Feck Off

Chapter One — The Tab Comes Due

Riley O’Brien had always believed the universe operated like a particularly vindictive bartender. It let you run a tab for years on nothing but charm and carefully curated lies, then slammed the whole thing down on the bar the second you thought you were getting away with something. Only this time, it tossed in a fat tip, a set of keys to a pub, and a wink that said, “Good luck, you magnificent fraud.”

She sat at her desk in the closet she’d long ago claimed as a studio, mid-sip of black coffee strong enough to wake the dead. No foam and no pretentious questions about oat milk. The phone buzzed mid-sip with an international code. Tibby, twelve pounds of stuck up cat who made a living judging her, opened one eye from the floor with the specific energy of someone personally wronged by a ringtone.

353. Ireland. The international code she always recognized. Maeve’s number. It always arrived with blarney, an invitation to visit that was really a dare, a nudge about the sweaters she sent as if Riley had ever worn a single one, and always a question about her love life, knowing full well Tibby was the only thing keeping her company at night.

The script on her laptop glowed accusingly: “And don’t get me started on people who think leprechauns are cute. They’re basically tiny, green trolls with bad fashion sense and questionable footwear.” She smirked at her own words, the kind of sharp roast that had built Feck Off: An Irish-ish Podcast, mocking everything from shamrocks to step dancing, all while waving her O’Brien ancestry like a green flag she didn’t really feel. It was hitting forty thousand downloads per episode, real numbers, the kind that had brands emailing and agents calling, though not yet the kind that paid for anything more than ambition and excellent shoes.

Morrissey drifted from the speaker beside her mug, his voice low, aching, smoke in every word turning the lyrics into something she couldn’t shake even when she tried. She loved that song. Misery dressed up in a beat that made her smile anyway. Her playlist was her private chaos: The Smiths bleeding into Sinatra, then plunging into death-metal polka covers of Irish standards, the raw material for seven seasons of turning her half-hearted heritage into laugh-out-loud content. She set the mug down, popped a square of dark chocolate into her mouth, and let it melt. Everything else could wait. Good wine, great champagne, real food she didn’t have to apologize for. That was her religion. Diets were clichés. Holidays were worse.

She answered the call, her over-dyed hair falling over one shoulder as she leaned back in her chair. The acoustic foam on the walls muffled the distant honk of Manhattan traffic below. The city outside her window was alive and indifferent. Taxis and ten million people who had somewhere more important to be. It was home, or what passed for it. Fast, fake, fabulous in its fraud.

“Ms. O’Brien? Patrick Flannery here, solicitor for the late Maeve O’Flaherty. First let me say, she was a remarkable woman. One of a kind. Ireland won’t quite know what to do without her. I trust the news has reached you by now.”

Maeve O’Flaherty. Her mother’s aunt.

The Irish half of her family had always been more story than reality. Her mom was gone by the time Riley was old enough to ask the right questions. Maeve had been the last connection to any of it.

“She’s gone?” Her voice came out quieter than she meant it to. A woman who had always felt permanent had slipped away without her noticing. That part hit hard.

Riley had never been good with final. Final had a way of arriving before you were ready and staying longer than seemed fair.

The chocolate turned bitter on her tongue. Maeve, gone. The force of a woman who could roast you with a smile and make you thank her for it. Someone who had sent an XL wool sweater every Christmas despite knowing Riley hated farm animals and was a size medium at best. Their calls had been rare but memorable. Maeve sipping tea, Riley with merlot, trading stories that always ended with the same gentle push: “Come visit, love. The pub needs fresh blarney.”

“Peacefully, last Tuesday. Still telling the postman how to do his job properly. One of a kind, that one.”

“She was.” She always had been. The kind of woman who ran a pub for sixty years and made everyone who walked through the door feel like the most important person in the room. The kind you never imagined would stop.

Mr. Flannery cleared his throat and paused. Solicitors never rushed. They billed by the silence.

“Riley. She left you something rather specific. Something I can’t send across the ocean in an envelope.”

Well that ruled out more sweaters. The commentary feeling shallow even as she made it.

“The Harp and Hound. The family pub in Kilmore, just north of Bunratty.”

A pub.

The word landed like a cab driver’s rant on a Sunday. Loud. Unavoidable.

Riley O’Brien, who had spent seven seasons making a career out of mocking the very culture that had apparently just handed her the keys to one of its relics.

Why her. Of all the people Maeve knew, she had picked the one person with no desire to leave New York, no qualifications beyond dead air and banter, and absolutely no idea how to pull a pint. The gap between what she had been left and what she was capable of doing with it was significant.

“There’s a Jack McInerney who has been helping run things,” Flannery continued, his voice carrying the practiced neutrality of a man delivering information rather than opinions. “And a woman named Peggy. Been there longer than the fixtures. Between the two of them the place has kept its doors open.”

Peggy and Jack.

