He was pulled from the water, dead. The gash on his forehead looked so small compared to the amount of blood that had flowed from it.

I wasn’t sad that he was dead.

I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done.

He had killed my little girl. He was slowly killing me.

And now I was free of him. Or so I thought.

His brother and father could not believe that Colm had not been able to swim to shore after he fell, even with a gash on his head. He was a good swimmer. They wondered why I hadn’t jumped in after him or thrown him a life vest. They wondered what he had hit his head on when he fell. They’d been with him only a short time before and he’d not been drinking then. How was it that he was drunk—as I had claimed he was—so soon after they’d left him? They began to talk with others after the funeral and after I’d returned to Mam’s house. It was just talk at the pub, but Mam heard of it and began to worry for me, because I had told her the truth of what had happened. She knew how Colm ended up in the water.

It was Mam’s idea for me to go to America to be with Mason, her idea to use Sophie’s birth certificate to get a passport in Dublin, far away from home. It was her idea for me to have a fresh beginning with a name she still loved so very much and which would ensure no authorities in Donaghadee or County Down would ever know where to find me. It would also give me what she felt I deserved and what she had been unable to give me—a new and happy life.

I went to Dublin with my dead sister’s birth certificate. I worked in a restaurant there for two months as Sophie Whalen, and then I got a passport and booked a passage to America. My letters to Mam I sent to my brother Niall in Bangor so that the postmaster in Donaghadee wouldn’t know an S. Whalen was writing to her from New York.

I wasn’t anxious to get out of Manhattan because the tenement I was living in was appalling. It was, but that is not the reason I answered Martin’s advertisement. The tenements were full of other Irish girls like me, and a young woman I knew and who knew me had arrived from the village next to Donaghadee. She was living on my block. If I had stayed, she would’ve recognized me. I couldn’t take the chance that she would write home and that word would get out where I was. So I left and became Sophie Hocking. I became her. That’s who I am now.

Sophie Hocking.

There is no Saoirse Whalen McGough.

32

When I’m finished telling Deputy Logan what he insisted on knowing, my only thought is that I will not return home to Kat tonight and I promised I would.