THREE MONTHS LATER . . .

Half-hidden in the high branches and Spanish moss, the tree house appeared like a small cottage that had been built snuggly into the nook of the oak. It sat steady and level, the metal roof shimmering in the November sunlight. A ladder, much larger and safer than the one Colleen, Hallie and Shane had climbed long ago, had been attached to the trunk, pink ribbons hanging off the sides, fluttering in the wind. Behind it, the river was flat and calm at ebb tide. Colleen heard her nieces’ voices, muffled and laughing in the branches, their voices blending with the afternoon frog croaks and birdsong.

Colleen gently closed the door to the taxi and dropped her backpack at her feet next to her suitcase. She inhaled the river-soaked air and smiled. She hadn’t told anyone but Beckett that she was returning today. He would arrive soon, but she wanted to surprise her nieces and Hallie first, then Shane.

For three months she’d rented a whitewashed cottage with a thatch roof, hiked the land of West Ireland, met distant relatives of her Irish mom and written an outline and first chapters of the travel memoir. She’d had her cast removed after seven weeks and begun to type even faster. She hadn’t traveled much, but instead had become deeply familiar with the small town and its people.

She’d kept in touch with her family, sending letters and texts, updating them with photos and e-mails. She’d sublet her apartment in New York, and hadn’t promised anyone when she’d return because she hadn’t known. As time had stretched out in Ireland, there came a moment when she understood why her dad had decided to stay, reasons that went beyond his love for his wife Colleen. It wasn’t one quality of the land or the people, one person or pub or house that attracted her; it was the mix and mash of it all, a seductive quality not unlike the Lowcountry. A land alive and surreal, changing with each tide and wind. A land where the trees seemed as old as the earth, and the water had spent a lifetime thrashing against the tide and rocks, begging her to dance with it. A lush land, of every shade of green, that surrounded her and asked her quietly, in the night air, in the stormy sea, in the curved roads, green pastures and fairy circles ringing the trees, if she would stay and allow it to make her its own.