Peggy landed first. The very sound of it, the way the P rolled off her tongue, brought up images of Mother Hubbard baking cookies in an apron that had seen better days. Peggy was an antique name. The kind reserved for grandmothers and caretakers and women who kept hard candy in their pockets and had opinions on everything whether you asked or not. She pictured sensible shoes. A tea towel. A look that said she had been here since before the building and fully intended to outlast it.

Which, apparently, she had.

And then there was Jack.

Jack McInerney. Who named their Irish kid Jack? Somewhere in County Clare a mother had looked at her newborn son and chosen the most American name on the island and called it a day. No doubt his roots ran about as deep as her own, not a freckle on his face, not a clue how to pour a proper stout. She pictured him immediately, thin, weak arms, low tolerance for greasy food, the kind of man that name always suggested whether she wanted it to or not.

Had Maeve set her up to fail?

An Irish pub. Left to a fake Irish podcaster. Kept alive by a man with a name as American as hers.

She knew nothing about beer. Less about stout. And bar banter, the real kind, not the podcast kind, was an entirely different thing.

She had questions. Practical ones. Who was paying the electric bill. What did a pub in County Clare cost to run on a Tuesday. Were Jack and Peggy on payroll or were they very committed volunteers.

And if she got the deed then what? Was she supposed to drag herself permanently to Clare and take up residence above a pub? Leave the podcast, the closet studio, the city that had never once asked her to be anyone other than who she was? What exactly was Maeve’s plan here. Because from where Riley was sitting it looked a lot less like a gift and a lot more like a challenge she hadn’t signed up for.

Flannery cleared his throat.

“Aye, there’s a small condition with Maeve’s will.”

Of course there was a condition. Dead relatives never just handed you things. They handed you homework with a side of existential crisis. She leaned forward without thinking. The chair creaked louder than the moment called for. The coffee had gone cold. The chocolate wrapper crinkling under her elbow, reminding her she wasn’t the only thing in the room holding its breath.

“You must travel to Ireland, take up residence above the premises, and manage the pub yourself for ninety consecutive days. Open, close, pull pints, settle tabs, referee arguments about whether hurling is superior to football. And keep the doors from closing permanently. At the end of three months, if the place is still standing and the locals haven’t chased you out with pitchforks, the deed is yours free and clear.”

There was a slight pause, one long enough for Riley to take another sip of her coffee.

“You will also receive five hundred thousand dollars.”

Five hundred thousand. Holy feck.

She thanked Mr. Flannery, promised to review her calendar, and hung up before she said something she’d regret.

She had never once won a dollar on a scratch-off and was fairly certain she was the only person alive who had ever received a jaywalking ticket in Times Square. The luck of the Irish had never been her thing. And yet here she was, sitting in a closet in Manhattan with a pub and half a million dollars apparently waiting for her in County Clare.

That was more than just walking around money. That was real money.

Half a million. She’d have to spend the first hundred thousand on lavish food and play toys for Tibby. Maybe for once his judgment would stop. The rest would be up to her. No doubt it would include a great new pair of heels and a studio with a window she could rent by the hour.

Ninety days.

She tried to picture it. Rainy streets. Locals with accents she could barely understand. Sheep herders in dirty overalls. A pub that smelled of spilled stout and strong opinions. Ninety days of pretending she knew how to tap a keg without flooding the floor, pour a proper pint without drowning it in foam, or smile through a room full of people who had been doing this their whole lives, and all of it with a Peggy and a Jack by her side.

There was no way she could do it. Half a million or not.

Who in their right mind would leave a pub to her?

Only a woman who had always believed in the wildly impractical. Maeve, that stubborn impossible woman, who had more faith in Riley than Riley had ever found on her own.

She thought about the three hundred dollars Maeve had sent her the year she’d turned twenty-three. Dance lessons, the note had said. Every woman should know how to rumba. It’s very sexy. Riley had lasted exactly two sessions before being quietly but firmly asked not to return. Something about not being able to follow directions and a particular talent for stepping on people’s feet. She hadn’t even been able to blame the instructor. She’d been genuinely terrible. A hazard, really, to herself and to the other students.

Maeve’s only comment.

“Did you try?”

“I did.”

“Then I’m proud of you.”

That was it. That was the whole conversation. No disappointment. No jokes. Just “I’m proud of you” for showing up to something she was catastrophically bad at.

This felt different from dance lessons. This felt like Maeve handing her something real and saying I know you can. The terrifying part wasn’t Ireland or the pub or the ninety days.

The terrifying part was that for one completely unguarded second, she almost believed it too.

Maybe Maeve was right about her. Maybe she actually could do it.

She slid down the wall slowly, the kind of dramatic descent that belonged on a film set with a director yelling cut and a PA handing her a coffee.

Her butt hit the floor with a thump that sounded like surrender.

Tibby got up to move and stared at her with the slow deliberate look of someone who had seen everything, decided it was all beneath him, and moved on.

“You’re coming,” she told him, her voice unsteady only for a second. “Emotional support animal. Even if all you do is judge from your four paw perch.”

Tibby flicked an ear and looked away. The conversation was apparently over.