You still loved Elizabeth, of course you did. Love does not always disappear; we merely make choices. Together, you and Elizabeth quickly married and packed to move to Watersend, South Carolina, swearing the small family to silence, and there you began again. You returned for your daughter, Colleen, so she could have a beautiful life. It was for your daughter that you didn’t shut down. It was for your daughter that you pushed through grief and embraced a new beginning.

But you, Gavin Donohue, you carried those two years in Ireland within you as a force so divine and so life affirming that you opened a pub and named it after the song Colleen played that evening; the song that was sung on your wedding day, the song you see in your daughter’s eyes. You honored your first wife, Colleen, in your heart while also honoring those with whom you chose to build your life, those you also loved deeply—our family: your wife, Elizabeth; your daughter, Colleen, called Lena; your second daughter, Hallie; and your son, Shane.

And that is the story of your Irish love, the one who molded your soul into the shape your family sees—a soul of the divine and the profane, of loyalty and betrayal, of life and death.

Chapter Twenty-six

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Attributed to Aristotle

“She’s always been my half sister, at least by blood. She’s always been all mine in truth and family, but not by blood.” Colleen ran her fingers through her hair and leaned into Beckett’s chest. They lay reclined on his couch in his small apartment across from the pub. He pulled her closer, and he listened, making soft sounds of assent. Only hours had passed since she’d returned from the boat trip; only hours since she’d discovered that the world wasn’t exactly as she’d believed. She didn’t look at Beckett while she told the story, but kept her eyes closed. “She died while giving me life; I was born in Ireland; someone who owed my grandfather a favor in Virginia forged my birth certificate here. And all of this was hidden to keep my mother safe, to preserve intact her reputation and the love she shared with Dad in the way she had always imagined it should have been.”

“Oh, Colleen.”

Colleen sat straighter and stared out the window at the inky night, the soft glow of the streetlights seeping into the liminal space between one day and the next, between this life and the next, between the story she’d been told while growing up and the truth she’d learned that day. “Yes, but we can’t just make things up so we don’t have to live with the truth. We don’t get to do that.”

“Many people do. And many people survive that way. It’s not always so bad.”