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Running from Ivy, are you? Now even the opposite coast isn’t far enough away?
I wasn’t running from. I was running to.
Sure you are, buddy.
After I got some goddamn sleep.
Blearily, I rubbed my eyes and put in a quick call to my travel agent. I’d let her handle it. I needed ten hours down.
“When do you want to go?” my travel agent asked.
“What’s today?”
“Thursday, Rory.” She was used to me.
“Friday night.” It would require some shuffling—all right, a lot of it—but all of a sudden, I was certain I needed to be home.
Even if I’d never been certain of that before in my life.
“Can you make that happen?” I asked into the silence.
“Give me a couple hours. No guarantees on what class.”
“I don’t care. I’ll take coach if need be.”
Good thing I’d been so open-minded, because that was exactly what I got.
Once I finally arrived in Dublin what felt like a century later, I also took the most rubbish rental vehicle I’d ever encountered.
But less than seventy-two hours later, I was standing on the moss-covered stoop of the cottage where I’d grown up, drawing in great breaths of sea-tinged air. The scents of nature surrounded me. Flowers I’d been given names for since I was a child and had never bothered to commit to memory. And behind me, children shouted and laughed as they wheeled up the uneven street.
I lifted my hand to knock on the rounded door my mum had painted an eye-searing red. It swung open and the woman in question stared at me, her soft blue eyes more lined, her perfect bow mouth slack with shock.
“Rory Michael.”
It made me smile despite the fatigue from the trip that hung heavy on my shoulders. “Ma.”
She hauled me in for a hard hug that rattled my ribs and settled my heart into a more regular rhythm. I hadn’t even realized how out of whack I was until I felt her arms around me.
Worse, I wouldn’t have said I even derived comfort from her in that way. Was I so unaware of my true feelings? Could I be that daft?
She drew me back and cupped my cheeks. I towered over her, but she’d always closed the distance between us as if will was enough to make it less. “You’re too thin.”
I scuffed my sneaker. “I haven’t lost more than half a stone.”
That wasn’t exactly accurate. I hadn’t been eating. I wasn’t close to wasting away, but my appetite wasn’t what it had been.
I definitely couldn’t go near ice cream.
“Your mum knows. Now you come in here and take a load off.” Before I could argue, she stepped back into the small foyer and called up the stairs. “Padraig, we have a visitor.”
I stepped over the threshold and dropped my bag. I’d traveled light as always. “Oh, Ma, he’s probably busy—”
My da appeared on the landing, his halo of bushy salt-and-pepper hair whiter than I remembered. How long had it been since I’d been home? It shamed me that I couldn’t remember.
That if not for my turmoil over Ivy and what that blasted town Crescent Co
ve had done to me, I might not even care.
