Chapter 2

Morning smelled like rain and yeast. Niamh woke with lemon on her tongue and a note in her pocket that said Niamh: Good in a hand that made letters stand up straight the way their writer stood in rooms. She folded the note again, for luck, and tucked it into the little slot in her wallet where she’d once kept a lipstick she no longer wore. The day would be trouble. She could feel it already in the way the kettle sighed and the radio insisted on news it didn’t need to insist on. But she’d had a kiss that felt like permission to keep going, and that counted for more than luck. By eight she was in the lab, hair up, cardigan bright enough to argue with the sky. She ran pulls from B and D; the thief shivered in her hand like a temperamental violin and then behaved once she told it she was in charge. Notes found her: orange oil again, but rounder; almond like a memory of biscuits; that quiet heat—quiet fire—that sat at the back of the throat without shouting. She drew lines on the sensory map with a ruler she’d stolen from accounts years ago and never confessed. She whispered, to nobody at all, “We’re close,” and the room didn’t disagree. At exactly 9:12, Jamie’s head appeared round the lab door as if he’d knocked on the air and been let in. “Leah’s on hoops today,” he said, a non sequitur that wasn’t. “If you’ve a minute at eleven, come watch. She listens with her hands.” “I’ll bring applause,” Niamh said. “And biscuits.” “Citrus loaf,” he corrected, and left before she could be touched to the point of silliness. She found him later at the bench, the ledger open, the neat block caps an anchor for a world that had decided fonts meant something. Leah stood like a question, a bruise—old—faint under one sleeve where a plank had got ideas beyond its station. Jamie did not crowd; he gave instruction like a map, short and spare, then let her walk it. Tap, adjust, tap. When the hoop seated with that small, perfect sound—like a note going in—it was as if the room exhaled. He didn’t say anything. He wrote LEAH: GOOD in the ledger’s corner, same tiny square where nobody was supposed to look. Leah looked anyway. She pressed her lips together and didn’t cry, which made Niamh turn away for a second because some crafts deserved privacy even when pride pulled at the edges. At 12:10, triangles. They found Niamh at the end of the aisle in Warehouse D, where the laugh lines drifted like fish you had to learn to see. He held the paper bag out without ceremony. “You’ll faint otherwise,” he said. “I never faint,” she said, and took a bite and closed her eyes because the mustard was exactly right and the ham had the clean salt of a life that didn’t need embellishment. “Orla’s looking for you,” he said after a minute. “She’s always looking for someone,” Niamh said, then sighed. “What is it today? QR codes for the souls of the departed?” “Influencers,” he said, grim. “She wants an ‘activation.’” “God save us all,” she said, and wiped a crumb off his sleeve with the intimacy of a person who hadn’t earned it and was still allowed it. “What time?” “Two,” he said. “She wants to film in the cooperage. Ring lights indoors.” “She can film in the tasting room,” Niamh said. “We’re not turning your bench into a backdrop.” He looked at her, that small private corner of his mouth loading the smile he kept for her alone. “You’ll tell her that?” “I’ll tell her that,” she said, and then, because she had learned to cooperate with inevitability, “I’ll also bring the nice glasses. If we’re doing this, we’re not drinking out of jars.” The “activation” arrived at two with umbrellas and certainty. Orla glided behind them like a duchess in a war film, lips glossy enough to reflect the ring light’s circle. The influencers were younger than the whiskey and shinier than the cooperage; beautiful in the brittle way of people who hadn’t yet learned the comfort of staying put. One had a hat that could have defended a small fort in a siege. Another said, “Vibes,” and Niamh, who liked words to work for a living, wrote down VIBES on her pad just so she could cross it out later. “Darlings,” Orla called, clapping once to gather the room like a schoolteacher. “We’re doing a short, a medium, and a long. The long will go on YouTube. The medium is for Instagram. The short is for TikTok. Keep your answers succinct and your hands beautiful.” “My hands are what they are,” Jamie said, looking at his palms as if they were Swiss maps. “They’re not an apology.” “We love that for you,” the hat said, sympathetically. “We’re filming at the bench,” Orla announced, and started forward. “No,” Jamie and Niamh said together. Orla turned, smile set. “Pardon?” “At the tasting bar,” Niamh said, sweet and immovable. “We don’t put ring lights near steam and steel. If your content needs steel, film a spoon.” One of the influencers giggled. Orla’s lashes lowered to half-mast. “Fine. Tasting bar. Jamie, you’ll talk re-char. Niamh, you’ll—” “I’ll translate,” Niamh said. “In the sense of making it sound like food rather than witchcraft.” “Lovely,” Orla