My name is Lily Malone now. It was my on-the-run name, and it has stuck. I have decided to keep it forever. Lily for the orange and yellow daylilies growing along the stone wall of my grandmother's sea garden, waving on long, slender green stalks in the salt breeze. Malone for the song she used to sing me when I was little:

In Dublin's fair city, where girls are so pretty,

I once laid my eyes on sweet Molly Malone.

She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets
broad and narrow,

Singing “cockles and mussels alive, alive-oh.”

Those lyrics are so sweet, and because my grandmother sang them to me when I was little and couldn't sleep, they seemed full of life and romance and the promise of unexpected love. I took the name Malone to honor my grandmother's lullaby, but also for a darker reason. The name helps me stay on guard—reminds me that someone once laid eyes on me too. And like Molly Malone, I was a hardworking woman; he liked that about me. He liked it very much.

I would like to explain my chosen name to my grandmother. I would like to see her again. To introduce her to Liam—and, especially, to Rose.

More than anything, I've come back from my nine-year exile to try to save my grandmother, as she once saved me. I am remembering all this for her. I want to recapture every detail, so I can appreciate exactly what she did for me—for the woman I was, and the woman I have become.

This story is a prayer for her, Maeve Jameson.

It begins twelve years ago, three years before I left Hubbard's Point for the most remote place I could find—back when I was Mara. Back when I was a rose that bruised so easily.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

How does a person reenter a life she left nine years earlier? Knowing that there had been a relentless search for her, that her picture had been plastered on the front pages of every newspaper in Connecticut and beyond? Understanding that every local police department remained on the lookout for her? Realizing that all but one of her friends and family have given her up for dead?

The answer is, she walks right in the front door.

That's what Lily Malone did in the very-early-morning hours of August ninth. Just past one A.M., Liam Neill parked his truck in the turnaround at Hubbard's Point, lifted Rose—sleeping, after the long drive from Nova Scotia—and followed Lily down the stone steps.