I spend the night sleeping on my sister’s sofa. In the morning, I make a cup of coffee and drink it outside in her back garden while talking on the phone with Finn in Donegal. “I’ve been practicing my numbers, since we’re going to learn a lot of numbers in kindergarten,” he says.
“That’s a good plan,” I say, and listen to him practice.
“Seventy. Seventy-one, seventy-two. What comes after one hundred?” he asks. “Is that the end?”
“No, sweetheart,” I say. “That’s not the end.”
Something happens, as I listen to Finn count. My chest starts to prickle and tingle, the energy building in my veins. I can hear the determination in his voice, the purpose. This is important to him, he is taking it seriously. He wants to be prepared for everything he has to learn.
Enough, I think after we hang up. I won’t play by their rules anymore. I’ve had enough.
The trip only takes me two and a half hours. By eleven, I am standing on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast, across from a computer repair shop. Past the plate-glass windows, I can see figures inside the shop. When I open the door, a bell rings, and the two men behind the counter look up.
Eamonn blinks when he sees me. He has on a blue polo shirt, embossed with the shop’s logo. I try to speak and can’t, then cough to clear my throat. “My screen’s cracked,” I say, while Eamonn stares at me over the counter with a dazed expression. “Let’s have a look,” says the other man, reaching out his hand, then Eamonn snaps to. “I’ll take care of it, Stephen,” he says.
I follow Eamonn past the rows of shelving to a back repair room and close the door. I take in the tools, the stations, Eamonn’s uniform. Every day, he was working here. He was at a computer shop on the Newtownards Road, while I wondered about his whereabouts.
“You’re not in MI5,” I say.
Eamonn lifts his chin with the slightest nod. “UVF?” I ask, and he nods again. “Who’s your commander?”
“Johnny West,” he says, and my stomach feels it like a punch. West has been a UVF leader since the Troubles. Eamonn sees the look on my face and says quietly, “He’s not that bad.”
“Why was Marian chosen?”
“Because she was a paramedic,” says Eamonn, and his voice sounds rusty, like he hasn’t spoken for hours. “Johnny had a heart attack, and Marian was the first responder.”
A dozen ambulances circling in Belfast, and hers was the closest. I say, “But how did he know she was in the IRA?”
“Because she was terrified. Her hands were shaking,” says Eamonn. “She’d recognized Johnny, she knew that she was in a terrace house in east Belfast surrounded by UVF members. Everyone noticed. After the ambulance left, a few of the lads looked at one another, and said, What the fuck was that?”
“You were there?” I ask, and he nods. “Go to hell, Eamonn.”
“I’m sorry, Tessa,” he says. “I’d do anything to take it back.”
“So you were told to approach her, and say you were MI5?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask, and he shakes his head. “How many other times have you done this? How many other informers do you have?”
He hesitates, then says, “Four.”
“Do you fuck all of them?”
“Are you actually asking me that?” says Eamonn. I wait, bracing myself for his answer, with my arms crossed over my chest. “Come here to me, Tessa. You know the answer.”
“It must have been hard for you,” I say finally. “To touch a Catholic.”
Eamonn starts to speak, and I interrupt him. “All part of the job, though, right? Did you like pretending to be a spy?”
Eamonn rubs his forehead. “Yes, I did,” he says. “At first.”
“Did you really live in Hong Kong?”
“I’ve never been on a plane, Tessa.”
My pride is begging me not to ask the next question, but I need to know the answer. “Are you married?” I ask.
“No.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Sort of,” he says, and I’m about to lay into him when he lifts his face toward the ceiling. “I think of you as my girlfriend.”
I blink, and he says, “Of course I’m not sleeping with any of my other sources.” I hesitate, searching myself to see if this information makes me feel any less stupid, or any less angry. Not really. I still feel like a mockery.
Eamonn says, “You vanished, Tessa. For three years, I didn’t know where you’d gone, I didn’t know if the IRA had killed you. I was out of my mind. And then in August someone used the gift card at a supermarket in Ranelagh. I spent three days standing outside the shop, waiting in case you’d come back.”
I look at Eamonn’s eyes, his mouth, his dark hair. If we’d grown up on the same side of Belfast, we would have been friends, I think. We might have played together as children. One of us might have asked the other out, as teenagers. We might have fallen in love.
“Why did you join the UVF?” I ask.
“The IRA bombed my parents’ restaurant,” he says. “They killed my younger brothers.”
I lift a hand to my face, my eyes suddenly searing with tears. I look at the small welts on Eamonn’s face and hands. They’re burn scars. The truth was always there, right in front of me.
“I’m sorry, Eamonn. I’m so sorry about your brothers.”
Eamonn doesn’t move, but he looks like someone trying to stand upright in a storm, like someone being buffeted by heavy wind.
After a long time, I take the gold gift card from my wallet and set it on the table. He says, “Tessa—”
“I’ve been lying to you, too,” I say. “The IRA forced me to start meeting with you again. They want me to turn you.”
“Oh, god,” he says. “Okay. I can help you.”
“No, Eamonn. You can’t.” It’s over now. This is the last time I will ever see him, I know that, both of us know that.
“I did start a knitting club,” he says. “That part was real.”
I close my eyes. Eamonn comes around the table, and I lean forward as his arms fold around me. We stand clutching on to each other, and he lowers his head to kiss me. Everything stops, the tide stops. Not coming in, not going out. For a second, two, three, we’re in slack water.
Then I’m pulling away from him, the distance slowly growing between us, a centimeter at a time. I feel a wrench deep in my chest.
“I told a detective about you,” I say, finally. On the drive up, I rang DI Fenton, an old friend from Belfast. “He wants information from you about the UVF. He’ll be on the beach in Ardglass tomorrow at seven.”
“I can’t do that, Tessa. You can’t ask me to do that,” says Eamonn. “Do you want me to help the IRA win? They’re murderers.”
“No, I want this to end. So do you,” I say. “You can be arrested for membership of a terrorist organization. Or you can meet with him and help end this. I think you’ll like each other, for what that’s worth. I think you’ll work well together. It’s your choice, Eamonn.”