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Of course, I wasn’t healthy enough to accept we needed to stop seeing each other. During the few months that remained in the Trinity year, we drifted apart. He came to say goodbye when I was leaving Ireland, and we drank coffee in the back garden pretending we would see one another again although neither of us believed that was true. Trine was driving me to catch the train to begin my trip across Europe, but he was standing on his head and refused to say goodbye. I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget me, Christopher Robin.”

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I landed in Dublin and was in a cab headed to Emily Murphy’s flat on Wilton Place before I felt anything but a mild sort of shock that I had actually managed to leave the country. “Are you visiting a relative?” the cab driver asked.
“I’m going to Trinity for a year.”
He glanced in his rear-view mirror. “Ah, Protestant then?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Well, not even lapsed, never started. My grandmother was from the North. She grew up in a convent.” This need for self-identification was always in play in Ireland. Unlike race in America, Irish people looked alike and needed a guide to hate each other. It was almost impossible to remain mysterious about your belief system or to deny religion when choosing a side was necessary.

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James and I went to the pub, had a few drinks, and he made it very clear any mention of his dead fiancée was off limits. My jet lag resulted in a stagger to my room, but a few days later we slept together. I was immediately drawn to this man, his broken heart, his anger, his humor, and his connection to my childhood. Of course it ended badly, with his shooting out the mansions’ windows with a pellet gun and fucking another woman, an old girlfriend, in the room next to me.

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