All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

thing. Just that she’s basically OK. They seem totally dazed. I don’t think they’ve had this much excitement their entire lives.”

“I can’t believe she’s back, Roe. It worked. We did it.”

“I know. Me neither. I guess we’re pretty amazing.”

“Glad we’re agreed.”

I kiss him goodbye and turn to leave.

“Maeve?”

“Yes?”

“Nevermind.”

“What?”

“It’s dumb.”

“Come on.”

“No, it’s the wrong moment. I hate myself already.”

“Roe.”

“Will you … are you my girlfriend?”

I decide to make him wait. Just for laughs.

“Or, y’know, ‘girlfriend’ is a weird term. It’s very binary. We don’t have to gender it. Is ‘partner’ too weird? ‘Lover’? Oh, God. Pretend I didn’t say that. Please wait while I stab myself again?”

I laugh. “We are not making jokes about stabbing, Roe, as a rule.”

A pause.

“And that’s a rule, I insist on, as your girlfriend.”

He smiles. “I accept.”

I’m discharged from hospital a couple of days later. Mum comes to collect me and brings Pat with her.

“I glued that Walkman of yours back together,” he says, giving me a hug. “Is this what teens are doing now? A few years ago, it was vinyl and now it’s cassette tapes?”

“No,” I say, remembering Heaven. “Honestly I think I’m outgrowing it myself.”

I never get to visit Lily’s room, even though I try to get Mum to take me. She won’t even let me say goodbye to Roe. “You’ll see him when he gets out in a few days,” she says. “This is family time.”

“You don’t want him getting excited either. Not in his condition.”

“Pat!” Mum says, disgusted.

“Mum, we were all thinking it,” he protests.

It feels like it takes a long time for life to get back to normal. Cillian arrives and it’s strange to watch him lump around the house with his work laptop, knowing what I do now. The brother born in the summer of Harriet. The difficult pregnancy. The year the cat ran away. He’s definitely the moodiest of the five of us, and the only other one who has dark hair, like me. Part of me wonders if it touched him in some way, whether the Housekeeper is part of his DNA now. The way, I suppose, it is mine.

Mum doesn’t let me go back to school until Friday. That way, she says, I only have one day before the weekend, and it won’t be too much of a “shock to the system”. I hug Fiona when I see her. It’s awkward. Her texts have been formal the last few days, and I can’t say I blame her. We meet in the art room at lunch.

“Hey,” she says, holding me at a distance. “How are you feeling?”

“Uh. OK. Not too bad, really. The stitches are kind of itchy and gross, though.”

“Sure. Great.”

“Fiona. I’m sorry.”

“You could have told me, Maeve.”

“You know I couldn’t have. And anyway, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do.”

“You could have died, man! In fact, you were planning on it.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I say. And because I can think of nothing else, I just repeat myself. “I was just … willing to do whatever it took.”

She says nothing, just stretches a piece of Blu-Tack between her fingers.

“It just seemed like the only way to bring her back. And to end all this … all this horrible stuff. My sister and her girlfriend were getting attacked, Roe’s gigs were ending in punch-ups, Aaron’s weird influence … it was all water flowing from the same direction. I had to be … the cork in the bottle, I suppose.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It does, in a messed-up kind of way.”

“No, I mean, it’s an interesting theory, but it hasn’t stopped anything, has it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The CoB are having a rally this weekend in Dublin.”

“What?”

“Well. They’re not calling it a rally. It’s a ‘city-wide festival celebrating Ireland’s Catholic heritage’, but it has all these creepy alt-right speakers doing events at it.”

The blood drains from my face.

“Oh God. I should have waited to tell you, shouldn’t I?”

“So … nothing has changed? Aaron is still…”

“I wouldn’t say nothing. Lily is back.”

“But…” I rub at my eyelids. No. No, this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“What deal? Did you make a deal?”

“No…” I say, trailing off.

“Maeve … did you think that…” Fiona bites on her bottom lip, pausing to find the right words. “Did you think that you could end hate crime by killing yourself?”

“You know it wasn’t as simple as that,” I say fiercely. “But Aaron’s the other sensitive. The one who’s manipulating everyone. CoB’s popularity was because of him. The city was cursed, Fiona.”

“I agree that maybe the city was cursed,” she reasons. “But … did you really think Aaron could make people hateful if they weren’t already?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Maeve, when I was twelve, a fully-grown man screamed ‘Sweet and sour chicken!’ at me from a car window.”

“Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And that was long before the Housekeeper or Aaron came to town.”

I start chewing on my nails.

“He might have watered some seeds, organized some people … but all this stuff. The seeds were already planted, Maeve. They already existed.”

“I guess you think I’m pretty dumb.”

“I think … when you’re looking for things that are out of place,” she says softly. “You see all the things that already are.”

I don’t know what to say. I’ve never felt so stupid, or so small. But I look at Fiona, the brilliant friend who made a tourniquet from satin and held my bleeding arm together, and my heart bursts at the millions of tiny things that have happened to her. The infinite tiny interactions she’s had where someone has used her race, her immigrant mother, her scholarship, her beauty, her anything, as a way to hurt her. Things she will never tell me about, but will exist nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“What for?”

“For thinking…” But I lose the words. “For not seeing.”

“It’s OK,” she says, and despite everything, she starts to laugh. “You’re not the first person to make oppression all about themselves. And Aaron is still making