Maybe because life never, ever followed an outline. Hadn’t Dad always told them that he and Mother moved to Watersend to buy and open the pub? But if the dates were right on the photos, if Mr. Bivins was right, they’d moved to town before they had a thought of buying McNally’s pub; Colleen had been born here in this place, but well before they owned the pub. According to Mr. Bivins, Colleen had been ten months old and Gavin started working at McNally’s a couple months before she was born, which would make it about January 1981. If so, what had he and Elizabeth been doing between May 1980, when they married, and January 1981?

And there was still the question of when Gavin had really returned from Ireland.

Colleen placed her finger on the wall between the cards, wondering what had happened to her parents in the in-between spaces. Had they not moved to Watersend until after she was born? No. Colleen shook her head. Her birth certificate stated Watersend, South Carolina.

Why would their parents lie about when they moved here or when they bought the pub? What was the point in that?

Colleen sat on the couch and stared at the note cards dangling from the wall. Why would they lie, except to cover something up?

Chapter Twenty-one

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Dust balls had made their home in the corners of Shane’s former bedroom closet. It was there that Colleen began to pull bags and bins off the shelves, moving piles of clothes, shoes boxes and labeled plastic containers to the floor in search of her baby book. A double bed, dresser and desk completed the sparsely furnished room, which might have been suitable for a visiting monk. Shane had taken most of his belongings with him, while Colleen and Hallie’s room still appeared as it had the day Colleen had left.

Standing on the desk chair, Colleen finally found the book she was looking for atop the highest shelf; both Hallie’s and Shane’s baby books lay underneath it. She grabbed her book, covered in pink satin that was ripped and torn with the years of storage, nibbled by moths and caked in dust. She ran her hand across the top, where there was a painted image of a stork carrying a blanket laden with a baby wearing a pink bow on her head.

Considering the confusing dates associated with her birth, maybe it was true—maybe the stork had brought her precariously tipped in a blanket over to Watersend. How long had it been since she had looked at this book?

The last time had been with Walter.

They’d been sitting on the edge of her bed, going through old photographs and mementoes.