It was so easy to bring it all back, Amanda realized. Even after all these years that she’d suppressed those memories, they could swim back now, as clear and pure as water. Kate’s giggling laugh, the cough of the tiny car they’d rented, the wrong turns and the right ones they’d made.

And her first awed look of the sweep of hills, the spear of cliffs of the west. The sense of coming home she’d never expected, and had never felt again.

“We wanted to see all we could see, and when we’d reached the west, we found a charming inn that overlooked the River Shannon. We settled there, decided we could make it a sort of base while we drove here and there on day trips. The Cliffs of Mohr, Galway, the beach at Ballybunnion, and all the little fascinating places you find off the roads where you least expect them.”

She looked at her daughter then, and her eyes were sharp and bright. “Oh, I wish you would go there, see, feel for yourself the magic of the place, the sea spewing like thunder up on the cliffs, the green of the fields, the way the air feels when it’s raining so soft and gentle—or when the wind blows hard from the Atlantic. And the light, it’s like a pearl, just brushed with gold.”

Here was love, Shannon thought, puzzled, and a longing she’d never suspected. “But you never went back.”

“No.” Amanda sighed. “I never went back. Do you ever wonder, darling, how it is that a person can plan things so carefully, all but see how things will be the next day, and the next, then some small something happens, some seemingly insignificant something, and the pattern shifts. It’s never quite the same again.”

It wasn’t a question so much as a statement. So Shannon simply waited, wondering what small something had changed her mother’s pattern.

The pain was trying to creep back, cunningly. Amanda closed her eyes a moment, concentrating on beating it. She would hold it off, she promised herself, until she had finished what she’d begun.

“One morning—it was late summer now and the rain came and went, fitful—Kate was feeling poorly. She decided to stay in, rest in bed for the day, read a bit and pamper herself. I was restless, a feeling in me that there were places I had to go. So I took the car, and I drove. Without planning it, I took myself to Loop Head. I could hear the waves crashing as I got out of the car and walked toward the cliffs. The wind was blowing, humming through the grass. I could smell the ocean, and the rain. There was a power there, drumming in the air even as the surf drummed on the rocks.

“I saw a man,” she continued, slowly now, “standing where the land fell away to the sea. He was looking out over the water, into the rain—west toward America. There was no one else but him, hunched in his wet jacket, a dripping cap low over his eyes. He turned, as if he’d only been waiting for me, and he smiled.”