said, as if she’d invented the word. They did the medium first. The questions were harmless in the way of things that could do harm if you weren’t careful. What’s char? What’s toast? What makes Kilbracken Kilbracken? Niamh answered in kitchen and parish, Jamie in facts. The ring light put halo circles in their eyes, which was both funny and uncomfortably on brand. Then came the short. “Say something provocative,” the hat said. “Like—why not outsource? What’s wrong with progress?” “Nothing’s wrong with progress if it’s honest,” Jamie said, tone even, a line of patience tightening between his eyes. “But barrels aren’t props, and the cooperage isn’t a label. If the flagship sits in anything but what we made and maintained here, it’s not ours. Not with my hoops.” The hat lit up like a Christmas market. “That’s good. Say it again? More—” She wiggled her hands. “No,” Jamie said. Which should have been the end of it and, in any decent world, would have been. Instead, a phone kept recording while Orla said, coolly, “We have to be open to opportunities,” and Jamie replied, “Not with my hoops,” and the phone stitched the two sentences together in an edit that glowed with the promise of a fight. By six, the clip had been posted. By seven, someone had added a caption—DINOSAURS IN WATERFORD—over a still of Jamie’s face as if he were personally holding back the tide. In the tasting room after hours, the projector blinked its refusal to be useful while Niamh and Seán and Kira set up for a small industry group who’d asked for a quiet look at the blend-in-progress. Niamh’s phone went hot in her pocket—messages, links, a cousin she loved and hadn’t heard from in months forwarding the clip with You okay??? as if the internet were a weather event you could stand under an awning to avoid. She found him in the doorway, jaw set, eyes doing that still thing that meant the rest of him was moving very quickly under the surface. “I’ll handle it,” she said. He looked at her. “How do you handle a thing made of air?” “By giving it less to feed on,” she said. “By telling the truth in plain words and not rising to bait.” “You’ll write for me?” he asked, not embarrassed, exactly—just aware that words in the wild were not his planks to place. “I’ll write for us,” she said. She drafted a statement at a table under the projector’s sulk. The words did what she asked them to: simple, spare, the shape of a hand extended without grovelling. Kilbracken’s flagship will be made in barrels maintained on site by our own cooperage. That is how we’ve always tasted like ourselves. We’re excited about innovation that keeps the craft honest. No shade on anyone making cans; we’ll raise a glass to them too. But this one’s ours, and we’ll make it like we mean it. “Read,” she said, turning the screen. He read. His mouth softened. “It sounds like you.” “It sounds like us,” she said, and posted it on the distillery account before she could second-guess the commas. The industry group filed in with shoes that didn’t know cobbles. They were kind, mostly. They were the sort of people who could tell the difference between flavour and clout. They nosed, they asked questions with curiosity rather than suspicion, they said things like, “There’s a calm in the finish I didn’t expect,” which made Niamh want to hug them or give them cake or both. The pre-order page ticked up a notch while she poured water and nobody explained what “sustainable” meant to anyone else. By morning, the clip had done what clips do: run wild and run out. But the damage had decided to linger in the way of scratches you only saw when the light hit a certain way. A blogger with a vendetta posted a think-piece on “Irish Whiskey’s Problem with Elitist Tradition,” featuring a screenshot of Jamie’s jaw. Comments layered like sediment: some thoughtful, many not. Orders slowed the way a crowd slows at a window when someone has fainted—not stopped, just distracted. The board called an emergency check-in. Orla brought charts that had never seen a farm shop; Mr. Dwyer brought worry like a second suit. Councillor Grace brought the word optics and set it on the table like a centrepiece. “The RTD line is an opportunity,” Orla said gently, as one might offer a biscuit to a dog in someone else’s kitchen. “We can roll it out in parallel. It’ll buoy the flagship.” “Like a lifejacket tied to a stone,” Jamie said, not gentle. “We need wins,” Mr. Dwyer said to the middle distance. “We need headlines that aren’t think-pieces.” “We need the cooperage,” Niamh said, and hated that she sounded like a girl and not the scientist who had eaten glass for degrees. “We need to show our work. Let me do a lab open hour. Let Jamie run an open bench night. Let people touch the grain. If we go tinny right now, we’ll sound tinny forever.” Orla’s lashes didn’t move. “Tinny is selling,” she said. “Selling keeps doors open.” “Doors to what,” Jamie asked, quiet, “if the bench is gone?” “It would only be for a time,” Mr. Dwyer said, and his voice felt like the inside of a winter car. “Once you close a thing