The Secret Kept
His sister Moira was behind the bar when he walked in, and the silence that fell over the pub was the loudest sound Cormac had ever heard. She was fifty-five now, grey-haired, with their mother's jaw and their father's eyes, and she looked at him across the taps with an expression that held so many things at once — shock, anger, love, grief, a weary kind of inevitability — that Cormac could not meet it for more than a second. "You're back, then," she said, in a tone that made it neither a question nor a welcome but simply a statement of fact, the way you might note a change in the weather. "Dad's in the ground four years. Mam's in the home in Skibbereen. You missed both."
He had known this. He had received the letters — Moira wrote regularly, with the dogged persistence of someone who refused to accept silence as an answer — and he had read each one and filed it in a drawer and not replied, because replying would have required explaining, and explaining would have required telling the truth, and the truth was something he had carried for thirty years like a stone in his chest that he could neither swallow nor spit out. He sat at the bar and ordered a pint and let the silence around him slowly fill back in with the cautious murmur of people who were pretending not to watch. Moira pulled the pint with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had been doing it since she was