“Oh, I slept fine.” I’d actually slept perfectly, and woken with lingering dream fragments that featured her son. I tried to banish the memory and drum up something else to say. “Is this your first time in Ireland? Or did you meet—Mr. O’Connor—here?”

Kate smiled and took a long sip of her coffee. “No, I met him after he moved to Boston.”

“Why did he move there?”

“A lot of people did, then. More jobs. More opportunity.” The cup’s steam formed a veil before her face, gentling her features like a camera’s soft focus. “But Brian always said, ‘I’m going to die in Kilkarten.’ Like it was a foregone conclusion he’d come back.”

Yet he hadn’t spoken to his brother for twenty years after he left. “He must have really loved it.”

“More than anything.” She finally turned to look at me, her ethereal features firming up with attention. “We’re going to see Patrick’s widow today. You’re welcome to come, but don’t feel obligated.”

I didn’t; I felt awkward. “Oh. Thank you, but I actually saw her yesterday.”

Her brows rose and the silence lasted just long enough to feel strained. “And how was she?”

“Um.” Honestly, you’d think I’d never written ethnographic papers for cultural anthropology classes describing all sorts of relationships and behaviors. “She was—not very talkative.”

Kate nodded and pursed her lips like she was about to say something, but she changed her mind and stared back out the window. “Did you like her?”

The question struck me as peculiar. “We didn’t spend enough time together for me to form an opinion.”

She nodded again, and let out a deep sigh. Then Eileen reentered with my scone, and Kate switched the topic to my schoolwork and interests and other parental inquiries, and the odd moment passed.

After breakfast, I walked to the village while the sun finished rising, through floating sheets of mist and the spray of the sea and long, sharp calls of birds. I caught an extremely bumpy bus that carried me to Cork, and chatted easily with eighty-year-old Mrs. Buckley, who insisted that Mike’s grandfather had never really meant to marry Mike’s grandma or been interested in Eileen from the inn, but that he’d really loved her.

Apparently Mike’s granddad really got around.

Cork felt like a massive city after several days in Dundoran, but I still wanted to stop every ten seconds and whip out my camera. I walked along the river, strolling across the bridge and admiring the colorful houses and the cathedral’s steeple. I got hungry again and settled in a tiny café for an hour, eating another scone accompanied by a mocha. I alternated between people watching and one of my comfort books on my eReader.

At ten, I headed over to Cork’s Central Library, located on the Grand Parade. I spent a happy afternoon buried in the stacks. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted, so I pulled everything that mentioned Kilkarten, the neighboring farms, Dundoran Village, local archaeology, Iron Age Ireland, Rome... I ended up with stacks of books. I could access the digital newspaper archives for free from the library itself, so I delved into old articles.

Libraries were dangerous places. Start researching one topic, and the next thing you know it’s three hours later and you’re reading up on family feuds from two-hundred years ago. I did pretty well at staying on topic, but I was surprised to find it near seven o’clock when I left. I ate at a South Indian restaurant while reading a copy of the local paper. I thought about calling my mom, but decided I’d shoot her an email when I went back to the inn instead.

I got back just as the sun set, and after grabbing my laptop from my room, headed down to the inn’s library. It was a cozy room lined with books and a small fireplace. Lauren sat at a round polished table in the window alcove, typing away on a laptop. She looked up when I stopped in the doorway, and pushed back some of the bright corkscrews that had fallen loose from her messy bun. “Oh, hey. You’re back from...”

“I went into Cork. Did some research.” I dropped down at her table. “Where’re your mom and Anna?”

“Oh, back at the cottage. I needed to get away and relax.”

I laughed sympathetically. “Long day?”

She sighed and shook out her hair. “You have no idea.”

I studied her. Lauren wasn’t very forthcoming, but she seemed smart and practical and down-to-earth. I had no idea how she felt about Kilkarten or if she fully sided with Mike’s excavation ban, but I wasn’t quite ready to ask her that straight out.

“I think Mike mentioned you were meeting your uncle’s widow? How’d that go?”

Lauren shrugged and closed the laptop. “It was an experience.”

“Was it awkward? Mike told me a little about your family dynamics.”

Her brows rose. “He doesn’t usually talk about our family. But, yeah, it made it awkward. Mom and Maggie were polite but cold, and it kind of felt like they were taking digs at each other.”

Kind of like when my dad and his ex-wife were in the same room. “Did you ask your mom about it?”

Lauren nodded. “I tried to pry it out of her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the big deal was. Though I guess she did invite Maggie and Patrick to Dad’s funeral, and they didn’t come, so Mom thinks we currently have the high moral ground for coming out here at all. I don’t even know.” She shrugged. “But we’re going back for lunch tomorrow, to meet Maggie’s nephew, so it wasn’t an entire disaster.”

We spent the next hour chatting about innocuous things—mostly school. Lauren had just wrapped up her Masters of Public Health, and while that had no relation to archaeology, everyone in grad school had a small kinship. We had finals and capstones and defenses before panels or committees. We had undergrads and advisors and exhaustion and a deep disdain for everyone who kept telling us how much harder life would be in the “real world.”

It was Lauren who finally moved the topic closer to home. “Where did you grow up?”

“Just outside of the city.”

“So you’re actually a New Yorker. Leopards’ fan?”

“I’ve been a Leopards fan since I was little girl.” I relaxed back in the seat, loose and mellow. “There was a... I used to wear a jersey as my night-shirt. Dustin Jones, the QB before Carter. My dad got it for one of my brothers, and he forgot it at my house... God, they fought over who’d taken it when Evan couldn’t find it.”

“You must have really wanted it.”

I’d really wanted a present from my father about something he loved. That was the year I’d started doing my own laundry, because I didn’t want my mom to see it and make me give it back. Which, in retrospect, was pretty pathetic. “I was a weird kid.”

She laughed. “Weren’t we all.”

“Mike too?”

She wavered her head back and forth. “When we were little, sure. But after our dad died... He got really serious.”

“But now everyone describes him as charming.”

Her brows scrunched. “Don’t I know it.”

I blinked.

She sighed. “Sorry. More bitterness than I meant, there. I just wish he’d spend some time with this family. But—I don’t know.”

I suspected I did, if I saw the same things she did. That Mike’s charm was something of a façade, and that Lauren was worried about her brother. Hadn’t Mike said Lauren wanted their family to “fix” things? “Thus, the vacation.”

She smiled and waved a hand. “I’m forcing us to bond.” She paused. “So—just to clarify—how do the two of you know each other?”

I hesitated. “Did Mike mention the excavation at Kilkarten to you?”

She shook her head and frowned.

“I’d contracted the ability to excavate Kilkarten from your uncle Patrick, but when he died, the land went to Mike.” I felt like I was walking along a tightly stretched rope. “That’s right, isn’t it? The land was left to Mike?”

She transferred her gaze to me, just a hint of perplexity opening her features. “Well. I guess it wasn’t, really.”