PRESENT DAY
WANDESFORD QUAY
CORK CITY, IRELAND
Freeny’s Violin Shop was nestled in a corner spot beside The Time Traveller’s Bookshop and a walking bridge that spanned the River Lee.
They stepped in through a door of weathered wood and pebbled glass. Cormac spotted the counter and went to the young man behind it, while Laine drifted over to rows of shelves.
So much of Ireland was steeped in history—castles and manors, and cities built upon centuries-old foundations. This was a tiny shop of books and musty shelves that told so many of those stories, of antiques and nostalgia more than modern music. It reminded Laine of happy times so long ago, when she’d stood behind a nineteenth-century shop counter to greet curious antique hunters who’d wandered in from the street off the old town square.
Now she and Cormac were the wanderers.
Drifting past rows, Laine thumbed through boxes of vintage vinyl—album covers of Irish rocker bands with names like Horslips and Thin Lizzy. She found books, shelf after shelf of music, secondhand novels, and biographies with jackets curled and cracked at the spine. Acoustic guitars lined the brick of a back wall. The polished cognac wood of violins gleamed from inside a glass case. Racks held sheet music, and an entire case was dedicated to wires and gadgets for modern acoustics, though she hadn’t the faintest idea how to tell what was what.
“Laine?”
She turned at the sound of Cormac’s voice. He peeked down a row of books and headed her way when he spotted her.
“Young lad’s gettin’ the owner. Seems he lives in the flat just upstairs.” He wrinkled his brow. “Ye okay?”
Nodding was easy. Easier than explaining why he must have seen tears trying to build in her eyes. Memories were beautiful, but hard sometimes—too much to say right then. “Yeah. Fine.”
“We’re goin’ to meet a Martin O’Brien. He’s owned the shop only since the late nineties, but it’s been here for ages, an’ he’s supposed to know about the clientele goin’ all the way back. If Dolly did come in here, I’m bettin’ a Steinway like hers wouldn’ be easily forgotten. Not a manor an’ castle ruins either.”
“Mr. Foley?”
They turned in unison.
A man walked their way down the aisle, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater with leather elbow patches, a crown thinned and gray, and a smile. “’Tis a pleasure to see ye. How is the Richard Lipp?”
“Do you know him?” Laine whispered to Cormac.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Well, he thinks he knows you—and your piano at the pub.”
Short-statured and kind around the eyes, Mr. O’Brien stopped in front of them with every contrast to the fiery Cullen they’d just met, greeting them with a hearty handshake.
“When young Conor came up an’ said a Mr. Foley was downstairs askin’ about tunin’ a piano, I just assumed Jack come down from Dublin. But ye must be Cormac then, yeah? His older son. The one who still lives in Ireland.”
Cormac shook hands with the gentleman, all the while something strange melting over his face. Was it shock? Or anger? Laine hated that she couldn’t tell which at the moment, except that it certainly looked like Jack Foley had some explaining to do when they returned to Dublin.
“Aye. I’m Cormac an’ this is a friend. Laine. I’m sorry, uh . . . Mr. O’Brien. Ye know my father, Jack Foley? Owns a pub on O’Connell Street.”
“The very one. Wit’ a nice 1912 Richard Lipp tucked in the snug? I tried to convince him to sell it on more than one occasion, but he’d never take a price. Said it was stayin’ put long as the pub has walls.”
There was no denying it: O’Brien was talking about the same Jack Foley who held dominion over his pub in the heart of Dublin. Whatever the association there though, Cormac looked knocked over by it. Laine didn’t know why exactly, but to show solidarity, she brushed closer to his side in a light shoulder-to-shoulder touch.
“I’m sorry. My father’s never mentioned ye to me. Or comin’ all the way to Cork to stop in a music shop.”
“No? Ah. ’Tis years ago, but I remember the Richard Lipp. A real beauty. Jack there paid us to ship the piano to the pub, all the way from London. Quite a task, mind. But he said he’d pay whatever it cost. An’ we’ve only seen him here a few times since, when he’d stop in to schedule a tune for a friend’s piano.”
Cormac swallowed hard—something Laine knew she’d have to wait and ask him about on the drive home. Since they’d walked in the door, nothing was adding up. Had Jack really known Dolly . . . and kept it from everyone?
“We’re here about a piano, Mr. O’Brien. An’ now I’m wonderin’ if the friend might have been the same. Was it a Dolly Byrne?”
“That I can’ say, son. Jack would come in, pay in euros on the spot, an’ send me to an address. That’s it. I didn’ mind, because it’s not often ye get to tune a piece like the Steinway they had. An’ wit’ such a view o’ the sea in County Wicklow. One o’ my better commissions to get to make that drive once or twice a year.”
“You said ‘they,’ Mr. O’Brien. Did you ever meet the owner?” Laine asked, watching Cormac’s jaw tense out of the corner of her eye.
“No. Can’t say as I ever did. But I can give ye the address just the same.”
“Yes. Thank you. That would help us a lot.”
Mr. O’Brien stepped back to the front of the store, then moved behind the counter and opened an old-school leather-bound appointment book. He searched through pages until he spotted what he was looking for, then penciled something on a piece of paper by the register.
“Cormac—I don’t understand what’s happening. You mean Jack really did know Dolly?”
“We don’ need whatever address that man is writin’. He’s just goin’ to lead us home.”
“Are you sure?” she whispered, watching as Mr. O’Brien finished his task and headed back their way.
Cormac thanked him and shoved the paper in his jacket pocket. He led Laine out of the shop after that, weaving through the downtown streets of Cork, calm and quiet until they reached the car.