like that,” Jamie said, “you don’t open it again. Not properly. You open a museum. You open a ghost.” Niamh put her pen down before she snapped it. “We can do both,” she said, and saw his head jerk, a betrayal she’d committed without intending to and he’d felt like a lash. “Not on the flagship,” she added quickly. “But if the town needs jobs, and if a line of cans keeps the lights on and nobody pretends it’s the same thing—” “They’ll pretend,” he said, so gentle she wanted to hit something. “That’s what marketing does.” “Not mine,” she said. “Not here.” The meeting ended not with a decision but with a bruise. Orla would explore the RTD feasibility “without distracting from the flagship workstream.” Niamh would schedule a lab open. Jamie would… keep the wood. Everyone would pretend the room hadn’t felt like a small ship in a sudden swell. The Tour Guide Mutiny arrived like a rescue she hadn’t ordered but was grateful for. The official script, which Niamh had rewritten to excise the polysyllables that made people feel stupid, still insisted on a paragraph about high-ester formation that would have made a GCSE student cry. One of the aunties already had thoughts. “You’re losing them there,” Mairead said, jabbing the printed page. “We’ll do it in Irish and then translate to common sense.” “We don’t have time,” the new guide whispered, eyes wild at the sight of three tour groups materialising like rain. “You do now,” Mairead said, and clapped her hands. “Kitty—esters as green apples. Bridie—aldehydes as furniture polish but in a nice way. Nora—terroir but don’t say terroir; say ‘weather and ground and who you live with.’” The aunties took the floor like a storm with a set list. They heckled the projector into submission and conscripted the American group into repeating Irish words back at them until everyone was laughing and nobody felt like a tourist anymore. When the guide faltered, Mairead took the mic without apology and said, “We don’t need a lecture; we need a chat,” and the room relaxed so suddenly that the glassware nearly fogged. Pre-orders ticked up again not because anybody had bullied them up but because people had felt looked after. That night, Niamh wrote MAIREAD: GOOD in her notebook and wished for a ledger that could hold a town. They were tired by Week Seven in the way that makes you honest or cruel, and sometimes both before lunch. The lab open hour filled with students who smelled like new notebooks and hope. Leah came and stood in a corner until Niamh pulled her to the front and had her talk through grain in a way that made three teenage boys sign up for the apprenticeship programme on the spot and a girl with a nose ring ask if a person could be a cooper and a poet. “You can be whatever you want,” Leah said, shaky and fierce. “Just don’t rush the wood.” Jamie, at the back, listened with arms folded and a look you could mistake for stern if you didn’t know pride when it tried not to be seen. On the bench that night, he wrote LEAH: GOOD and then, below it, APPRENTICESHIP: FUND. The ledger did not move money, but sometimes writing a wish like a fact changed the shape of what came next. Then the bad night. It began, as bad nights do, with something small. Orla scheduled a “tasting with tastemakers,” which was a phrase designed to make Niamh’s teeth itch. She put on her good cardigan and her scientist voice and tried to believe it would be fine. It was fine for twenty minutes. People filmed and smiled and said, “notes of” in the way of parrots who had learned a trick. Then someone asked if Kilbracken would be “keeping up” with the canned wave and whether “legacy brands” could “handle” the pace. Before Niamh could reply with the answer she’d practised in the mirror, Jamie said—calm, firm—“The flagship stays honest. Not with my hoops.” A laugh, derisive, kicked from the back. “Oh granddad, let the young ones have their fun.” He turned, not red, not rattled; just steady. “The wood isn’t a prop,” he said. “We’re not signing our name to anything we didn’t make.” “Speak for yourself,” a blogger said, and Niamh felt the room tilt, just a degree. The little black holes of the phones felt closer. She moved in, quick. “What he’s saying,” she said, bright, bridging, “is that the flagship—this bottle we’re launching—is Kilbracken’s heart. We’ll do cans or cocktails or whatever brings people joy, but this—this is the thing you bring home. This has laugh lines. This tastes like time.” A line formed on his forehead she’d never seen. Later she would name it: the place where he swallowed something to keep a room from breaking. