours’ll save the parish,” Seán said. “We have a pensioner who claims to be able to smell his late wife’s lemon bars in anything above 46% ABV.” “Perfect,” Niamh said, delighted. “We’ll test him.” She set her notes on the lectern, then moved them to the back table because notes were for comfort and not, today, for reading. The crowd trickled in: tourists with expensive rain gear, locals with the soft shoulders of people who knew where to put things, a stag party that had—God bless them—chosen a distillery instead of paintball. Jamie stepped in, a shade late, sleeves rolled, hair damp from the steam. He scanned the room the way a sailor read a sky. When his eyes found hers, the corner of his mouth lifted—small and private, like he’d found the thing he came for and didn’t need anyone else to notice. “Showtime,” she mouthed. “Don’t do heroics with the bung,” he mouthed back. She lifted her chin. “Define heroics.” “Anything that gets you wet,” he said without sound, and then looked up at the ceiling like a guilty altar boy while she tried very hard not to laugh. “Welcome to Cask Conversations,” she said to the room as the murmur settled. “I’m Niamh. I look after the bit where you smell something and it reminds you of your granny’s kitchen. This is Jamie. He looks after the bit where wood breathes and we all pretend we’re not religious about it.” Auntie Mairead, seated in row one with a battalion of aunties who had conquered every raffle in Waterford, nodded, satisfied. Jamie lifted a hand like a blessing, then tapped the hoop driver against his palm and the room went a little more quiet. “We’re going to taste a couple of small pulls,” Niamh said, “and I promise you—if your nose says ‘Jaffa cake’ and the person next to you says ‘church pew,’ you’re both right.” The first pour landed in the glasses like a soft invitation. She talked in kitchen-table language—orange peel, toasted almond, a hint of honeycomb that wasn’t sweet so much as a suggestion. The American group sighed and wrote words like ‘marzipan’ and ‘Ireland’ on their cards as if both could be captured by ink. The stag party bravely agreed that this wasn’t “a shot,” and by the second sample were arguing—politely—about whether the finish was “chocolate” or “that smell when you open a good wardrobe.” “Now,” she said, “we’re going to look at wood. In a perfectly platonic way.” Jamie stepped forward, rolled a cask to the centre, and set it like a man who trusted gravity but preferred to supervise it. He pointed to the char, explained toast levels with the clean economy of someone who had made the lesson fit the minute a hundred times. He handed round a stave like a sacerdotal object. When he lit a small swatch of end-grain—controlled, safe, sanctioned—the room inhaled at once: that smell, the one that was bonfire and bread and a childhood memory that belonged to everyone. “Char puts a jacket on harshness,” he said, deadpan. “Toast gives you the warm jumper. Re-char is what we do on-site when we’ve a cask that’s had a life and we want to keep listening to it.” A hand went up—an auntie. “Do you name your tools, love?” Silence. Jamie looked at Niamh as if she had bribed the woman. Niamh smiled beatifically. “I do not,” Jamie said, with grave dignity. Niamh stage-whispered, “He absolutely does.” The room laughed, softened; phone screens lowered. He glanced down, adjusted the hoop driver—the aforementioned Dolores—and then, with the resignation of a saint choosing humour over martyrdom, lifted the ledger and displayed it like a relic. DOLORES: HANDLE REPLACED. The room melted. Niamh loved him, a little, for doing it. He put the ledger down with a clatter to break the moment. The bung-pop baptism came, inevitably. She knew better. She did. But the cask on the end of the line had a bung that had been tapped by someone who didn’t understand the difference between snug and “we’re keeping this till Lent.” She gripped the mallet, felt the room’s attention clamp around her like a hoop, and gave it a confident thump. The bung shot like a tiny, holy comet; whiskey arced like a joy. A laugh erupted and then a collective oh no; her cardigan took the angel’s share on the chin. “Right,” Jamie said, moving with calm speed—cloth, pressure, everything in hand. “That’s the end of Mass.” His eyes were bright. “Nobody lick the floor.” She stood there dripping citrus notes, laughing at herself until the laugh broke and became something like relief. “Consider me baptised,” she said to the room. “Amen,” Auntie Mairead called. “We’ll get the towels, Father.” The stag party offered their honorific sashes to mop up, were refused, bought six pre-orders to atone for nothing except being in the way. Niamh excused herself long enough to change into an emergency visitor-centre hoodie (BRACKEN THE