I stood in the back of the bookshop and read what a local historian had written about my family in the past tense. The Madigan family, prominent in the region for three generations, known for their distillery and their place in the complicated social fabric of organized crime in the west of Ireland. I got as far as the sentence that began with Tragedy struck, and I closed the book before I read the rest.
I put it back on the shelf. I stood there with my hand on the spine and breathed through it. Then I took my hand away and went back to the other titles.
"You're not from here," the woman said when I came back through.
"Sorry?"
"You're not from here." Not unkindly. Just noting it. "But you know the town. The way you walk it. You know where things are."
I held her gaze. "I visited once or twice. When I was young."
She studied me with those sharp eyes. "Where are you staying?"
"The Kerrigan estate," I said.
Her face changed. Recognition, and something else. A small adjustment of whatever category she'd sorted me into.
"Ronan's a good man," she said. "His father was a good man. The whole family." A pause. "It's been quiet up there a long time."
"Yes," I said. "I imagine it has."
"Funny." She said it like it had only just surfaced. "You're the second this month to come asking after that house and the family tied to it. Had a gentleman in a fortnight back. Older. Lovely manners. Wanted the local histories, anything on the old families out on the point, the alliances between them." She lifted a shoulder. "A writer, I took him for. We get them."
Something cold walked up the back of my neck. I kept it off my face.
"Did he leave a name?"
"He did not. Paid cash." She frowned, as if the oddness of it was only now reaching her. "Tipped like a man who'd rather not be remembered, now that I think of it."
She held my gaze a beat longer, and I gave her nothing. Eventually she nodded and went back to whatever she'd been doing.
I bought a book I didn't need about the geology of the Clare coastline, because it seemed rude to leave without buying anything, and went back out into the wind.
The street was empty in both directions, the ordinary empty of a small town on a weekday. I stood on the step anyway and let the trained part of me work, the part my father built and Chicago kept sharp. No one in a doorway. No car that didn't belong. Nothing.
Which should have settled it and didn't. The back of my neck had its own opinion, and it had kept me breathing a long time, so I'd quit arguing with it years ago.
I walked to the end of the main street and turned down the coast road, and kept going until the town was behind me and the cliff path was ahead and the water was below me, gray and enormous and uninterested. I stopped where the path curved down toward the shingle beach and thought about a fifteen-year-old girl who ran from this town in the dark and didn't come back for a long time.
I thought about what she'd been running toward.
I thought about what I'd built in Chicago. The bar, the whiskey, the surveillance, the case. How it felt like purpose for so long, and how it had started to feel like something else in the last year. Not purposeless. Just insufficient. Like I'd built a very elaborate machine for a task the machine couldn't actually finish, and some part of me had known it a while and hadn't been willing to say so.
I'd called Kira my second night at the estate. Kira ran my bar in Chicago, closed it four nights a week, and was the nearest thing to a friend I'd let myself keep in four years, which is to say she knew a woman named Claire Byrne and nothing underneath her. So I gave her the story I'd kept ready for exactly this. A sick aunt in Ireland, no telling how long. I put her in charge with a raise she didn't argue about and the number of a lawyer for anything she couldn't handle. Madigan's would keep pouring without me.
It cost me less than it should have, handing off the place that had been my whole life for four years. Maybe because it had only ever been a very good place to hide, and I was standing now in the thing I'd been hiding from.
The wind came off the water cold and sharp. I turned and looked back at the town.
Dunraven from this angle looked the way it did in my childhood memories of it. Small and certain, settled into its piece of coastline like it had always been there and meant to stay. The church spire. The harbor. The roof of the pub my father went to the odd Friday and came home from smelling of porter and in an excellent mood.
I'd thought about this town every day since I ran.
I'd thought about it with grief and anger and the bitter fuel of a girl taken from everything she loved, certain she knew exactly who'd done the taking. I'd thought about it as the place where everything ended. The place I could never come back to.
I was standing in it. It hadn't ended.
I pulled my collar up and looked at the town I grew up in and thought about my mother, and what she'd wanted for me, and how it hadn't been a cage after all. I thought about Ronan saying I shouldn't be alone anymore. Tiernan wanting something real. Cormac, who'd read the whole of my work and found nothing in it he'd have done differently.