the water mocked a hushed endearment, the sound of his name becoming the sound of his voice. Coun-tess, Coun-tess, Coun-tess.
Then I saw him. A peaked cap, broad shoulders, a tweed coat, and pale eyes. Pale-blue eyes clinging to mine. He said my name, low and disbelieving, as the small red boat split the fog and slid toward the shore, so close I heard the oar scrape the sand.
“Thomas?”
Then he was standing, using the oar like a Venetian gondolier, and I was sinking to my knees on the rocky shore, crying his name. The little boat bellied up to the beach, and he stepped out onto solid ground, tossing the oar aside and pulling his hat from his head. He clutched it against his chest, like a nervous suitor come to call. His dark hair was shot with silver, and a few more lines creased the corners of his eyes. But it was Thomas.
He hesitated, teeth clenched, gaze pleading, as though he didn’t know how to greet me. I tried to rise, to go to him, and he was suddenly there, swooping me up and holding me against him, the swell of our child cradled between us, his face buried in my hair. For a moment, neither of us spoke, our burning lungs and pounding hearts stealing our speech and robbing our senses.
“How is it that I’ve lost eleven years, and you haven’t aged at all?” he cried into my curls, his joy tinged in sorrow. “Is this my child, or have I lost you too?”
“This is your child, and you will never lose me,” I vowed, stroking his hair, touching his face, my hands as delirious as my heart. Thomas was wrapped around me, so close I felt every breath, but it wasn’t enough. I drew his face to mine, frantic, afraid I would wake without kissing him goodbye.
He was so real and so wonderfully familiar. The scrape of his cheeks, the press of his lips, the taste of his mouth, the salt of his tears. He kissed me like he’d kissed me the first time and every time after that, pouring himself out, holding nothing back. But this kiss was flavored with long absence and new hope, and with every sigh and second that passed, I began to believe in an afterlife.
“You stayed in Ireland,” he choked, his lips skimming across my cheeks, down my nose, and over the point of my chin, his fingers cradling my face.
“Someone told me once that when people leave Ireland, they never go back. I couldn’t bear the thought of never going back. So I stayed. And you stayed with Eoin,” I said, overwhelmed.
He nodded, his eyes so full and fierce that tears trickled down my face and pooled in the palms of his hands.
“I stayed until he told me it was time to go.”
On July 12, 1933, the day after Eoin’s eighteenth birthday, Thomas lowered the little red rowboat from the rafters in his barn and packed a small suitcase with a box of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a few photographs. He thought he might need something that had belonged to me in 2001, something that would guide his travel, and slipped the diamond earrings I’d sold Mr. Kelly into his pocket; he’d bought them back the day after I pawned them. He had the empty urn that once held Eoin’s ashes, and he knew the verse I’d recited that day on the lough, the poem by Yeats that spoke of fairies and riding on the wind.
But Thomas was convinced the diamonds, the dust, and the fairy words made no difference whatsoever. When it was all said and done, he simply hitched a ride to 2001. The moment the boat was returned to the lough, it began to sail toward home, slipping through the ages, parting the waters, and calling the mist. Eoin had watched it disappear.
We left the boat on the shore, the paddle in the sand and the lough behind us. Thomas was wide-eyed but unafraid, his suitcase in his hand, his cap back on his head. I doubted much about Thomas would change, regardless of the decade he called home. For eleven years, two months, and twenty-six days, he had patiently waited. He’d worried that I would be gone, that he would have to find me in an unknown world and across an ocean. He expected to find a son or daughter half grown, if he found us at all. And what if time took him