Ballots and Bedtimes

By Laura Carpenter

She protects other people's stories for a living. The last one she meant to protect was her own.
Niamh Cassidy has rebuilt her life out of quiet routines: Thursday night reading hour at Little Lights community centre, owl stamps on children's library cards, and the steady, fierce love she has for her eight-year-old daughter, Fiadh. After being chewed up once by the media machine, she lives by new rules-no photos, no case studies, and absolutely no turning children into "human interest" pieces.
Then the local election circus decides Little Lights is the perfect venue for a live candidates' debate... and the frontrunner is the man she spent one careful, unforgettable night with years ago.
Councillor Cillian O'D laigh is a widowed father running on ramps, soup kitchens, and early-years literacy-not staged photographs with "a few wee ones" for the cameras. He's built a campaign on decency over optics. What he hasn't planned for is Niamh asking for ten private minutes before the walk-through and quietly telling him:
Fiadh is eight. She is mine. She is yours.
In a cramped office with bad tea and a third-party note-taker, they negotiate the terms of truth. No mystery-child speculation. No "family reveal" for the papers. No using a little girl to win votes. With the help of a sharp-eyed therapist and the women who run Little Lights like a ship, Niamh and Cillian start to design something neither of them has ever had: a child-first way to be a family in public.
As polling day closes in, the rules multiply-no cameras in the reading room, no b-roll in the hall, soup after every crisis, colour-coded calendars for school runs and "Saturdays of Joy". Somewhere between board meetings, legal letters and late-night cups of tea, Niamh and Cillian find themselves sharing more than policies: slow laughter, rebuilt trust, and a second chance at the kind of intimacy that doesn't ask them to perform.
But the internet has a long memory and a short attention span. When a grainy silhouette photo of four backs in the rain starts doing the rounds, Niamh has to decide how far she'll go to protect Fiadh's privacy-and whether she trusts Cillian to hold the line beside her when the campaign machine comes knocking.
Ballots and Bedtimes is a heartfelt contemporary Irish romance about a secret child finally brought into the light, a widowed father who refuses to trade his family for sympathy, and a former headline girl proving that love, like good policy, starts in the small rooms-at the kitchen table, by the stamp desk, and beside a kettle that never quite stops boiling.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GF84Q3QJ
• ISBN13: 9798242786981
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"