I remember very little of his passing or his funeral or burying him next to my sister and my grandmother. I was in a fog of numbness that I didn’t want to emerge from. Mason had already been set to emigrate to America. A second cousin on my mother’s side had offered to sponsor him, and he already had his passage booked. He made it clear that he didn’t want to stay in Donaghadee; he wanted to make his own way in the world even more so now that our father was dead. He did not want to be a roofer, and that’s what his lot would’ve been had he stayed. My mother told him to go, even while I begged him to stay. My two older brothers who lived nearby—but not in Donaghadee—offered to help as best they could, but they had children of their own to provide for. It would have made sense if one of them had offered to take in Mam and me, but neither one did. I wonder to this day if Niall and Ross were jealous of the love Da had lavished on me.

At first the neighbors would bring us warm dishes of food or a freshly plucked chicken or jars of preserves. But as the months went on and everyone returned to their own lives, Mam and I began to feel the loss of my father’s income. There wasn’t enough to eat in the house, little coal for the fireplace, and no extra money for gifts or a cake for my seventeenth birthday four months after my father’s fall.

Colm began to show up on our doorstep from time to time with extra fish from his day’s catch. We had heard from Mason by this point and we knew he was safely in New York, had found work, and was going to be sending us some money as soon as he found a better job. I believe Mason had asked Colm to check on my mother and me in his absence, as his happiness with his new life in America was making him feel guilty. Colm had obliged.

The more Colm came over, the more he found solace at my house, I think. Mam was a good cook and a good conversationalist and his mother was neither. Colm could share his opinion about something, whether it be politics in the village or the world at large, and my mother would engage with him. At some point he began to see me no longer as just Mason’s little sister. I remember with utter clarity the day he told me I wasn’t a little girl anymore and that I was pretty.

“Stop your teasing,” I’d said to him with a laugh, because I was sure he was. “It’s not nice.”

“I’m not teasing,” he replied. “You’re the prettiest girl in the village. And the truest. You’re not like the other girls, all full of giggles and fancies and flirtations. I wouldn’t trust a one of them.”