The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

enthusiasm.”
    “Fair enough.” He stepped outside with her, waiting while she locked the front door.
    The air smelled of sea and flowers. It was something she loved about Ardmore. The scents and sounds, and the wonderful spread of the water. There were such possibilities in that vast sea. Sooner or later it would bump into land again, another place with new people, different things. There was wonder in that.
    And comfort here, she supposed, raising a hand in greeting as Kathy Duffy called out to her from her dooryard.
    “Is this your first time in Ireland?” Darcy asked him as they walked toward the beach.
    “No, I’ve been to Dublin several times.”
    “One of my favorite cities.” She scanned the beach, noting the pockets of tourists. Automatically she angled away and toward the cliffs. “The shops and restaurants are wonderful. You can’t find that in Ardmore.”
    “Why aren’t you in Dublin?”
    “My family’s here—well, part of them. Our parents are settled in Boston now. And I don’t have a burning desire to live in Dublin when there are so many places in the world and I haven’t seen nearly enough of them yet.”
    “What have you seen?”
    She looked up at him. A rare one indeed, she thought. Most of the men of her acquaintance wanted to talk about themselves. But they’d play it his way for now. “Paris, just recently. Dublin, of course, and a great deal of my own country. But the pub hampers traveling.”
    She turned, walking backward for a bit with her hand up to shield her eyes. “I wonder what it’ll look like when he’s done with it.”
    Trevor stopped, studied the pub as she was. “The theater?”
    “Yes. I’ve looked at the drawings, but I don’t have an eye for such things.” She lifted her face to the breeze of salt and sea. “The family’s pleased with it, and they’re very particular.”
    “So is Magee Enterprise.”
    “I imagine so, though it’s difficult to understand why the man would pick a small village in the south of Ireland for his project. Jude, she says part of it’s sentiment.”
    It surprised and nearly disconcerted him to have the truth spoken so casually. “Does she?”
    “Do you know the story of Johnnie Magee and Maude Fitzgerald?”
    “I’ve heard it. They were engaged to be married, and he went off to war and was killed in France.”
    “And she never married, but lived alone in her cottage on Faerie Hill all her days. Long days, as Old Maude was one hundred and one years when she passed. The boy’s mother, Johnnie Magee’s mother, grieved herself to death within a few years. They said she favored him and could find no comfort in her husband, her other children, or her faith.”
    It was odd to walk here and discuss these pieces of his family, pieces he had never met, with a woman he barely knew. Odder still that he was learning more of them from her than he’d learned from anyone else.
    “I’d think losing a child has to be the biggest grief.”
    “I’m sure it is, but what of those who were alive yet and needed her? When you forget what you have for what you’ve lost, grieving’s an indulgence.”
    “You’re right. What happened to them?”
    “The story is that her husband finally took to the drink, excessively. Wallowing in whiskey’s no better or worse than wallowing in grief, I suppose. And her daughters, I think there were three, married as soon as they could and scattered. Her other son, he who was more than ten years younger than Johnnie, eventually took his wife and his little boy away from Ireland to America, where he made his fortune. Never did he come back nor, they say, contact those left here of family and friends.”
    She turned and looked back at the pub again. “It takes a hard heart never to look back, even once.”
    “Yeah,” Trevor murmured. “It does.”
    “But so the seeds of Magee Enterprise were sowed first in Ardmore. It seems the Magee running matters now is willing to put his time and money into seeing those seeds grow here.”
    “Do you have a problem with that?”
    “No, indeed. It’ll be good for us, and for him as well most likely. Business is business, but there’s room for a bit of sentiment as long as it doesn’t cloud the bottom line.”
    “Which is?”
    “Profit.”
    “Just profit?”
    She angled back, gestured out to the bay. “There’s Tim Riley’s boat coming in for the day. He’s been out with his crew since before first light. It’s a hard life, that of a fisherman. Tim