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“Oh, hon,” she says when she sees my face. “Areyou being cyberbullied?”
I laugh despite myself. I hate how much I love this place. How much I love these ridiculous people. I hate that my mistakes have lost the pub business and disrupted everyone’s day.
“No, I’m...” I look up at the ceiling to try and blink back tears. When I finally find my voice again, it’s just above a whisper. “I’m just really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to... I wanted to help.” I sigh down at my hands. “I told Jack I was a mess. He didn’t listen to me.”
“Yeah, you’re a mess,” Nina says. The words surprise me. I glance up at her and her usually severe expression softens into a smile. “And so am I. And so is Oliver, for that matter. I swear the man can’t take off a pair of shoes without leaving them in a heap. The point is, everyone’s a mess. Your messes just happen to be quite literal. Those are the best kind, believe me.”
I fiddle with my phone. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I do know. I’m the queen of figurative mess-making. Surprise, I know.”
Sebastian startles us both when he leaps onto the table. He looks at Nina, then at me, and steps from the table and into my lap. I give him a scratch between the ears.
Nina eyes Sebastian. “See? That cat knows. And for what it’s worth, I think Jack will like the pub’s new look when he sees it, but... if he doesn’t... don’t take it personally, okay? It wouldn’t be about you.”
I meet her gaze. She wears a sincere look of concern. It’s tinged with a sadness I haven’t seen from her before.
“Now,” Nina says, making both me and Sebastian jump when she slaps the tabletop with both hands. “Back to work. We’ve got plenty of mess left to clean up.”
Nina leaves, muttering under her breath about the string lights. I finish making my posts about the pub’s delayed opening and think about Jack. All night I’d been imagining how excited and surprised he’d be to see the pub’s transformation. I hadn’t really considered it could go any other way, though, of course it could. Jack told me himself he doesn’t do well with changes at the pub.
Well, he’ll definitely be surprised.
Sebastian purrs beside me, as if to reassure me, but it doesn’t help.
I’ve got the uneasy feeling that my great idea might be even more of a disaster than it is already.
Twelve
Jack
When I finally arrive at the Local, I wonder if I’ve somehow stepped into the wrong place. The pub is almost unrecognizable. All the black-and-white photos are gone. In their place are paintings—many of them mine, but some that aren’t. Photographs. Framed newspaper clippings. Guinness and Murphy’s and Beamish paraphernalia. And dozens of items I can’t yet identify.
For weeks, Raine has been collecting things. Every Saturday, she goes thrifting with Nina. Even the customers are in on it. They dig things out of storage or buy them at estate sales. As soon as they step inside the pub, they look for Raine. And every day it seems we have more customers, many of whom come in just because they met her out and about and she invited them.
So I’ve had plenty of time to prepare for this. But I didn’t expect to walk in this evening and find a completely different pub. She had to have been up all night to pull this off. Or perhaps she had help. I don’t know a single person in Cobh who wouldn’t help her if she asked.
The walls are filled with things, but all I feel is the absence ofthose pictures. I scan the pub for Raine but don’t see her. The pub is packed. There haven’t been this many people in here at one time since Da’s funeral.
A couple sits together at a nearby table. Beside one of their half-empty plates is a knife.
You could pick that up and stab someone and no one would see it coming. No one would be able to stop you in time.
I don’t want to do that. I wouldn’t do that.
My pulse picks up. I’ve been dealing with intrusive thoughts about harm for weeks, but this is the first intrusive thought I’ve had during this flare-up about hurting someone on purpose.
I look away from the table, but all I see is everything I could use to hurt someone. A pint glass. A bottle. A chair. I could carry a napkin over to the fireplace and use it to burn the place down. If there are a thousand ways to kill someone, my brain must know all of them.
Of all my themes, the violent ones scare me the most. The first violent intrusive thought I had was of strangling my cat. I was fourteen and had just started working at the pub. We used the flat upstairs for storage then, but I liked to go up there on my break to read, and Cleo, an orange tabby who lived in the pub, always came with me. One afternoon, I looked up from the book I was reading and caught sight of Cleo, when I thought,I could kill this cat with my bare hands.
I was so alarmed, I went back downstairs well before my break ended. Cleo followed me around the pub like she always did, and the thoughts kept coming. I tried to shoo the cat away, but it didn’t work. I tried to distract myself as I cleaned tables by looking at those black-and-white photos on the wall and counting every corner of every one. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And it worked. It helped me to forget. By the time I’d gotten through all of them, Cleo had disappeared to some other place in the pub. Magic.
After that first violent intrusive thought in the flat, I never went up there during my lunch break again. Instead, I’d leave the pub and walk. I hardly ever sat down, because it was easier to distract myself if I was moving. Even so, the thoughts only got worse. I was fourteen and terrified. I thought I was crazy. My brain had been hijacked by some other version of myself, a version I feared was the real Jack Dunne. Someone who wanted to hurt others. Someone like Da.
And now those violent thoughts are back in my head again telling me I’m not safe to be around.
Are you sure?
