Chapter 1 – Before the Flame
Before everything changed, there was a rhythm to our friendship. It wasn’t loud or dramatic—it was steady, like the ticking of a quiet clock or the creak of a familiar door. Josephine, William, and I were each other’s routine. We had no script, no plan, and certainly no idea that our lives would one day be split by fire, loss, and silence.
Josephine had known William longer than I had. They’d been classmates at New Court School in Bray—a special education school with a warm reputation and a tight-knit student body. Their bond was old, filled with unspoken understandings and inside jokes I never fully decoded. When I met Josephine, she was already a fixture in William’s life. And soon, she became one in mine.
Back then, she moved between our worlds with ease. Her laugh echoed in William’s cluttered sitting room just as easily as it did in my small Dublin flat. We didn’t think of her travels as remarkable—we just thought of them as normal. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she’d be in Bray, sitting beside William, helping him through the loneliness left behind after his father’s health began to fail. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, she came to me, often arriving with stories, drawings, and bags of crisps.
There was a purity to those days, even if life wasn’t easy. None of us had much. William lived under the growing shadow of his father’s illness. I lived paycheck to paycheck. Josephine balanced her loyalty between two friends who depended on her more than we ever said out loud.
We didn’t take photos. We didn’t keep journals. But the memory of those days is etched into the way I see every friendship now. We had no medals, no uniforms, no official titles. Just a quiet trust that tomorrow, one of us would still be there, waiting to answer the door.
We didn’t know what was coming. We didn’t know that loss was about to test everything we thought we understood about friendship. For a while, we just lived.
And then the fire came.