onto the waves and never coming back. Each day I walked along the shore, considering. And each day I turned away, unwilling to try. Unwilling to leave Eoin. To leave Thomas. To leave myself, this new Anne, behind. I ached for my grandfather—the man, not the boy. I mourned for my life—the author, not the woman. But the choice was easy to make. Here, I loved. And, in the end, I wanted to love more than I wanted to return.
The years ahead, years that would come and go—years that, for me, had already come and gone—weighed heavily on me as well. I knew what was to come for Ireland. Not every twist and bend or every turn and tumble. But I knew the rocky destinations. The conflicts. The never-ending fighting and turmoil. And I wondered what it was all for. The death and the suffering. There was a time to fight, but there was a time to stop fighting too. Time had not proven especially helpful—not in Ireland’s case—in ironing it all out.
Eoin was the light in the continually darkening tunnel that was closing around me. But even that joy was dimmed by the truth. Loving him didn’t excuse lying to him. I was an imposter, and all my devotion didn’t change reality. My only defense was that I had not set out to harm or deceive. I was a victim of circumstance—improbable, impossible, inescapable—and I could only make the best of it.
Eoin and I had filled several books with expeditions and adventures to far-off places. Thomas had made the connection between my confession in Dublin and Eoin’s stories; I had climbed into a boat on Lough Gill and found myself in another world, just like the little boy in Eoin’s tales. Thomas had stared at the words and then looked at me, realization flooding his face like a black cloud. He’d made himself scarce after that, adding pictures to the stories after Eoin and I had gone to bed.
When we weren’t writing stories, I’d begun to teach Eoin how to tell time and how to read and write. He was left-handed, like me. Or maybe I was left-handed like him. I showed him how to hold his pencil and form his letters in neat little rows so he would be ready when he started school, which came sooner than either of us would have liked. The last Monday in September, Thomas, Eoin, and I walked in silence to the schoolhouse, Eoin dragging his feet, unhappy about our destination.
“Can’t you teach me at home, Mother?” Eoin whined softly. “I would like that so much better.”
“I need your mother to help me on my rounds, Eoin. And you will be with friends. Your father and I met when we were boys. You might miss a chance at making a lifelong friend if you are tutored at home,” Thomas said.
Eoin looked skeptical. Eoin already had a few good friends and probably figured he could see them without attending school. Plus, Thomas hadn’t been taking me on his rounds since we returned from Dublin; he didn’t want to be alone with me.
Seeing that Eoin was unconvinced, Thomas pointed at a little cottage peeking out of the trees in a small clearing, a cottage I’d seen before but never thought much about. It was clearly abandoned, and the foliage had begun to overwhelm it.
“Do you see that cottage, Eoin?” Thomas asked.
Eoin nodded, but Thomas kept walking, moving us along. There was rain in the air.
“A family once lived in that cottage. A family like us. But then the potato blight came, and the family was hungry. Some of them died. Some of them went to America to find work so they could eat. There are abandoned homes all over Ireland. You must go to school to learn how to make Ireland better for her people, so that families don’t die. So our friends don’t have to leave.”
“Wasn’t there any food, Doc?” Eoin asked.
“There was food, just no potatoes,” Thomas answered, his eyes on the landscape as if he could still see the blight that had ravaged the country seventy years earlier.
“Couldn’t they eat somethin’ else?” Eoin asked, and I could have kissed him for his curiosity. I really didn’t know the answer, and I was expected to. I should know these stories better than I did. The research I’d done had been centered on the Irish Civil War and not the decades that preceded it. I listened intently, turning back to look at the