It took Shannon a moment to find her voice. “Everyone says he wanted to be a poet, but didn’t have the words.” She pressed her lips together. “It sounds as though he did to me.”

“He had them when it counted,” Murphy said quietly. “He often lacked them for himself. He carried sadness in his eyes that showed when he didn’t know you were looking.”

Shannon looked down at her hands. They were her mother’s hands, narrow, long fingered. And she had Tom Concannon’s eyes. What else, she wondered, had they given her?

“Would you do something for me, Murphy?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

She knew it, but just then couldn’t let herself think of it. “Would you take me to Loop Head?”

He rose, took their plates from the table. “You’ll need your jacket, darling. The wind’s brisk there.”

She wondered how often Tom Concannon had taken this drive, along the narrow, twisting roads that cut through the roll of fields. She saw little stone sheds without roofs, a tethered goat that cropped at wild grass. There was a sign painted on the side of a white building warning her it was the last stop for beer until New York. It nearly made her smile.

When he parked the truck, she saw with relief that there was no one else who had come to see the cliffs and sea that morning. They were alone, with the wailing wind and the jagged rocks and the crash of surf. And the whisper of ghosts.

She walked with him down the ribbon of dirt that cut through the high grass and toward the edge of Ireland.

The wind lashed at her, a powerful thing blown over the dark water and spewing surf. The thunder of it was wonderful. To the north she could see the Cliffs of Mohr and the still misted Aran Islands.

“They met here.” She linked her fingers with Murphy’s when he took her hand. “My mother told me, the day she went into the coma, she told me how they’d met here. It was raining and cold and he was alone. She fell in love with him here. She knew he was married, had children. She knew it was wrong. It was wrong, Murphy. I can’t make myself feel differently.”

“Don’t you think they paid for it?”

“Yes, I think they paid. Over and over. But that doesn’t—” She broke off, steadied her voice. “It was easier when I didn’t really believe he loved her. When I didn’t, couldn’t think of him as a good man, as a father who would have loved me if things had been different. I had one who did,” she said fiercely. “And I won’t ever forget that.”

“You don’t have to love the one less to open your heart a bit to the other.”

“It makes me feel disloyal.” She shook her head before he could speak. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not logical to feel that way. I do. I don’t want Tom Concannon’s eyes, I don’t want his blood, I don’t—” She pressed her hand to her mouth and let the tears come. “I lost something, Murphy, the day she told me. I lost the image, the illusion, that smooth quiet mirror that reflected my family. It’s shattered, and now there are all these cracks and layers and overlapping edges when it’s put back together.”