Prologue – Today
Whoever played the game of life always stood at the edge of a cliff between success and misfortune — my mother had told me that over and over again. Her wisdom, some of it good, yes, but other parts so questionable that I would never pass them on to my own daughter, had accompanied me since earliest childhood.
A childhood shaped by the fact that my mother had been barely more than a child herself when she had me.
Now I stood before her grave, laying fresh flowers among the bouquets left by other mourners, already wilting from the days before. Someday, I knew with certainty, I would come here and find the grave completely bare. A grave was ultimately a place of remembrance for the living, not the dead. A place to long for days that had passed, and to be reminded that everything would end eventually.
My mother had been terminally ill for so long that we did not see her death as a heavy burden, but as the end of years of suffering. What does your life give you when you can only look out the window from a bed? What, when the only thing that had made each day bearable was a playlist of old songs that carried you away into dreams? One evening, as we were about to have dinner with her, she had drifted off to one of her favorite songs still playing softly in the background — and never woken up again.
Today, no more tears fell. Even when Sira had volunteered to carry her grandmother’s urn to its final resting place, silence prevailed. The urn was lowered into the dug grave, the guests threw white roses down into it, while Hotel California blared from the small speakers someone had set up beside the headstone.
Not my first choice, but my mother had thought through her own funeral more carefully than anything else in her life. She had planned to the minute what was to happen when, and which song was to be played at which moment.
All of it felt now, two weeks on, like some strange dream I was only slowly waking from. And it was not the first time I’d had to live through this particular dream.
When Sira’s mother died, we had already lived through it once. Weeks of numbness that had threatened to paralyze me, despair, and the fear that I wouldn’t be able to manage it all alone. Back then, many tears had flowed — Sira’s honestly and visibly, for anyone to see. Mine only in the dark, when I reached in the evenings for the spot beside me in the bed and found nothing there but emptiness.
Then, the grief had been new and cut deep — like a knife driven straight into the heart. Now it feels more like the tip of a needle lodged in the chest.
My mother had left me everything she had ever owned. The house where we had cared for her for years; the old Mini rotting away in the garage; and money, though not much. Her care and all the renovations that came with it had cost everything — my savings and hers alike.
Ten years I had been here, looking after her around the clock. Time that had passed faster than I would have liked.
I opened my eyes slowly, took in the overgrown garden sprawling behind Sira, who was swaying gently in the old porch swing, and breathed in deeply.
Ten years that had turned the little eight-year-old with the gap in her teeth — the one she’d always filled with pink chewing gum — into a seventeen-year-old teenager. She drank coffee now, wore makeup, and pulled on skirts that were, in my opinion, too short, but apparently very much in fashion.
“Dad!” she pulled me out of my thoughts, not gently. “You’re thirty-eight bloody years old and you’re honestly telling me there was never anyone who—” She shook her head, exasperated, her hands dancing through the air as though imitating a bird that couldn’t quite manage to fly. “You know. Someone who turned your head.”
At her age it was so easy to talk about love as though it were magic — it just happened, headlong, without any reason whatsoever. I still remembered her first boyfriend — Michael — who had broken her heart, and I knew Sira remembered him too, and certainly always would.
“Mom’s been gone so many years,” she went on, undeterred by my silence. “I don’t think she would’ve wanted you to become a bitter, male spinster!”
I would have liked to correct her — a spinster was a woman who had never been married. I, on the other hand, had been married to her mother, so I could hardly become a male spinster. Instead I smiled and waited for Sira to continue. But my daughter only looked at me expectantly, apparently waiting for me to say something, while I stayed quiet. What was there to answer? Sorry, I have absolutely no desire to date? I suppressed a wry laugh, and when the first raindrops drove us inside to continue the conversation in the kitchen, she had barely waited for the door to fall shut behind us.
“Now that Gran doesn’t need looking after anymore, you could finally—” Sira shook her head, seemed to search for the right words. “I don’t know. Live."
I waved it off. We’d had this argument more times than I could count, and Sira had already tried often enough to set me up with various mothers of her friends — at least until we moved to Clopton, England, to care for her grandmother.
Maybe it had been the illness itself, which demanded help around the clock, or the fact that Clopton had a hundred people in it, but after the move Sira had finally stopped trying to push me into a relationship. Or so I’d thought. Two weeks after her grandmother’s death she’d started going through her mother’s things again. A week later she’d asked me about every woman who appeared in any photo from my youth. And today was the day she had requested what she called a serious conversation.
I’d had a bad feeling about it from the start, but when she handed me an oversized coffee mug, I knew it was going to be a long one. And here we were.
I glanced around my mother’s old kitchen. She had once been a proud woman — a hippie who had never quite escaped that phase of her life and who lived perpetually in the past. Her kitchen was a collection of mismatched furniture, some of it from my childhood, pieces that had survived the move from Italy to England, if not entirely unscathed. Everything here showed its age and I knew I was no exception. Like the dark green cupboards, I had cracks in the varnish, chipped edges, and other problems that could no longer be fixed.
Sometimes it was hard to look back at the past, but when I looked at Sira — watching me with her large dark eyes — I knew I had to tell her something, or I wasn’t getting out of this kitchen today. I let my fingers move carefully over my three-day stubble. “There was someone, but that was an incredibly long time ago.”
Sira’s eyes went wide immediately. “Who? Where! When? You have to tell me everything!”
I would have liked to roll my eyes like a teenager. Our family had moved so often that Sira’s social circle consisted of me and a handful of people she’d managed to meet wherever we happened to be living. Which was why she always latched onto the stories I told her, seemed to live on them alone.
I breathed in, tried to gather my thoughts, but before the beginning of the story could reach my lips, a face appeared before my mind’s eye. The woman had naturally red hair; glittering eyes and a laugh that had once made my heart leap. All of it had been before Sira’s mother, so impossibly long ago, and yet this first love had crept back into my thoughts again and again.
“Did Mom know about her?” Sira seemed to have read my thoughts.
I nodded, slowly. “Yes. Your mum knew everyone I knew — we’d been together since her university days.”
Sira straightened in her chair at once and leaned across the table toward me, nearly knocking over her teacup. “I need more details, Dad!”
Why had I let myself get drawn into this conversation? And more importantly: how was I going to escape before Sira turned every sentence I said into the beginning of some unrealistic love story that didn’t exist and never had? Tense, I breathed in deeply, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes.
Where to begin? The story of Sira’s mother reached so far back that I could barely remember its beginning, but my first great love I had found during my time in Rome — not here in England.
When I opened my eyes again and looked at my daughter, she was smiling knowingly. She knew she had won. I was going to tell my story, and that was exactly what she’d wanted. A victory for Sira — small, but a victory nonetheless. I had been the fish that had swum straight into the bait, and now I wouldn’t be leaving this kitchen until I’d told her the whole thing.
“Her name was Sorcha,” I began, reaching for my lukewarm coffee cup. “And back then I believed I had never met anyone more beautiful than her.”