DAY), returned to the room hair damp and pride moderately intact. “Let that be a lesson,” she said, breathless. “We respect the bung.” “Define respect,” someone called. “Anything that doesn’t get me wet,” she said, and then blushed, and half the town laughed like a bell. By lunch, the pre-order board had more ink than she’d dared hope. At exactly 12:10, a triangle of ham-and-mustard found her hand. She looked up to see Jamie’s stone face compromised by a grin he wasn’t letting anyone else have. “You remembered,” she said. “Some things you don’t forget,” he said, and it sounded like the kind of sentence you could live in. “Your turn,” she said later, sliding a greaseproof-wrapped wedge towards him. “Citrus loaf. Notes.” He looked at the cake as if it were a test. “I don’t do cake.” “You do now.” He ate. He chewed. He swallowed, eyes thoughtful. “Orange oil. Almond. Butter. Whatever that thing is where you put sugar on the top and insult it in the oven.” “Glaze,” she said, both deeply impressed and stupidly fond. “I’m writing ‘insulted sugar’ in the tasting notes.” He took the pen and wrote: DO NOT WRITE THAT. In the afternoon, they moved to the courtyard. He hooped; she translated. He pointed out a hairline and said quiet; she said, “Like when you hug someone and you can feel the tired under the coat,” and three visitors put deposits down like people making vows they intended to keep. Leah, the apprentice, hovered at the edge like a bird trying to decide if it could land without anyone noticing. “Leah,” Jamie said, without turning. “You’re either in or out. If you’re in, you wash your hands and you hold the hoops like they’re sleeping babies.” “In,” she squeaked, and darted to the sink like she’d wanted the invitation for a week and finally got it. Under the awning, the Stave Jenga tower rose—Seán’s sense of humour and Kira’s competitive streak made wood into a game that made Jamie’s mouth a line. Niamh watched him look at the tottering stack, then at the teenagers, then at the aunties placing bets with shameless joy. “No,” he said, and the living quiet in his voice dropped the room a degree. “We don’t make the craft into a collapse.” “It’s for the safety talk,” Seán said, contrite, too late. “We’ll show what happens when—” Jamie reached in and removed a critical length, slid it back into place with the same care a midwife used for a breech baby. The stack swayed. His hands were steady where they needed to be and gentle where they could be. He turned, face a shade of thunder, and addressed the crowd without raising his voice. “You do it right because the wood has a memory. You do it wrong and the memory will bruise you back.” He let the tower go. It stood, improbably, and the aunties murmured like a congregation. Then he touched the top—barely—as if blessing it, and it fell in a clatter that made the stag party cheer and Mairead mutter something about men and demonstrations. Thirty seconds later, he had the pieces arranged as they should be, his hands making a lesson out of an annoyance. He laughed in the break room later, a proper laugh that came out of him like a surprised gift. “Stave Jenga,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You were terrifying,” she said, leaning against the fridge with a paper cup of tea. “And then you were—” “Human?” “Beautiful,” she said, then pretended she hadn’t. The day was a success, and success was its own kind of trouble. Orla appeared from nowhere as the last tour drifted towards the shop, heels eating the cobbles without apology, eyes already calculating how to compress a day into nine seconds. “That was… charming,” she said. “It was honest,” Jamie said, and Niamh put a hand on his sleeve because she felt the second battle rising in him and they’d already won the first. “You both came across well,” Orla said, which she made sound like a concession. “Now we’ll need clips. Bite-sized. No jargon.” “No cake,” Niamh said. “Who’s the peanut—” “You and your—” Orla fluttered a hand at Niamh as if fanning away a gnat. “Let’s just keep it clean. The board is watching the numbers.” “We’re all watching the numbers,” Niamh said, a thread of steel in the cheer. “Numbers don’t mind jokes. People do.” Orla’s phone binged. “Great. So we’re aligned.” “We’re not,” Jamie said. “Noted,” Orla said, and was gone. “Aligned,” Niamh muttered, and then, because there was nothing else to do, she picked up a mop. Week Two tasted like work. Not the showy kind—no demos, no auntie chorus, no perfect sunlight down Warehouse B’s aisle at the exact moment a phone could catch dust motes. This was the kind of work that didn’t present well on camera: measuring, waiting, measuring again. Jamie rationed her wood like a priest with the last host in a siege. She asked for three casks—got one. Asked to