At a side table, empty whiskey glasses next to them, two men in baseball caps were deep in animated conversation. The words “mayor” and “bullshit” and “roadblocks” slipped out in loud proclamations. Yes, Colleen also remembered this well—the men and women who argued about politics or religion or family or ex-lovers then went right back to being friends again. It was as though this place allowed the venting without the consequences. Well, most of the time.

Her dad, they all knew, had tried to replicate a true Irish pub in the Lark and maybe he’d succeeded, but surely those pubs didn’t have cobia fishing trophies on the wall, sand between the floorboards and the sweet-sour aroma of pluff mud that would never dissipate no matter how many scented candles were lit. Those pubs on the Emerald Isle didn’t display the South Carolina flag—featuring a palmetto tree and crescent—hanging on the wall next to the University of South Carolina baseball team photo signed by every player. No, Dad might have tried to imitate the idea of an Irish pub, but the details made this place exactly what it was—a Lowcountry home for many.

One other man stood at the bar, and Colleen quickly sized him up—midthirties, maybe early forties; the dim light obscured too much of his features to tell for sure. His hair was dark and tousled like he’d been out on a boat all morning. He wore fishermen’s shorts and a faded red T-shirt announcing a long-gone event at a bar in Savannah.

A guy in a pub in the middle of the afternoon was obviously there to drown his pain, most likely heartache. She’d become an expert at guessing why men and women were at the pub, a game she used to play when bored while washing glasses behind the bar. But what this guy would soon discover was that heartache could never be drowned. It had to be buried alive.

•   •   •

It had been two weeks since the wedding, two weeks since Lena Donohue had loaded her car and driven to Greenwich, Connecticut, to her friend Maggie Marlow’s house. Maggie hadn’t been able to attend the wedding, what with a two-year-old at home and no real help. Maggie had been her college roommate and now lived in a place where her husband took the train into Manhattan each day, and she tried to fit into a life she’d decided she was made for. Maggie also had a pullout couch in the basement and bottles of vodka.