I was such acoward.
I didn’t know where I was going when I left, but when I got there, I knew that I’d been heading there all along.
By the time I reached the hill behind the village, the sky was the soft gray of early evening, and the air smelled like damp earth and wood smoke. My boots crunched against the gravel path as I made my way up to the small plot where Maggie rested.
We had kept it simple, the way Maggie wanted.
Her headstone stood in the Gallagher plot. My parents were buried here, as were my grandparents, uncles, and aunts.
Most of the Gallaghers had long since left Ballybeg—some to America, others across Ireland and the UK. There was a time when uncles and aunts filled the farmhouse for my grandmother’s Sunday dinners. Now they were gone. Scattered.
The farm passed to my father, then to Maggie and me.
And now, like so much of our heritage, it would pass to business.
I knelt in front of the headstone, brushing a stray leaf off the engraved letters.
Maggie Gallagher
Beloved Sister, Friend, and Heart of Ballybeg
Maggie had chosen the spot herself.
"It's peaceful," she said, with that little smile of hers.
“And a good distance from the church," she added as a joke.
My sister hated village gossip and had told me not to listen to that shite, either. I’d been the sensitive one, while Maggie had been the strong one.
I remembered how she’d joked while we sat here a few months before she died.
"I want to rest far enough away that I can’t hear Mrs. O’Leary muttering over the fence, rolling her eyes at some scandalous rumor of the week.”
I sat on the dewy grass, my coat keeping the damp away.
“Hi, Maggie. It’s been a while.”
The air felt heavy to me—laden with memories but, surprisingly, not in a bad way. It had been eighteen months since she left me.
I think I’d finally stopped grieving her when I stepped into her bedroom with Jax. That had been a moment. But I knew I’d never stop missing her.
There was a Maggie-size hole in my heart that would never fill up.
“I slept with the Yank,” I told her. “It was good sex. On a scale of one to ten, it was a twelve.”
Maggie would always ask me where I was on a scale of 1 to 10, no matter what I said.
“I’m tired.”
“How much on a scale of one to ten?”
“I’m so hungry.”
“How much on a scale of one to ten?”
“I’ve made a right mess of things.” I pushed away a couple of leaves that were close to the headstone. “You’d say, feck no, Dee, you’re just livin’ your life the best way you can.”
I stared at the headstone, my chest tightening as words caught in my throat.
