Chapter 2 The outcast

By morning, the forest had returned to being just a forest.

That was the strangest part. No scorched earth, no broken stone, no sign that anything had shifted at all. The ruins sat quietly in my mind like a dream I couldn't shake-too detailed to be imagined, too unreal to be trusted.

I didn't mention it to anyone.

At breakfast, my mother talked about the weather and the price of bread. My father folded the paper with more force than necessary, muttering about men in Dublin who'd never set foot west of the Shannon. The radio murmured in the background, something about America, something about change.

I nodded where I was meant to. Smiled when expected.

But my thoughts kept circling back to the same thing.

Oisín.

He was everywhere once you started looking for him. Or perhaps he always had been.

I saw him that afternoon down by the quay, unloading crates slick with seawater. Oysters, someone said nearby, their tone dismissive. Dirty work. Lonely work. But the men unloading beside him moved with the ease of people who trusted one another with their lives, hands steady, movements practised.

Oisín didn't speak much. When he did, it was brief, efficient. No wasted words.

People watched him the way they always did-from a distance that pretended not to be interest.

"He's the one with the English mother," a woman murmured near me, as if the sea itself might overhear.

Not English, exactly. That was the version smoothed for public consumption.

The real story had sharper edges.

She'd run off when Oisín was still small. Taken up with a British soldier stationed nearby, uniforms and promises and the illusion of escape. She'd left in the night, they said. Never looked back. Letters stopped coming after a year.

His father had stayed.

That was almost worse.

A good man once, by all accounts. Quiet. Solid. The sort who fixed fences without being asked and showed up early to Mass. After she left, something in him broke loose. Drink took its place where responsibility had lived, and the house hollowed out around him.

Oisín left school early. Earlier than anyone else I knew. People said he'd been clever-too clever to waste himself the way he had. They said it with the same tone they used for weather damage or illness. A pity, not a problem.

He went to the coast. Oyster fishing. Long days bent over cold water, hands raw and cut, the tide dictating when you worked and when you starved. Solitary hours. Honest money. The kind of work that fed mouths without earning respect.

But it paid.

Enough to keep the lights on. Enough to put shoes on his sister's feet before they wore through. Enough to make sure she stayed young a little longer than the world would have allowed otherwise.

I saw the sister once-Máire, I thought her name was-running along the road with her hair unbraided, laughing freely in a way Oisín never did. He watched her from the doorway like a guard, not a brother. Protective. Alert.

That night, I dreamed of water closing over my head.

Not drowning. Floating. Suspended in a dark that felt like a held breath.

When I woke, my skin felt wrong-too tight, as if it didn't quite belong to me. The sensation faded by midmorning, leaving only unease behind.

I told myself it was nothing.

That evening, as the light softened and the town settled into itself, I found Oisín again without meaning to. He stood at the edge of the road near the fields, looking toward the forest as if it might look back.

He noticed me watching.

There was no accusation in his expression. Only surprise, and something like recognition-though neither of us had earned it yet.

"We didn't imagine it," I said, before I could stop myself.

"No," he replied. "We didn't."

The word we landed heavier than it should have.

Behind us, the land waited. Quiet. Patient.

And for the first time, I wondered who else had begun to feel it stirring.