pull early—got a look that was a lecture and a pat on the head and a warning written in grey. She made a sensory map the size of the noticeboard. Lemon oil linked to toast medium; honeycomb linked to re-char on ex-bourbon number two; a dotted line from ‘almond’ to ‘Kira’s biscuits’ because it turned out tasting was more honest if people thought about food rather than flavour descriptors invented in a conference room. Leah shadowed Jamie with the devotion of a new convert, hands improving by increments you had to stand beside to see. He let her set hoops on a spent cask, held his breath in a way his chest didn’t show while she tapped, corrected, tapped. When she got one clean, he said nothing, and then wrote LEAH: GOOD in the tiny corner of the ledger he imagined nobody could see. Niamh saw. She didn’t mention it. She made tea and left it by DOLORES: HANDLE REPLACED like a letter to a future that would forget both of them and remember the casks. At exactly 12:10, triangles found hands. One day she forgot—the board had demanded a mid-morning update, Orla had stuck her head in her lab to ask if there was “any progress on making the flavour feel more female” (Niamh had smiled until her jaw clicked and said, “We’re not gendering aldehydes, thanks”)—and when she finally emerged, hair skewed like a hedgerow, Jamie was leaning on the courtyard wall with a paper bag. “You missed your appointment,” he said. “I’m sorry,” she said, actually sorry. “Did the ham union complain?” “Ham and mustard at 12:10. They know what they’re for.” He handed her the bag. “I waited.” He’d cut them into triangles as neat as regulation, the way a man who lived by angles did kindness. She ate and nearly cried, because sometimes care was rectangular, exactly, then triangular when it reached your mouth. “Thank you,” she said when she could. “Don’t thank me,” he said, entirely serious. “Thank Mairead. She rang me when you hadn’t been seen at five past.” “Of course she did.” At poems & pours, the pensioner turned prophet. Blindfolded and solemn as a judge, he lifted the glass, inhaled, and said, “Mary’s lemon bars in March, when she took them out too soon and we ate them anyway.” He sipped, frowned, then smiled like a church window letting in sun. “Green apple.” The room erupted. In the video that went modestly viral, you could see Orla just off-screen, arms folded, making sure the logo cropped right. You could also see Jamie in the background, not performing, not pretending; just listening with his whole body as if what the man said might change the tilt of the earth. It did not, of course. But it changed something else: the pre-orders in the days after doubled, not because a viral clip demanded it but because people wanted to buy the feeling of being in the room when someone spoke memory and was right. Niamh wrote quiet fire on her chart and drew a heart around it before anyone could see. There were missteps. There always were. On Wednesday of Week Three, a junior in the visitor centre put draft tasting notes out on the shelf instead of the Kilbracken 100 flyers. It wasn’t sabotage; it was a mistake shaped exactly like a twenty-one-year-old’s panic and eagerness. Within an hour, a whiskey blogger with a taste for blood and engagement had posted a photo. GIMMICK, the caption said, somewhere between pity and scorn. CITRUS FINISH? WHY NOT JAM AND TOAST? The comments rolled like weather: outsiders who’d never set foot on the cobbles, insiders who’d decided to dislike anything that wasn’t poured out of their granddad’s bottle. Orla messaged a dozen times with “crisis comms” and “we’ll control the narrative.” Jamie came to find her in the lab, where she sat on a stool she hated like it was a friend. He stood in the door, took in the circles under her eyes like a craftsman taking in a hairline crack, and didn’t say it’s fine because he didn’t lie. “I should have been clearer,” she said. “Should have labelled things better. Should have—” “You should have a sandwich,” he said. “And a walk. Bring your notebook. Bring that pen you like—Seamus.” “Seamus is the croze. The pen is Bernadette.” “God save us,” he said, but he held the door. They walked the maltings, her favourite path: past the old stone, past the river that pretended it didn’t talk, past the stacked staves under tarp that were not sleeping so much as making. She told him the part of the truth that was tidy, then the part that wasn’t. How she’d chased precision like people chased God. How she’d been the kid with the chem set in the corner shop, counting drops and imagining a life where you got to count something that mattered to people who didn’t think numbers mattered at all. “You matter to Mairead and to Leah and to Seán and to Kira,” he said when she’d fallen silent. “You matter to the wood