to inspect such offerings before eating them.
Sophie chuckled. "Safe, I promise. They're some of Marcus's last batch of dried cranberries. Very tasty, and no green stuff."
Well, if a woman couldn't trust her friends, she was in a heap of trouble. Cass took a couple, surprised by the tangy sweetness. They were delicious. She added a handful to the top of her porridge. "They're good." It was probably bad to sound so surprised.
"Yup." The healer's eyes twinkled. "Beware his cookies, though. He's taken to sending out batches of them on a regular basis."
Maybe in exchange for all the food that had certainly flowed his direction - Cass knew her village life. "Not a baker?"
"He has a bit of an aversion to sugar."
She was duly warned. "Is there a potted plant I should feed if I get offered one?"
Sophie grinned and reached for more cranberries. "Nope. Just find yourself a witchling. They seem to forgive him his terrible cookies."
"They see what lies beneath." Kids always did. Cass stabbed her spoon into her porridge and watched the cranberries sink into oatmeal goop.
"You like him."
Damn. She should have stayed in her room and brooded. "He sneaks up on you. Like a complicated piece of music." The kind she'd never been able to resist.
Sophie raised an eyebrow, amused. "And what are you going to do about that?"
"What can I do?" Sadness landed back on Cass's chest with a force that took her breath away. She looked around Sophie's kitchen. "This isn't my life."
Sophie looked at a sweet photograph sitting on the window ledge. Mike, hands curled around a tiny, naked, newborn Adam. "Sometimes life changes."
Cass stabbed a cranberry. You didn't start playing a ballad in the middle of a reel.
You just didn't.
He had the luck of a foot soldier on permanent latrine detail. Marcus watched, resigned, as the parlor's most popular inhabitant squatted down in front of Morgan and twinkled her green eyes at his daughter. "Well, hello, a leanbh mo chroi. Did you come to hear the music again?"
"Her name's Morgan. Not Alanna."
Moira chuckled from the couch. "I do believe our visitor's speaking Gaelic. A leanbh mo chroi means child of my heart. My gran used to greet me with those same words." She smiled kindly at Cass. "And I believe I heard your nan calling you the same thing."
Marcus scowled - the Irish might adopt small children as easily as breathing, but he didn't have to like it. Not his child.
Morgan plunked into her new friend's lap. "'lanna."
Outvoted by all the females in his life. Marcus sank into a chair on the other side of the parlor, displeased with the world. Only after he'd settled in did his brain register the sadness in the room. Cass smiled at the child on her knee - but her mind dripped with sorrow.
He looked over at his aunt. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Quiet words that carried sorrow of their own. "Her gran's gone back to Ireland is all. We dropped her at the airport this morning."
He tried to be happy that there was one less meddler in Fisher's Cove - but he knew what it was to miss someone you loved. "Does Cassidy go back to Ireland often?"
"No." Moira shook her head, eyes sadder now. "And it breaks both of their hearts that she doesn't."
He didn't understand women. "What, she's got some terrible fear of flying or something?"
"Nothing so simple." Old hands worried the fringe on a brocade pillow. "Ireland's a country steeped in tradition. It doesn't change quickly, especially with all the young ones leaving to find work and livelihood in the big cities or across the waters."
They weren't speaking entirely of Cass now. And it was making him cross to try to follow the winding conversation. "She can't visit because they're a little behind the times?"
"It's always been hard for strong, independent women to make their way in Ireland. Especially ones who have tasted freedom elsewhere." The words drifted now, an old lady talking mostly to herself. "To go back is a reminder that it isn't truly home anymore. And a temptation to pretend that it is."
Against all will, he knew how that felt. His precious home on the cliffs felt empty when he trekked there now - a hollow, sterile castle. It would bring a tidy sum when it sold - and leave him king of a cottage that was little more than a hut.
Cassidy Farrell didn't even have a hut.
He cursed as sympathy breached his defenses, flowing over carefully laid sandbags as if they