Chapter Text
If Eva Garvey had ever had the time to think about what she really wanted out of life, she might’ve been able to come up with something halfway interesting, but that just wasn’t what fate had in store for her. Which wasn't to say that being the carer for four younger siblings wasn't interesting in its own right, just...not quite the sort of life a young girl my dream about.
As it was, Eva was never the most inventive girl. She grew up with certain assumptions of what her life was going to look like, and that was that. In typical eldest child fashion, she never really took the time to challenge what was expected of her too much. She didn’t have a framework for what was possible beyond what she could see around her. Not to mention that she’d barely begun to come into her own when she was thrust into the position of caring for her younger sisters. She’d only just finished up at university when the accident happened, and that had been that. If she’d been a different person, maybe she would have just let her sisters get put into care and carried on with her own ambitions, but beyond the sense of familial obligation, the truth was that she didn’t really even know what she wanted for herself. In some ways, it was easier to just slide into the role of parental figure where she didn’t have to worry about figuring out what she wanted to make of herself.
While Eva was exceptionally proud of the fact that she’d kept her family together, there was always a looming element of sadness and longing for the family of her own that she’d never managed to create. Not to say that she’d entirely given up on the idea, she knew that even at fifty there were ways of creating a family, that finding love was possible. But that didn’t change the fact that her life hadn’t quite worked out the way that she had expected it to.
Of course, in certain respects she paved the way for her younger sisters to have more freedoms from their parents than she’d been granted in her childhood. For instance, she set the precedent for pocket money, even if that reality hadn’t manifested until she was fourteen, which meant that her sisters benefited more from the policy than she had. Sure, she complained about it bitterly, but more out of a desire for recognition of her efforts than a desire for the situation to be rectified.
Once her sisters began making their way into the world, Eva was never the child who received the most attention (usually Bibi, and for her short time with their parents, Becka), or the one who did the best in school (Ursula), nor was she the best behaved (Grace). But, being several years older, she was always the first. Which meant she also became a mentor and confidant. While the role was somewhat irritating throughout her adolescence, it was never something that she would’ve wished away. It was corny, and she would have denied it at the time, but her family had always been high on her list of priorities. That was also why she’d never lived anywhere but Dublin – she’d never felt any calling stronger than family.