You were married on a cliff overlooking Galway Bay—on a windy day with thunderheads on the horizon. You weren’t of her strict Catholic upbringing and couldn’t marry in the church and yet her cousin, a Protestant cleric from town, performed the ceremony and you promised to love her for all your life. Together you settled into a small thatch-roof home that had once belonged to her departed parents. You took a job in her family’s pub, where you’d met that night of her parents’ wake, and started to have the tiniest bit of an Irish accent.

The Gaelic language slowly infused your speech until you learned enough to speak it in sorrow or joy—a few lines when needed.

Six months later, you discovered that the joy of that love had grown. Colleen carried your child and now she had a family again, and you were her family, and the child inside was her family.

You had goals and dreams—together you and Colleen would raise a family on the shore of a bay where your ancestors had originated before they boarded an immigrant ship and arrived on the shores of America to start a new life. You would help her carry on the family business.

Colleen went into labor on a frigid March day, two weeks early. Between labor pains and the stop signs that you ran, you rejoiced at the goodness of the world and the imminent arrival of your child.

The devastation happened quickly and without warning. Colleen lost consciousness when you were still within miles of the hospital. But maybe, you thought, this was normal—the pain of birth and the loss of blood, which was evident on her dress, on the car seat. But it was too much blood, wasn’t it? Too much.

They saved your little girl, but not your wife. Placenta previa they called it.

With all the love you had inside, you bundled up that little girl and you returned to your family in Virginia to begin again. You’d been gone for almost two years and you returned with a one-month-old baby daughter. The extended Irish family of O’Sheas understood your departure—there was no immediate family to keep you there. Your first love, Elizabeth, had waited. Yes, she’d remained true, always believing you’d return. Love, she’d said, brings home those who are meant to come home.

“I’ve always been yours,” she said. “And I will still be yours.”

But she had one condition—that no one would ever know of the great love from which your daughter, called Colleen after her mother, had been conceived. That no one could ever know that Colleen belonged to anyone but Elizabeth, and her name would be Lena. And she loved that baby as her own, and she promised that she always would.