“Oh?”

“A Hilary Barrett.”

“Hil—”

“We’re searching the White Pages on the ’Net,” Hector interrupted, his tone suddenly harsh, cocked, and aimed at Grace. Iris seemed to sense there was a subplot, or so Hector feared, so he smiled at Grace then.

“Right. Yes. Of course,” Grace said. “Good idea. The White Pages. Well, you never know. Right? Always a good place to start, with the telephone book.” Grace walked toward the door but turned before leaving. Iris couldn’t see that she held her hands open as if ready to catch something. Like an answer. Eyes so wide that if they had been speaking they’d have been saying, Hector, what have you found out? Hector shushed her away with a small wave of his hand.

In all, there were thirteen search results for Hilary Barrett in the White Pages for Massachusetts. But only one in the age bracket that matched Iris’s guesstimation: Becket, MA.

“It’s probably not her.” She thought a moment. “Where is Becket? Maybe she moved there?” She fell silent again. She shook her head. “Anyway. I just can’t ring her up—”

“Sure. Sure you can. She’ll remember you. I mean … yours is not a voice one easily forgets.” Hector, Hector, Hector. What are you saying?

Iris paused. She stared at the screen. Her face flushed as she took this in. “No, I mean. I don’t even know her. She’s not an old friend,” she said at last. She bit her lower lip hard. Looked around the room and at the closed door. “She’s my daughter’s birth mother.”

Hector sat back and inclined his head forward and his mouth formed an “oh.” He looked surprised because he was. The missing piece had fallen into place, but it wasn’t what he’d expected.

“Rose is my adopted daughter.” Iris closed the laptop. Her hands lay on her lap and she made small fists with them. And then she explained: the promise she’d made to her husband before he died but had never carried out; how she’d “stolen” the envelope just a few days earlier from the Adoption Board and got the name and address; and that yesterday when she visited 99 St. Botolph Street, the man there had never heard of a woman named Hilary Barrett.

She explained it all except for the now missed appointment and the reason for it.

“So you see, I can’t just ring her up, even if this Hilary Barrett in Becket is the woman I’m looking for.”

She was elegant in her distress. She held it together. There was strength in this woman; Hector wondered if she knew she had it. Her story was breaking his heart, but his heart had a mind of its own and, to paraphrase the great Irish singer/songwriter, his heart was doing his thinking and it was leading him into a danger zone. He needed more time. More time to get to wherever this was going and to figure out some way to help her, and so in a flush of feeling he found himself saying, “Why don’t I drive you there?”

“What?”

“Sure. Why not? Plan B. You could get out of the city heat and see some country.”

“Is it far?”

“Becket? Not really. About two hours. West across the state. Into the Berkshires. Part of the Appalachian mountain range and really—”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll ask Grace if we can borrow the car.”

“Please! Please don’t tell her—”

“No. No. Of course not.”

“Why,” she continued, “it’s probably nothing. I’ve been pretty unlucky so far.”

Hector laid his hand on hers. “Sure. I understand. Your secret’s—” Iris looked at him. She pulled her hand away like it’d been stung by a bee.

“Sorry, I’m not good with words. What I meant was—”

“It’s okay. I think I know what you meant.”

“I just want to … you know … help.” He reached for her hand and held it firmly for a second, then let go. “I meant to tell you last night before the concert, but you weren’t around. I want to help you because … you helped me.”

“What?” Her eyes widened.

“Yeah. Yesterday morning. I finished my piece because of you … you were my inspiration.”

A group of young teenagers cycled past the window, their voices loud and happy. He watched her watching them until they cycled out of sight. Iris stood and went to the window. After a few moments, she walked toward Hector, put her hand briefly on his shoulder, and said, “Okay,” and then went out the front door and crossed the street to the park.

*   *   *

Hector found Grace and Billy in the office and when he told Grace that he wanted to borrow her car to take Iris to the Berkshires, she gave him that mother of all looks.

“What have you found out? What’s the appointment? And who is she looking for? Is it the name on the envelope? Have you found her?”

“Nothing about the appointment, and not exactly.”

“Hector! Tell me.”

“It’s a needle in a haystack, Grace. We found one Hilary Barrett in Becket, Massachusetts. What are the chances? Right, Billy?”

“Hilary Barrett. Hilary Barrett.” Grace mused and screwed her round, dolphinlike eyes closed. “I know that name.” Billy and Hector waited. Waiting for Grace to clarify, but she kept shaking her head and closing her eyes. “I can’t remember. Oh…”

“I might be able to help,” Billy said at last. Grace and Hector looked to him. “I mean. I am in computers. What do we know?”

“Of course. Billy. Computers! Now.” Grace spoke excitedly, her voice rising.

“We only know that she is Mrs. Bowen’s daughter’s birth mother,” said Hector.

Billy raised his eyebrows. “That’s a mouthful.”

“And, that this Hilary Barrett once lived at 99 St. Botolph Street. That’s about it. Right?” Hector looked to Grace. “She’d be around … I don’t know. What do you think? How old is Iris?”

“Oh my. She’s so pretty. Um? Early forties?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. So her daughter is … like … twenty?”

“No. Nearly nineteen,” Billy said and Grace and Hector looked to him. “Yeah, she told me yesterday morning when we were talking at breakfast and—”

“Right. Okay.” Hector was nodding his head up and down in a kind of staccatolike beat in double-time. “That makes this Hilary anywhere from forty to forty-five. Ish. Yeah?” Hector was bouncing on his toes now. Rocking back and forth. “Okay. See if you can find anything out, kiddo.”

“Will do.”

Then, as if in silent consent, they left in separate directions. Grace to the kitchen to plan that evening’s dinner, Billy to his laptop to see what he could find out. And Hector to his room, where he lay down and waited for the sound of Iris’s footsteps returning.

Eleven

The thing about Iris Bowen was she liked to talk to people, even strangers. Like a few days earlier with Thornton Pletz, the Polish-American waiter at Botolph’s. If it hadn’t been for the dead-ended conversation about Hilary, she would have gone on and asked him about his family in Europe. Had he any relatives still there? Did he have children? Or, with Kerry at the airport the day she arrived, if she hadn’t been so overwhelmed with the sense of arrival and her mission, Iris would have asked in what village in County Kerry her granny was born.

At home in Clare, she struck up conversations with the people behind shop counters, too. With the man who sold her flowers on a Wednesday afternoon at the street market in Ennis, with the fair-haired fishmonger from Slovakia, who had developed a habit of asking each time he met her, “When is Rose due back?” To which Iris usually replied, “In a few weeks.” Her answer, too, had become a habit. Their frequent exchanges (Iris always bought a piece of halibut from him on a Friday) had turned to repartee, which made the Slovakian and other customers in the fish shop smile.

A few things like that, little anchors, helped her cope with loss.

And, it made her feel less lonely.

Before flowers and fish, Iris would often meet Tess for lunch in Ennis. In winter they sat in old feather-stuffed chairs beside the fire, just inside the front door of the Old Ground Hotel. In the summer they sat in garden chairs under the ancient beech tree on the moss-lined patio. They became regulars among regulars and the owner, an art lover named Allen, got to know their names. He never failed to ask how Rose was getting on. He’d known Luke because Luke often lunched there on his noncourt days and they’d become friends. When Luke was in hospital, Allen would send meals from the hotel’s kitchen. One day he had driven all the way out to Ashwood to deliver a bread-and-butter pudding, which was Luke’s favorite.