Read Chapter 3: THE LANTERN ROOM

Eileen Doran had not disappeared. She had simply become the kind of person the internet recorded incompletely.

There was an old catering notice, a charity committee list, a wedding announcement for someone who might be her daughter, and a 2008 article about the closure of independent cafés during the property boom. Julian found an address in Sandymount through a public business record, then refused to go there unannounced.

Maeve called him principled in the tone other people used for tedious.

He called directory enquiries.

By Thursday afternoon, they had a current number.

Maeve made the call.

“Mrs Doran? My name is Maeve Kavanagh. I own Bellwether Books. My aunt Nora—”

“Nora’s dead.”

The woman’s voice was brisk but not cold.

“Yes. I’m sorry to tell you if you hadn’t—”

“I went to the funeral.”

Maeve looked at Julian. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t see—”

“There were a hundred people and you looked like you wanted to escape through the floor.”

Maeve sat up straighter.

Eileen Doran agreed to meet them on one condition: they came to her house because her knees were bad and she was not crossing Dublin “for a mystery Nora should have explained herself.”

The next day was bright and sharp. Sandymount Strand spread under a pale sky, the tide far out, leaving wet flats of reflected light. Eileen lived in a red-brick terrace with a blue door and a ceramic gull nailed beside the number.

She was seventy-two, small, silver-haired, and wore a cardigan the colour of mustard. She examined Julian as if checking him for structural defects.

“You’re the professor?”

“Lecturer.”

“Ah. Not promoted yet.”

“No.”

“Tea?”

“Yes, please.”

“You’ll need it.”

Her front room was filled with framed photographs. Maeve scanned faces automatically, searching for younger versions of a woman in a red coat.

Eileen noticed.

“You have something of mine?”

“Maybe,” Maeve said.

She explained the letters without showing them.

At the initials T and E, Eileen’s expression did not change. At 1987, she blinked.

At The Third Policeman, she stood abruptly.

“Jesus.”

She left the room.

Maeve and Julian looked at each other.

“Promising?” Maeve whispered.

“Ambiguous.”

Eileen returned carrying a wooden box.

Inside were photographs from the Lantern Room café. Staff lined behind a counter. Birthday cakes. Musicians. Students smoking under an awning. In one photograph, dated 1989, a younger Eileen stood beside a tall dark-haired man with an angular face and serious eyes.

Eileen tapped him.

“Thomas Mullen.”

T.M.

Maeve’s breath caught.

“And E?” Julian asked.

Eileen sat down.

“Not me.”

Maeve felt foolishly disappointed.

“Then why ‘Ask Eileen’?”

“Because I was the idiot who introduced them.”

Eileen looked toward the window, where sea-light trembled on the glass.

“Her name was Evelyn Byrne.”

The name seemed to enter the room like someone late.

Eileen told the story in fragments. In the mid-eighties, she had managed a café near Trinity before opening the Lantern Room. Thomas Mullen was a printer and occasional poet who delivered menus, flyers and literary magazines. Evelyn Byrne taught music at a convent school in Rathmines and came in on Saturdays to read.

“They were both impossible,” Eileen said. “Tom could talk for an hour about a comma but not ask a woman to dinner. Evelyn looked fearless and was terrified of causing trouble.”

“What trouble?” Maeve asked.

Eileen’s eyes sharpened. “The ordinary kind. Family. Religion. Money. Expectations. You’re young enough to think people always had choices because technically they did.”

Julian said nothing.

Maeve thought of Ireland in 1987—not as a history lecture, but as Nora had described it: divorce impossible, contraception still contested, emigrants everywhere, respectability policed in kitchens and churches.

“Was one of them married?” she asked.

“Eventually.”

“Which?”

Eileen hesitated. “Evelyn.”

Maeve looked down.

“So Tom kept writing to a married woman for twenty-six years?”

“Don’t make it ugly before you know it.”

The rebuke landed cleanly.

Eileen opened another photograph. Evelyn appeared at a table, perhaps thirty, with dark curls and a red coat. She was laughing with her head turned away from the camera.

Maeve recognized the laugh from the first letter despite having never heard it.

“Do you know where she is?” Julian asked.

“No.”

“Thomas?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

Eileen closed the box.

“That’s theirs to tell.”

Maeve nearly argued, but Julian leaned back.

“Fair enough.”

Eileen studied him. “You mean that?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to approve.

Then she turned to Maeve.

“Did Nora leave the letters to you?”

“She left me the shop.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“No. There was no note.”

Eileen sighed. “Nora and Tom were friends. Not close, but the particular kind of friends who trusted each other with things they’d never discuss.”

“Why would he hide the letters in the shop?”

“I don’t know that he did.”

Maeve frowned.

Eileen stood and took a photograph from the mantel. It showed Nora outside Bellwether in the late nineties, smoking despite always claiming she had quit in 1982. Beside her stood Thomas Mullen.

On the back, someone had written:

Nora, Tom, Bellwether. December 1997. Keep what cannot be carried.

Maeve read it twice.

Julian said, “May we make a copy?”

Eileen nodded.

As they left, Eileen caught Maeve’s sleeve.

“Nora kept people’s secrets,” she said. “But she didn’t keep them forever. There’s a difference.”

Outside, the wind off the strand cut hard through Maeve’s coat.

They walked toward the village.

“What does that mean?” Maeve asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re supposed to be good at interpretation.”

“Only when the dead have been footnoted.”

Maeve smiled despite herself.

At the bus stop, Julian asked, “Why are you selling the shop?”

The question came so casually that she nearly answered honestly.

“Because it’s losing money.”

“That’s a reason.”

“It’s the reason.”

He did not challenge her.

She found that worse than if he had.