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” he said, quiet. “I’m translating,” she said. “Like we agreed.” “We didn’t agree to sell what we’re not making,” he said. “We didn’t,” she said, heart hammering. “I’m not—” “Then why are you talking about cans like they’re inevitable,” he asked, not accusing, just working it out in public with a hundred strangers studying his face. Because we might need them to keep you employed, she didn’t say. Because the board will use any excuse and I’m trying to build a runway. Because I’m scared. Because loving a thing means learning the language of compromise without making it your mother tongue. “Because not everyone starts with neat,” she said instead. “Some people need a spritz to come into the room. We’ll give them one, and we’ll keep the bench.” The blogger sniffed. “You can’t keep both.” “We can,” she said, and heard, from the corner of her mind, her own flaw ring a small bell. “We can’t,” he said, and there it was: not anger, not disdain. Fear, perhaps—the kind that made his hands careful and his words stubborn. The room became a jury. Orla, at the edge, held her breath in the shape of a smile. The phones gazed like bugs. Niamh felt humiliation flood up her throat and swallowed it like cheap spirit. “We’ll discuss this not in front of people holding two thousand euro of pixels,” she said lightly, and moved the conversation to tasting notes with the skill of a woman who had once managed a family Christmas where the turkey caught on fire and nobody noticed because she’d told a story at the exact right moment. The night ended. The bottles went back on shelves. The ring light dimmed to a dull coin. Orla glided away leaving the scent of something expensive and the faint sound of a spreadsheet begging for mercy. Outside, in the darkness that let you be uglier than daylight did, they stood under the arch where the rain made a curtain. “You made me feel like a prop,” he said. She reeled. “I am the only person in that building working, daily, to make sure your bench stays a bench and not a plaque.” “And I’m the only person in that building who can keep your whiskey from tasting like it came off a truck,” he said, and it should have sounded cruel but it didn’t; it sounded like truth arriving without a coat. “Then don’t hang me out to dry in front of people who’ll clip it for sport,” she said, harsher than she meant. “Don’t cushion me with marketing when I’m saying what I mean,” he said. “God, Jamie—” She pressed her hands to her eyes a second, bright pinpricks behind her lids. “I’m trying to get us through the winter. That’s all.” “You’re brilliant,” he said, exasperated and admiring and breaking. “But you think if you explain a thing well enough, you can make the world choose right.” “And you think if you refuse to bend, the world will admire you and come around,” she said. “Sometimes it walks away and calls you a museum.” They stood very close and very far. Somewhere, a forklift beeped like a tired metronome. She could have touched the line between his eyes and asked it to relax; he could have put his hand on her shoulder and forgiven them both. Instead, he stepped back. “We should… cool our heads,” he said, and the politeness of it scraped something raw. “Right,” she said, because she would not beg in the yard where the aunties might see. He nodded, once. “12:10 still stands,” he said, and turned, and she wanted to laugh and cry because what sort of man kept a promise about sandwiches when everything else felt like a question. A good one, her heart said, unhelpfully. She walked the river. The rain made the world small and honest. She let it soak her fringe flat and her cardigan heavy. She thought of the note in her wallet and wondered if folding a thing creased its meaning. She thought of the lab map and the lines she’d drawn from orange to toast and wondered if she could draw a line from control to care without snapping the pencil. She thought of the cooperage door, open, smelling like the inside of a story. At home she put the cardigan over the radiator and watched the angel’s share lift in steam. She made tea. She didn’t drink it. She texted two words—Sorry, stubborn—and deleted them. She wrote three more—You’re right, sometimes—and deleted those too because truth deserved sentences and the right room in which to speak them. In the morning she went in early, because not sleeping had given her time and time, mismanaged, was a sin the cooperage did not forgive. On her bench sat his mug—HEAD COOPER—in mute accusation or comfort; she couldn’t tell. Beside it, under the clean swing of DOLORES: HANDLE REPLACED, the ledger held a new line: Niamh: Off-site sampling. It wasn’t a peace offering; it was a breadcrumb trail of consideration. She left a lemon sweet under the spine and wrote on a Post-it: You were right about the re-char heavy on No. 2. She signed it with a tiny doodle of a bung, because some habits insist on being ridiculous or they’re not habits at all. Saturday came whether the town was ready or not. Niamh was grateful. Saturdays gave shape to weeks the way frames give shape to pictures. The projector sulked in exactly the same way; Auntie Mairead browbeat it into a flicker and then declared, “We’ll do without,” and the room applauded. The stag party—different hats, same ears—proved receptive and well-behaved. The American group brought a gift—a tea towel with a map of Ireland on it and a circle around Waterford as if they’d discovered it. The teenagers asked clever