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 William had grown quieter, more withdrawn.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 of the end — not a single decision or moment, but a slow erosion. An exhaustion none of us could name aloud.

There were days when I wondered what any of it was for — what we were still holding up, and who we were holding it for. It was as if we had built this invisible scaffolding around William’s life, but none of us knew when it would be safe to take it down. Or if we’d still be standing when it finally collapsed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

After the Fire: Friendship, Loss, and What Remains

Chapter 1: New Court Days Before the fire, before the grief, and long before the quiet silences that would stretch between us, there was New Court School in Bray. That was where Josephine and William first met — two kids walking the same halls, sitting through the same lessons, learning side by side. It wasn’t a school people talked about much outside the town, but inside those walls, friendships were built the way all meaningful ones are: slowly, through time and little things. Josephine stood out not because she talked much — quite the opposite. She was gentle, observant, and spoke in careful doses, like someone rationing her energy for when it was needed most. William was louder, more impulsive, full of stories and laughter. They made an odd pair to outsiders, but it worked. Maybe that was the beginning of everything that followed — the way they balanced each other. I wasn’t there with them in New Court. My connection came later, but I always felt like I was catching up to something...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more