Clouds followed them home in silence, and it rained all the way back to Wicklow. The former nostalgia Laine felt for vintage stories was lost a little after that. The things she’d hoped to ask Cormac on the drive home faded into the background. What was ticking around in that head of his?
The rain had stopped, but the Irish Sea was still stormy.
Cormac stood at the castle ruins, his back pressed against the stones. Laine walked up behind, her footsteps drowned out by the sound of waves crashing against the rocks. He looked over when she stood at his side, wrapping her sweater tight around her middle though the wind tried to toy with it.
“Ye ready to go back to Dublin then?”
“In a minute.” She leaned into the cutout of a Gothic arched window frame, watching the sea’s turmoil with him. “I called Ellie. She said they went to the zoo. And Phoenix Park. And ate cookies at a little bakery on Henry Street. Now Cass is watching cartoons in the flat and eating fish and chips from your pub kitchen—completely happy at the moment.”
“That’s good. I’m glad ye didn’ have to worry about her while we were gone.”
Worry about her . . . He didn’t know how close he was.
Laine watched the last battle of sunlight trying to cut through the clouds. It cast a glow on Cormac’s face, his hair, and the shoulders of his jacket as he stared out past the cliffs.
She noticed everything she hadn’t allowed herself before. Cormac was steadfast and strong, in ways she hadn’t seen in someone before. Always courteous, asking questions, letting others be the fools who’d rush to judgment while he kept a cool head. It was evident Jack had some major issues with his sons—about some very big questions they still didn’t have answers to—but Cormac didn’t respond with anger. Instead he was there. Waiting for her to talk. And wanting only that a mother shouldn’t have to worry about her daughter for the whole of an afternoon.
Cormac Foley might be the only person in her small corner of the world who could understand what her little girl had gone through.
“Cassie’s not mine, if you were wondering.”
His attention shifted from the span of ocean over to her. “I wasn’. But she’s yers now. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. My niece wasn’t born of me, but I adopted her after my sister, Bethany, went to prison. We don’t know who her father is, and we’ll probably never know. But we’re a family now—Cassie and me—and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
He looked to her, hands buried in his pockets, but he didn’t move. Just stood there in the waning sunlight. Too solid and silent to put her off from telling him more. “What happened?”
“Dominoes fell a while back—our grandfather died and we closed up the family antique shop we’d had on the town square, I don’t know, for like forever. My parents divorced a few years later. Mom remarried and moved to Florida, and our dad left for New York. That was it. Our little white-picket-fence youth was over. But we were grown up, so it shouldn’t have been as hard, right?”
“I remember hard. But Quinn an’ I had all the memories o’ when our parents were together. It still bothers me that Keira doesn’ have that.”
“Sometimes memories can bring more hurt than healing. I felt for a while like I’d abandoned Bethany because I got married. And when Evan left, I blamed myself even more because I’d given up my sister for him.
“She still made some really bad decisions she had to own. It was trying drugs once at a party and she was hooked. Lost her job. Gave up on school. She got in trouble with the police and then I lost her, Cormac. The Bethany I used to know—the little sis I remember watching cartoons with on Saturday mornings or curling her hair for the junior prom—was gone. She is gone. In a federal prison for the next few years for drug charges she couldn’t deny, because they were true. And there’s nothing I can do to help her.”
“An’ Cassie? What happened to her, wit’ the nightmares?”
“She wasn’t three yet. Bethany left her in the apartment while she went out to a party, thinking she’d sleep through the night. The complex caught fire—some freak accident with a tenant cooking on the stove. By the time police arrived, they found Cassie alone in a smoke-filled apartment, and I got a call at work in the middle of the day—come quick, your niece is dying.”
“But she didn’ die.”
“No. And I still don’t know everything she went through before Child Protective Services brought her to me. But I wondered that night you and I were sitting in St. Audoen’s, with her between us on the pew, if it wasn’t just the biggest blessing of my life to get that call. Because the hardest day turned out to be what would heal both of us, years down the road, before we even knew we’d need it. So no. I’m not worried about Cassie. She’s right where she needs to be right now. And I’m okay with that. We’ll handle tomorrow, tomorrow.”
It would have been too easy for Cormac to cross the mere inches of space between them, to slip his arms around her and dare her heart to try again. He seemed to feel it too but didn’t move as the wind whipped blonde waves against her neck.
He cleared his throat and pushed away from the ruins. “Well, I’ll go ahead an’ take ye back. They must be wonderin’ where we are.”
“Yes. I imagine Jack will need you at the pub tonight.”
“I imagine he will.”
They started down the rise, Laine stepping over patches of stubborn yellow flowers that refused to yield to a late-November chill. Cormac walked alongside her. Head down a tad. He opened the passenger door and waited for her to climb in—a gentleman’s act that put a painful, businesslike punctuation on the end of the day. He closed it behind her and slipped into the driver’s seat.
Before kicking the car in gear, he looked over at her and said, “Cassie’s story is what it is. But the future—ye can change it for her. Ye are changin’ it. Don’t forget how valuable that is, even if it’s not how or when ye planned.”
“Reminds me of your words at the church. ‘The rain always stops . . . just not in the moment we may want it to.’ Life never happens in our own timing, does it?”
Laine watched as the castle ruins disappeared behind them, gazing at the sea rolling in and the sky bleeding desperate hues to meet it, wishing for the first time that their time at Ashford Manor didn’t have an expiration date attached. But they were leaving. Cormac’s life was in Ireland, a world away. And carpet picnics by candlelight could only go on so long before someone got hurt.
How she wished one sunset over the water could change it all.