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Chapter 7: A New Jersey

After William got his keys, the silence between the three of us settled into something permanent. Josephine still came to my place, but it was different now. She was quieter. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. She stopped mentioning Bray altogether. I didn’t ask. Some things didn’t need to be spoken aloud. For a long while, we drifted. Just the two of us now. The energy we once gave to William — the shared routines, the urgency — it had nowhere to go. That was when I noticed her looking for something else. A leaflet. A poster. A bus ad. Special Olympics. She’d seen it before, of course. Knew people involved. But never joined. Not after school. Not even when invited. “Maybe I should,” she said one day. Quietly. I didn’t push her. Just nodded. She didn’t sign up that year. Or the next. But the thought had been planted. What I didn’t know then — what none of us could have — was how much it would come to mean to her. How it would give her structure again. Purpose. A place to belong. But...
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Chapter 6: The Keys

The day William got the keys was a cold morning in early 2006. I still remember the way Josephine told me about it — no big announcement, just a passing line over tea: “He got the keys today. They're letting him back in.” After all we’d lived through, the news should have felt like a victory. A home rebuilt. A chapter closing. But instead, it felt like the air shifted. Something unspoken crept into the space between us. Josephine packed up her things like she always did — her holdall bag, half-zipped — but this time, it felt heavier. She left that morning for Bray, like every Monday. But she didn’t come back on Tuesday. Not that week. Not the next. William had a house again. A front door that locked. A mailbox with his name. And with that, the story we had built together started to dissolve. There were no harsh words. No arguments. Just silence that widened over time. Calls went unanswered. Plans left hanging. Josephine drifted further into Bray. Into William’s new world — one we w...
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Chapter 5: The Middle Days

There was a stretch of time, after the fire but before William got his new keys, that felt like we were caught in the middle of something — not grief, not healing, just the in-between. William had no home. Only the scorched frame of the one he'd grown up in. Josephine moved like a bridge between two broken ends — Bray on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dublin the rest of the week. She carried everything in a single holdall bag. Spare clothes, a notebook, some letters. That bag was with her at William’s, at mine, on every bus and Dart train in between. She never once complained. Not about the tiredness, the heaviness, or the way her time was no longer her own. In Bray, she helped William clear out smoke-damaged clothes, salvage papers, meet inspectors. They’d sit at the old kitchen table — now just a charred skeleton of wood — and talk as if Billy, his father, might still walk in. In Dublin, she rested. Not much. But enough to stay upright. We watched DVDs on loop. She ate what we...
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Chapter 5: Fractures Beneath the Surface

The months following the fire passed in a haze of rebuilding and adjustment, but the invisible wounds left behind ran deeper than anyone could see. For Josephine and William, the tragedy had shifted the very ground beneath their feet. Josephine’s visits to Bray, once frequent and filled with hope, became more infrequent and heavy with unspoken tension. She arrived later, lingered less, and the easy warmth between them was slowly replaced by a cold distance. When asked about William, she would say softly, “He’s managing,” but her eyes told another story—one of quiet worry and helplessness. William’s world had contracted to the size of the house he longed to rebuild. The memories of his father—Billy—were both a comfort and a burden. Conversations that once flowed effortlessly now stalled, silenced by the weight of grief he refused to fully confront. He became more withdrawn, his presence fading from the life he once shared with Josephine and their circle of friends. At times, their excha...
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Chapter 4: Cracks in the Walls

Time moved, but nothing else did. By spring, the rhythm Josephine had created began to falter. Not in a dramatic way — there were no slammed doors or harsh words — just small absences, changes in tone, conversations that drifted instead of landing. William had grown quieter, more withdrawn. He spoke less about his father and more about the council, the builders, the forms. The grief hadn’t lifted; it had simply changed shape, turning into frustration, then resentment. Our little support circle, once held together by shared purpose, began to fray at the edges. Josephine still made her trips, but the weight of them was showing. She didn’t stay as long in Bray. She lingered more in Dublin, sitting at my kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea that went cold before she touched it. When I asked how William was doing, her answers grew shorter. "He’s tired." "He didn’t say much." "Same as always." I didn’t press. And maybe that was the beginning ...
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Chapter 3: The Days In Between

In the quiet that followed the fire, there was no dramatic turning point — just the slow, grinding passage of days that felt longer than they should have. William remained without a home, adrift in the ruins of a life that once held the simple comfort of his father’s voice in the kitchen. The repairs to the house in Bray were promised, postponed, then promised again. Each delay tested the limits of patience, of hope. Josephine moved between two worlds in those days. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were for Bray — for William. She made the journey like clockwork, arriving with a quiet steadiness that kept his world from collapsing entirely. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, she returned to Dublin, where I tried to offer her a little warmth, a bit of normality, and a place to simply be. We never called it a schedule, but it became one. A rhythm of resilience. There were no grand gestures, no headlines after the first one. Just the same cup of tea passed across a kitchen table. The s...
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Chapter 2: The Days That Followed

Chapter 2: The Days That Followed In the weeks after the fire, everything moved slowly and yet all at once. William was still in shock. So were we. The news had said it clearly — a fire in Bray, a man dead, the home left in ruins. But it didn’t feel real until Josephine arrived at my door with tears in her eyes and an overnight bag that looked too heavy for what little it carried. We fell into a kind of rhythm after that. She traveled to Bray on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to be with William. The rest of the time, she stayed with me in Dublin — Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends. It wasn’t a plan so much as a survival strategy. Her loyalty to William was unwavering, but the grief in Bray hung heavy. She needed the escape, and I became her escape route. I’d wait at the bus stop on those nights, watching for her silhouette to appear under the streetlight. Sometimes she arrived silent, other times she poured out stories about William — how he was coping, or not. She spoke of the awkwa...
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