because you care how it breathes.” “And to you?” she asked, because some days bravery looked like staying in a room; other days it looked like opening a small door and standing back to see if anyone came in. He walked a few paces. He tapped the hoop driver against his shoulder, a restless metronome. “You’re char two with citrus peel,” he said finally, almost to the river. She laughed, helpless at the sweetness of it. “Toast heavy, heart sweet,” he added, and because he was looking at the water she could look at him, and because he was a careful man she could be a careless one for a single breath. She touched his sleeve; he didn’t move away. They came back to the yard and found a forklift mutiny in progress. Someone had tried to squeeze a butt between pallets designed for angels, not fools. The forklift was wedged like a whale stuck between two boats. A crowd had formed to watch what they would later call the Forklift Waltz. Jamie took one look and put his hand low on Niamh’s back, not a claim but a request. “Stay,” he said. “Watch the left.” He walked forward like a man going to a pulpit. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t make it a performance. He simply directed, one hand, one word, and the forklift—stubborn walrus that it was—decided to bend to physics rather than pride. Niamh, caught by the neat choreography, found herself conducting with the thief—Bernadette oops wrong, the thief had a name but she refused to say it out loud lest she summon ridicule. Jamie glanced back just in time to catch her small, ridiculous movement and shook his head, smiling, and nearly knocked his shoulder on the pallet because he’d been looking at her, which felt like a minor miracle and a terrible idea. “Don’t conduct with a thief,” he murmured when it was done, and the forklift operator—red with embarrassment—bought a round at the pub that night to pay penance to every cask he’d frightened. At the Malt House that evening, the aunties claimed a corner like a parliament. Trad in the snug, the clack of dominoes in the back, the chalkboard promising stew and a pint, no exceptions, we love you. Seán and Kira ran Poems & Pours like a pair of benevolent conjurors. People read silly sonnets to whiskey; whiskey listened and pretended not to preen. Jamie—reluctant and suddenly famous—sat with a pint and let people approach him the way they approached a small friendly dog, hand out, voice soft. “You’ll do it,” Mairead said to Niamh, unwrapping a lemon sweet and popping it in Niamh’s mouth like a sacrament. “You’ll make a thing people want and they’ll keep the cooperage and we’ll talk about this winter like it was the year we nearly tripped and didn’t.” “I hope so,” Niamh said around the sweet, and it tasted like loyalty. Jamie slid in beside her, bringing the quiet a second chair always brings. “We’ve a slot at nine,” he said. “Seán wants a short from us.” “A poem?” she said, aghast. “God, no,” he said. “He wants you to say ‘laugh lines’ into a microphone.” “Nobody needs that,” she said, and then, because the room was loud and because he was here and because—if she was honest—the day had rolled her out like pastry and left her raw in a way that felt right, she leaned into his shoulder for a heartbeat. He went still and then, slowly, as if he might be arrested for it, pressed his arm to hers. He smelled like oak and soap and the idea of rain when it hadn’t yet decided to fall. They read their bit at nine. It wasn’t a poem. It was worse. It was honest, which drew blood in a softer way. She said laugh lines and let the room hear love in her voice; he said re-char and let the room hear defiance; Seán strummed a chord to make the word land like a joke and a vow. When they sat, their knees touched. He didn’t move his. She didn’t move hers. The aunties sighed in unison. The bartender rang the bell for last orders as if to bless or separate; it did neither. Outside, the street was wet as a promise. He walked her to her car because that’s what men like him did, not because he thought she couldn’t navigate a puddle; because the act mattered. At her door, she turned and found him looking like a cliff—solid, impossible, forgiving if you climbed with care. “Thank you,” she said, useless and true. “For what?” “For today. For sandwiches. For being stubborn in the way that makes the world reliable.” “Don’t thank me,” he said, almost smiling. “Thank Mairead. And the wood.” She put a hand on the door, then on his wrist because she did not intend to be careful forever. “Jamie.” He looked down at her hand and then into her eyes with a concentration that made her knees ridiculous. “Niamh.” “This,” she said, and the word covered the entire day: the bung baptism, the forklift waltz, the lemon sweet, the walk, the stupid, perfect triangles at 