He was handsome in a buttoned-down way, as if he’d never put on worn jeans to go out on a johnboat or strained to hold a fishing pole against a struggling catch. His qualities might have come prepackaged in a fluorescent-lit man-factory.

“Whiskey is a science with you, is it?” he asked as she downed her third.

“An art,” she told him.

“You can’t be from around here.”

She fell into his smooth voice, his sense of humor and, hours later, his bed.

That next morning she awoke with a hangover worse than she’d ever had, one that barreled through her with such force that she finally understood the truth: she could not drown the pain; it knew how to breathe underwater.

So she’d learned to swim.

Chapter Eleven

You think you have a memory; but it has you!

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

The fiddle player was tuning up in the back left corner of the Lark. Colleen went behind the bar, grabbed a bottle of Glenfiddich and a shot glass. Just one shot to soothe her nerves after meeting the adorable nieces, who were still bolting around the pub like Hallie and she had done as children. Hank gave her a clownish nod and a salute.

The guy at the bar—the one she was sure was drowning his heartbreak—leaned across the counter. “Are all the customers allowed to serve themselves?”

Colleen downed the shot. “I’m not really a customer.”

“You’re a bartender who drinks on the job?” he asked, still smiling, and leaned back on his bar stool. His gaze turned into a squint. “Wait, I know you.”

He was awfully jolly for a guy with a broken heart, and awfully sober for one drowning his sorrows. She’d summed him up incorrectly.

“You do?” She leaned over the bar and poured him a shot from the same bottle. “On the house.”

“Yes, you’re a Donohue.”

A Donohue.

No one had said that to her in so long, she felt an unexpected rush of warm family sweetness.

He nodded, but slid the shot glass back toward her. “You can have it.”

He wasn’t heartbroken. He was happy and go-lucky, a mischievous type. What was he doing in a pub in midafternoon?

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Research.”

“You’re researching the Donohues?” She wrinkled her forehead. Did she know him? “Why the hell are you doing that?”

“Not the Donohues per se,” he said with a grin. “But the pub, the Lark. South Carolina is talking of making it a historic landmark.” He leaned forward, a sly smile on his face like he held a delicious secret. “Did you know this was the first structure built in Watersend? The home of the founder, Mack Turnbull? When he’d finished building his home on the river, he turned this into the town pub, what he’d always meant it to be.”