questions. She kept her sentences short and her metaphors homely. She did not look for him every other breath. She did, anyway. He arrived, late, a line drawn harder between his eyes. He hooped a demo cask and explained toast like a man who had decided kindness was the only way to survive being looked at. He did not look at her; he did not not look at her. When the time came, she handed him the mallet. His fingers brushed hers, once, a circuit that fired and went quiet. The bung sat in its place with the smugness of an object that had been the centre of attention and liked it. She lifted the mallet. The room held its breath. She thumped with the care of a woman who had mopped a puddle with dignity; the bung behaved. A small cheer rose as if competence were spectacle. She bowed to Mairead, who rolled her eyes and handed out napkins like medals. At 12:10, triangles appeared from nowhere—Mairead’s doing—and landed in people’s hands with the inevitability of liturgy. One found Niamh’s palm. She looked around; he was gone. She ate anyway, because hunger did not help anyone, least of all stubborn scientists attached to stubborn men. In the afternoon, Councillor Grace arrived with a photographer and a ribbon she hoped to cut around a concept. “We love to see apprenticeships,” she said to Leah, who smiled like a girl who’d been told to smile and had decided to do it if it meant she could go back to work faster. “We love to see heritage.” “We love to see funding,” Niamh said, too bright by half. Grace laughed as if the joke were excellent. “The town’s watching,” she said. “Don’t disappoint.” “We never do,” Jamie said from behind Niamh, and even with everything between them, she felt the relief of a person no longer standing alone at a microphone. The ribbon remained uncut because nobody could agree where it should be tied. The photographer took pictures anyway: Leah’s hands, Mairead’s smile, the ledger’s stubborn letters, Niamh’s bright cardigan, Jamie’s rolled sleeves, Dolores mercifully out of frame. The pre-order board ticked up and then paused again the way clocks do when you’re watching too closely. That night, the cooperage after hours held its breath the way rooms do when they’re about to keep a secret. She had stayed late because the lab smelled like solvent and going home meant not sleeping. He stayed because benches do not clean themselves and people on wages do not leave a mess for the morning shift. They could have left at the same time. They did not. “Truce,” she said, not stepping too close. “Work,” he said, and handed her a cloth. They tidied. They stacked. They put tools to bed. Bríd glinted under a lamp. The hoop driver—she did not name it out loud—rested like a tired soldier. When the bench was clean, he turned and leaned back against it and looked at her like a man backing a truck down a narrow lane: slow, sure, aware of both sides. “I don’t like being handled,” he said. “I don’t like being made a fool of,” she said. “We can arrange for neither,” he said, and the ghosts of a dozen arguments considered taking their coats and leaving; then, seeing a different kind of night ahead, did. She stepped closer. “Okay?” “Okay,” he said, and his hands were steady when they came up to her waist. The kiss tasted like sawdust and restraint and the sort of apology you don’t say with words because saying it would cheapen it. They laughed halfway through because his hair was dusty and her cardigan left fluff on his shirt and a hoop creaked in the corner in a way that sounded judicial. They kept it at warm and closed the door on heat because the mission, the mission, and because wanting to ruin each other’s carefulness was not love; holding it was. After, he put a mug in her hand—HEAD COOPER—because the other cups were in the wash and symbols were, sometimes, mugs. “We’ll keep it on-site,” he said, as if she had argued otherwise all day. “The flagship. The hoops. No outsourcers with smooth mouths and soft hands.” “We will,” she said. “And I will stomp on Orla’s RTD deck so hard she’ll hear it in her shoes.” He coughed a laugh. “Don’t get yourself fired.” “I get myself results,” she said, and bumped her shoulder against his. “And I get the town fed on citrus loaf until they see esters in their sleep.” He took the ledger down and, very solemn, wrote: Niamh: Good. Then he drew a tiny lemon beside it and scowled at himself for having a heart. They left together, separate. In the yard the rain had stopped and the cobbles shone like new coins. The still house hummed. Warehouse B breathed. The town, which had decided to be on their side without saying so in any forum that counted to Orla, slept. “Get candles,” Mairead said, practical as a lighthouse. “Get blankets. Get people in.” “Get the generator,” Mr. Dwyer said. “Get the truth,” Jamie murmured, running his hand along a stave as if a cask might remember candlelight as something kindly when the time came. “Get through the week,” Niamh whispered to the quiet fire inside her chest, and for once, it didn’t feel like a plea. It felt like a plan.