“I’m giving up a lot. Really making a sacrifice.” With a half laugh she combed her fingers through her hair. “I finally figured that out, too. I’m leaving New York. You can’t smell the grass there, or see horses grazing. You can’t watch the light strike over the fields in a way that makes your throat hurt. I’m trading the sound of traffic for the sound of mockingbirds and larks. It’s going to be real tough to live with that.”

She stuffed her hands in her pockets and began to pace in a way that warned him not to touch her. “My friends—acquaintances mostly, will think of me with amusement now and again and shake their heads. Perhaps some of them will come to visit and see just what I’ve given up the fast lane for. I’m trading that for family, for people I’ve felt closer to than almost anyone I’ve known. That’s a bad deal all right.”

She stopped, looking out between the stones as the warming sun burned off the mist. “Then there’s my career, that all-important ladder to climb. Five years more, and I guarantee I would have had that metaphorical key to the executive washroom. No question, Shannon Bodine’s got the drive, she’s got the talent, she’s got the ambition, and she doesn’t blink at sixty-hour weeks. I’ve put in plenty of those weeks, Murphy, and it occurs to me that not one of them ever gave me the joy or the simple satisfaction I’ve felt since the first time I picked up a paintbrush here in Ireland. So I guess it’s going to be real tough for me to turn in my Armani jacket for a smock.”

She turned back. “That leaves one last thing by my calculation. I’m back in New York, boosting myself up the next rung on that ladder, and I’m alone while the man who loves me is three thousand miles away.” She lifted her hands. “There doesn’t seem to be any contest. I’m giving up nothing, because there’s nothing there. That’s the bright flash I had last night. There’s nothing there I want, or need, or love. It’s all right here, right here with you.

“But you had to jump right in, didn’t you?” she tossed out when he would have stepped forward. “Now I’ll never be able to throw in your face during an argument what I’ve done for you. Because I’m not doing anything, and I know it. And you would have done everything.”

He wasn’t sure he could speak, and when he did it was only one unsteady sentence. “You’re staying with me.”

She circled over to where he’d balanced the painting. With impatient rips, she tore the protective paper aside. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”

A man and a woman on a white horse, their faces as familiar to him as his own, in a land washed with light. The stone circle in the background with two of the cross stones that had fallen still in place. The copper brooch clipped to a swirling cape.