“Does it, though? Does it feel right?” He turned to her, his eyes bright as if someone had momentarily lifted a veil.

Colleen didn’t answer because she wasn’t sure anymore. Doubt had been creeping in for days. But this wasn’t the time to disagree with her dad. It was the time to listen.

“Dad . . . go on.”

“I don’t know what I was saying.”

“That there is a reason we must be on the river.”

“Yes.” He nodded, his jowls moving against the tight collar of his shirt. “Yes, indeed.”

Then he was gone again, off into a land of nonsense and time travel, something about a baseball game he was late for and a shipment of kegs that hadn’t arrived.

“Dad.”

“Yes?” He looked at her and smiled.

“Thank you for loving me so well.”

He gazed at her with utter tenderness and reached out his hand to take hers. “Lena, my little lark, never let your fears keep you from living your life or from loving. You can’t run from who you are without losing your soul. Don’t do it.”

“I’m not running from anything at all. I’m just building a life away from here. Just like you did.”

“Ah, yes, but are you building it out of fear or love? That’s the difference.” He leaned forward and took her face in his hands. “Do not settle for the mediocre to avoid pain.”

“I hear you, Dad. I promise I hear you.”

This seemed to satisfy him. The frenetic look that had flickered across his face mellowed and he was there again, her calm and amiable dad.

Colleen almost heard the ticking of the world’s clock, the metronome of time passing, taking with it all that was precious of her dad’s memories. But the damn clock’s dark hands could never touch the essence of who he was with her, of the love that bound them together in ways Colleen had only dimly understood, in ways that her sister and her brother would never know, in ways that could never, even in memory’s demise, be broken.

They sat back in the chairs. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“You know how to speak Gaelic?”

“Yes, some I do.”

“Why did we never know this?” she asked.

He rested his head back on the chair with a slight grin on his face as though she had just told him something lovely. His hand, with veins prominent under the wrinkled skin, the freckles evidence of his hours in the sun and the knuckles scarred from hard work and a few stray fishing hooks, held tight to hers.

“We all have our secret places, Lena. You are my a stór, a mhuirnín,” he said and closed his eyes. “My treasure; my darling.”

Yes, secret places indeed.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Lord, keep my memory green!

Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain

THREE DAYS UNTIL THE PARTY . . .