LITMIR.BIZ

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Bend?” Brenna looked at the tiny, lopsided house that perched on a hillside looking over the place the local people called Whiskey Island. “We’ve come all this way, Liam, gladly left everything behind, to live in a place called Irishtown Bend?”

      It was so rare for Brenna to be critical that Liam felt her words in the pit of his stomach. “I’m aware of the irony,” he said. “But we needn’t live here forever. It’s a place to start, and not such a bad place at that. Isn’t it better to be with people we understand? People like us? So many of them came from Mayo. I might well run into people I knew there.”

      “Exactly what I hoped you wouldn’t do.”

      Liam wanted the world for Brenna and Irene. He was going to give them the world, but unfortunately, not quite yet. And, of course, she wasn’t asking for that. She only wanted freedom from worry, from a past that haunted her nights. His past.

      “I think the house has charm.” Liam cocked his head and stared up at it. The house was narrow as a young man’s hips and tall as a young man’s dreams. A rickety front porch ran across the front. His inspection had turned up boards so rotten that Irene’s meager weight would crumble them to dust.

      Brenna hiked their daughter higher on one hip. Most of the time Irene would not allow herself to be carried. She was a lively child, only content when she was moving. But the voyage, the nights in Boston, then the nights in a West Side hotel that housed as many rats as immigrants, had nipped at her good humor. She rubbed her eyes and angrily brushed red-gold locks of hair away from her face.

      His daughter. His reason for coming here.

      “Perhaps it has charm,” Brenna said, “but I suspect it has mice and bugs, as well, and in winter, it will have icicles inside.”

      “By winter we’ll live somewhere else, farther up the hill into the Angle, perhaps someday away from the Irish entirely.” He hesitated. “Unless we find family.”

      Brenna looked as exhausted as their daughter, and that prospect didn’t seem to please her. “There’s little chance of it, Liam. You shouldn’t raise your hopes so high.”

      Liam didn’t need the warning. His hopes weren’t high; in fact, he wasn’t sure what to hope for. Once, in a rare moment of conversation, his father had told him of uncles who had come here during the last century, Lorcan’s own brothers, Darrin and Terence, both of whom had died young and poor.

      All the Tierney family had already died or abandoned Shanmullin when Lorcan arrived home from Liverpool, as had most of the villagers he had known as a boy. Even Shanmullin’s priest had moved to America, but one neighbor recalled that Terence had married, and his wife might still be alive. The wife might even have given birth to Terence’s child. In a place called Cleveland, where she and Terence had gone to live.

      Liam knew so little of his family’s past, and he cared only a little more. Family had failed him so miserably. What reason was there to think that anything might change? He had made his own family when he married Brenna Duffy and sired Irene. If Tierneys were here, he would observe them carefully before he told them who he was.

      Now he tried to make the best of their bad situation, hoping to cheer his wife. “Be careful on the stairs,” Liam said. “Best give me Irene. I know what to avoid.”

      He took the little girl, who was fussing, and jiggled her as he climbed. He skirted the worst of the holes and pushed open the door. The house was dismal inside but surprisingly clean. The former occupants had been too poor for repairs but too proud for dirt. Only the faintest dust filmed the rickety table in one corner and the ladder-back chair beside it. The windows were few but gleaming.

      “Good people lived here.” That was the most he could say, since the house had nothing else to recommend it. It was cramped and dark, and the moldering boards on the porch had close cousins here. He hadn’t been inside before this. The house was all he could afford, and the state of its interior had hardly been at issue. It had a roof and a floor of sorts, a place to cook and sleep. Until he found work, there was little else he could ask for.

      He didn’t look at Brenna. He didn’t want to see the horror on her face. He had brought her here, far from everything she knew. True, like him, she had no family in Ireland. The orphanage where she had been taken at birth was a cruel place, and her memories of Ireland were sad ones. But she had married him to improve her life. And this was no improvement.

      “Oh, Liam, look at the way the sun shines in this window.” She stepped carefully around the room and peered outside, down the gentle slope that led to the river and the smoke of Whiskey Island.

      The sunlight wavered through the old glass, making patterns on the wall. He was pleased she’d chosen to notice them.

      “And it’s all ours,” she said, turning to face him.

      “It’s not much—”

      “All my life I lived in a room with twenty girls, sometimes more. I yearned for space like this, for a place where I could move without stumbling over someone.”

      He knew what she was doing, knew the effort this forced spate of optimism was costing her. He loved her more for it. “You’ll need to be careful where you move here, as well. Or you’ll end up on the ground below.”

      “But it will be our ground, won’t it? Not charity. No one reminding us that we didn’t earn it and we’re lucky to have it. No sisters to beat us if we aren’t thankful enough. Yes, it’s meager, Liam. But I’m sorry about what I said before. If there are mice, they’ll be our mice, won’t they? And if the icicles form inside, then we’ll know exactly where to patch, and we’ll thank them for the insight.”

      “I’ll get a job. I know there’s work here, lots of it. I’ve been told so by every man I’ve encountered. We won’t be in the house long. And I’ll patch the floors. There’s driftwood on the lakeshore. I’ve been told that, as well. I’ll patch, and we’ll make it a home until we can find better.”

      “I never expected to have this much. I have you, and our darling Irene, and I have this new land of ours, away from all our sad memories. We’ll start again here. The three of us.”

      He set Irene down, and she ran to the window where her mother stood. Brenna lifted her daughter in her arms.

      “Smoke,” Irene said, pointing down the hillside.

      “A sign of progress,” Brenna said. “A sign of good things to come.”

      Liam followed his daughter. Brenna held out an arm, and he let her enfold him. The only moments of pleasure he’d ever experienced had been due to this woman. He felt the warmth of her breast pressing against his side, smelled the wind-tossed scent of her hair. He put his arms around the only two people in the world whom he had ever loved, and Liam Tierney counted his blessings.

      chapter 10

      Megan pulled into the parking lot of the Whiskey Island Saloon in Casey’s red Mazda and turned the key in the ignition. She didn’t move to open the door. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, and her foot continued to rest on the brake. She closed her eyes and reminded herself to breathe.

      When she opened them again, nothing had changed. No fairy godmother had waved a wand in the intervening seconds to restore the rubble into a functioning Irish-American pub. The Whiskey Island Saloon would be a work in progress for weeks, maybe months, and Megan was going to have to accept the fact that life as she had known it was never going to be the same.

      The driver’s door opened. Startled, she looked up and saw her sister staring down at her. “You like my car so much you don’t want to return it?”

      “How did you know I’d be back today?” Megan stared up at Casey. “Is this sisterly ESP?”

      “Nick called Jon and told him what happened. I brought Charity for you and came to get the Mazda.”

      Niccolo’s phone call to Jon didn’t surprise Megan. He was already acting like a husband, even

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