“Murphy.” She forgot herself and bit into a slice of bacon. “You’re so sweet.”

“It’s as much a moment in a man’s life as it is a woman’s I’d say. Anyway, I was sitting there thinking of what you might imagine, and Tom comes along. He sits next to me and says nothing for a time. Just sits and looks out over the fields. It must have been all over my face. He puts his arm around my shoulders. ‘Made a man of yourself,’ he says, ‘and you’re proud of it. But it takes more than sliding into a willing lass to make a man. Takes responsibility.’ ”

Murphy shook his head and picked up his tea. “Now I’m sick thinking I might have to marry her, and me barely seventeen and no more in love with her than she with me. And I say so. He just nods, not lecturing or scolding. He tells me if God and fate are looking kindly, he knows I’ll remember it, and have more of a care next time out. ‘There’ll be a next time,’ he says, ‘because a man doesn’t stop going down such a lovely path once he’s begun it. And a woman is a glorious thing to hold and to have. The right woman, when you find her, is more than sunlight. You watch for her, Murphy, and while you’re sniffing those sweet flowers along the way, treat them with care and affection, and don’t bruise their petals. If you love with kindness, even when you can’t love with permanence, you’ll deserve the one who’s waiting along that path for you.’ ”

It took Shannon a moment to find her voice. “Everyone says he wanted to be a poet, but didn’t have the words.” She pressed her lips together. “It sounds as though he did to me.”

“He had them when it counted,” Murphy said quietly. “He often lacked them for himself. He carried sadness in his eyes that showed when he didn’t know you were looking.”

Shannon looked down at her hands. They were her mother’s hands, narrow, long fingered. And she had Tom Concannon’s eyes. What else, she wondered, had they given her?

“Would you do something for me, Murphy?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

She knew it, but just then couldn’t let herself think of it. “Would you take me to Loop Head?”

He rose, took their plates from the table. “You’ll need your jacket, darling. The wind’s brisk there.”

She wondered how often Tom Concannon had taken this drive, along the narrow, twisting roads that cut through the roll of fields. She saw little stone sheds without roofs, a tethered goat that cropped at wild grass. There was a sign painted on the side of a white building warning her it was the last stop for beer until New York. It nearly made her smile.

When he parked the truck, she saw with relief that there was no one else who had come to see the cliffs and sea that morning. They were alone, with the wailing wind and the jagged rocks and the crash of surf. And the whisper of ghosts.

She walked with him down the ribbon of dirt that cut through the high grass and toward the edge of Ireland.

The wind lashed at her, a powerful thing blown over the dark water and spewing surf. The thunder of it was wonderful. To the north she could see the Cliffs of Mohr and the still misted Aran Islands.

“They met here.” She linked her fingers with Murphy’s when he took her hand. “My mother told me, the day she went into the coma, she told me how they’d met here. It was raining and cold and he was alone. She fell in love with him here. She knew he was married, had children. She knew it was wrong. It was wrong, Murphy. I can’t make myself feel differently.”

“Don’t you think they paid for it?”

“Yes, I think they paid. Over and over. But that doesn’t—” She broke off, steadied her voice. “It was easier when I didn’t really believe he loved her. When I didn’t, couldn’t think of him as a good man, as a father who would have loved me if things had been different. I had one who did,” she said fiercely. “And I won’t ever forget that.”

“You don’t have to love the one less to open your heart a bit to the other.”

“It makes me feel disloyal.” She shook her head before he could speak. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not logical to feel that way. I do. I don’t want Tom Concannon’s eyes, I don’t want his blood, I don’t—” She pressed her hand to her mouth and let the tears come. “I lost something, Murphy, the day she told me. I lost the image, the illusion, that smooth quiet mirror that reflected my family. It’s shattered, and now there are all these cracks and layers and overlapping edges when it’s put back together.”

“How do you see yourself in it now?”

“With different pieces scattered over the whole, and connections I can’t turn away from. And I’m afraid I’ll never get back what I had.” Eyes desolate, she turned to him. “She lost her family because of me, faced the shame and fear of being alone. And it was because of me she married a man she didn’t love.” Shannon brushed at the tears with the back of her hand. “I know she did love him in time. A child knows that about her parents—you can feel it in the air, the same way you can feel an argument that adults think they’re hiding from you. But she never forgot Tom Concannon, never closed him out of her heart, or forgot how she felt when she walked to these cliffs in the rain and saw him.”

“And you wish she had.”

“Yes, I wish she had. And I hate myself for wishing it. Because when I wish it I know I’m not thinking of her, or of my father. I’m thinking of me.”

“You’re so hard on yourself, Shannon. It hurts me to see it.”

“No, I’m not. You have no idea the easy, the close-to-perfect life I had.” She looked out to sea again, her hair streaming back from her face. “Parents who indulged me in nearly everything. Who trusted me, respected me every bit as much as they loved me. They wanted me to have the best and saw that I got it. Good homes in good neighborhoods, good schools. I never wanted for anything, emotionally or materially. They gave me a solid foundation and let me make my own choices on how to use it. Now I’m angry because there’s a fault under the foundation. And the anger’s like turning my back on everything they did for me.”

“That’s nonsense, and it’s time you stopped it.” Firm, he took her shoulders. “Was it anger that made you come here to where it began, knowing what it would cost you to face it? You know he died here, yet you came to face that, too, didn’t you?”