12:10. “Is—” “Work,” he said. “Work,” she agreed. “And also—” “Also,” he said, as if it were a noun. They stood like that for the beat of a dropped drumstick, then both laughed, and the tension turned companionable instead of catastrophic. She got in the car. He shut the door with a care that felt indecently intimate. She watched him in the rear-view as she pulled away, and he didn’t move until she turned the corner. Weeks four and five blurred into the kind of rhythm you only recognised after it was gone. Mornings in Warehouse B, the choir singing minors. She learned to hear the difference between quiet and dull, a distinction the untrained ear ignored and the trained ear worshipped. She learned that Jamie’s silence wasn’t a dare but a gift; that if she filled it with noise, she missed the part where the wood told her what it wanted. Afternoons in D, the doghouse, where the laugh lines hid and refused to come out if she tried to charm them; they came when she showed up and did the work quietly. She taught Leah to read her own hands, not copy Jamie’s. Leah built a hoop from scratch on a Wednesday when the rain made the yard a stage for ducks; Jamie wrote LEAH: GOOD again and pretended the ledger had done it without him. Orla pushed the flavoured RTD line in every meeting like a trolley with a stuck wheel that still needed to be moved. “It’s money on the table,” she said. “We can do both.” “We can do one,” Jamie said. “Right.” “You can do both,” Niamh said one day, tired to the bone and unwilling to fight like a saint. “But not at the expense of the story we’re telling.” “What story is that?” Orla asked, too sweet. “That we make what we sell,” Niamh said. “With our hands.” “The consumer doesn’t care,” Orla said. “They care about taste and price and aesthetics.” “Then we’ll make them care,” Niamh said, and thought: if this is my fatal flaw, let it be fatal for the right thing. By the end of Week Five, she had two blends on the desk that could be real, could be more than a crowd-pleaser. One leaned sherry, the other told a quieter truth. They argued—she and Jamie—in the lab at a quarter to seven, lights low, the world elsewhere. He said, “The sherry’s pretty and I don’t trust pretty,” and she said, “Pretty is allowed to be honest,” and he said, “It is. But is this?” and she said, “Maybe,” which was as honest as she knew how to be. He leaned on the bench and looked at her, not the glass. “What if you start with honesty instead of decoration?” She bristled and then softened, because he wasn’t calling her a liar. He was asking her to go deeper. “You’re going to use an adze metaphor on me, aren’t you.” “Bríd says—” “Oh, for—” He smiled, small and ruined her. “Take a layer off. See what the grain wants.” She did. She took a layer off. Scrapped the twist that had made her feel clever. Built a skeleton out of ex-bourbon that had lived and been re-charred under his eye. Drew lines to oloroso butts that sang harmony rather than solo. Made something that felt… unadorned, in the way a face looks better without the distraction you thought it needed. She poured. He nosed. They didn’t speak for a minute and a half. “Laugh lines,” he said, and his voice had gone somewhere low, reverent. She wrote the words with a hand that shook. When they looked up, they found each other. The air between them had changed. Not heavy; not light. Present. She stepped towards him; he didn’t move to meet her because moving too quickly was not his way, ever, not with wood, not with people. She put her hands on his chest—work shirt, clean, warm—and he put his hands at her waist like a question. “Okay?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. The kiss tasted like orange oil and patience. It was not rushed. It was not a proclamation. It was a thing that had been moving towards itself for five weeks and had finally arrived without fanfare. When it ended, they looked idiotic and happy in exactly the way you’re supposed to look when the world shifts a click and your feet still hold. “We go slow,” she said, and then winced because she’d turned something private into a rule. “Slow is all I’ve got,” he said, and there was relief in it that made her throat tight. She laughed, helpless. “Mission first.” “Mission first,” he agreed, and added, after a heartbeat, “But mission includes you.” She went home with lemon on her tongue and a prayer in her pocket, written in a neat hand she recognised as belonging to a man who’d had to learn to write neatly because life depended on it. On the note he’d left on her bench, beneath a quiet DOLORES: HANDLE REPLACED, he’d written: Niamh: Good. She folded it around a lemon sweet and put it in her wallet like a ridiculous talisman. Then she slept, finally, as if the angels would take their share and leave her enough.