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“Fiona! And here you are entirely, dear girl.” She stood aside, motioning Fiona into the foyer. Mrs. D was the same age as

Fiona’s mom, but she seemed older. Wearier. As if life weighed heavier on her shoulders.

A hacking sound came from the back of the house, and Fiona pretended not to hear it. She’d always thought Mairin’s stepdad

was kind of gross. A drinker, she’d heard her own mom whispering to Flynn.

“Yep, that’s me,” Fiona said, forcing a smile. “Mairin ready?” She glanced around the foyer, which was once as familiar to

her as the one in her own home. This was a lot less cluttered than the one at Fiona’s. With eight kids in the family and seven

still living at home, the Gallaghers’ place was always filled with coats and boots, sports equipment and schoolbags.

By contrast, this place looked spare, almost empty. There was a hall table with a mail tray, and an umbrella stand in the corner.

Mairin’s mother was studying Fiona with an odd, unreadable expression on her face.

“Mrs. D?” Fiona prompted.

“Oh, Fiona. How are you, dear?” Something in her tone dipped into the deep well of sadness that lived inside Fiona.

She waved her hand and meant to say everything was fine, but what came out was a broken whisper. “I’m not okay, Mrs. Davis.”

Mrs. D took her hand, then ever so slowly and gently gathered Fiona into a cushiony hug. “I know, dear. I know it’s hard.

It’s just so very hard. I know, dear Fiona.”

She didn’t know, thought Fiona. She couldn’t. No one could ever know what it was like to push a living, amazing baby out into

the world, to watch her draw her first breath and take on the color of life and let out a sweet bleating cry, and then to

tell her goodbye forever. It was a kind of pain that nobody had ever found a word for. It was something dark and cold, taking

up residence in her chest like a disease that had no cure. Still, the embrace felt nice, and Mrs. D’s lilting Irish voice

was soothing.

As she pulled back, she was surprised to see tears in Mrs. D’s eyes.

“Um, everything okay?” she asked the woman.

“Certainly, dear. Of course.”

Fiona felt a flicker of concern. She recalled that Liam O’Hara had been drafted last fall. Maybe he was already fighting over

in Vietnam. Maybe something had happened to him, and that was why his mother was upset. Fiona looked around the foyer and

down the hall toward Mairin’s room. She focused on a handful of envelopes that lay in the mail tray. To her surprise, she

recognized the Paula Paper stationery Aunt Cookie had given her when she first arrived in Bradford, urging her to stave off

the homesickness by writing letters to her friends.

“Are those my letters to Mairin?” she asked Mrs. D. “Did she not even open them?”

Mrs. D took an unsteady breath. “Ah, that. Well, as it happens, Mairin is away, dear. I’ve been saving the letters for her

when she gets back.”

“Away?” Fiona frowned. “I don’t understand. Away where? For how long?” A thought crossed her mind. Girls going away usually meant one thing. “You can’t mean—”

“Of course not,” Mrs. D said hastily. “Certainly not. It’s—” She paused, glanced over her shoulder, and then gestured at the

door. “Come out on the porch, Fiona dear, and I’ll see you off to school.”

“Hell’s bells, Mrs. D.” Fiona followed her out into the chilly morning. She was worried now. “Where did Mairin go?”

“She’s gone to stay at the Good Shepherd Institute,” Mrs. D said, her voice thin with tension. “Maybe you know it? Over on

Best Street.”

Fiona was vaguely aware of the old stone buildings that covered a city block. It was some kind of orphanage or reform school,

something like that. “I don’t understand at all, Mrs. D. What’s she doing there? And when’s she coming back?”

“Ah, well, then. It’s... a difficult thing, it is,” said Mairin’s mother. “You see, she became troublesome, don’t you know.”

“Mairin? Troublesome?” Fiona gave a snort of disbelief. Her best friend was loud and energetic and irrepressible, but never

troublesome. She had a heart as big as the world. “What on earth did she do that she’s been sent away?”

Mrs. D rubbed her hands down the front of her bathrobe. Up and down, up and down. “Well, the sad truth is, Mairin and Colm—Mr.

Davis—don’t entirely get along. The two of them are like oil and water, truth be told. And with Liam away in the army...

It was decided that Mairin would be better off staying over at the Good Shepherd. The nuns there will keep her safe.”

Safe. Was Mairin not safe in her own home, then?

“I see,” Fiona said. But she didn’t see at all. “I’ll go pay her a visit after school.”

“Ah, no. You mustn’t do that,” said Mrs. D. “’Tisn’t allowed. The nuns there are very strict about the rules.”

“Is it some sort of prison, then?” Fiona asked. “She’s not allowed to have visitors?”

“The nuns are very strict,” Mrs. D repeated. “Very strict indeed. It was a hard choice that was made, but it’s for the best—”

“Deirdre,” called a rough male voice from inside the house. “Deirdre, coffee .”

Fiona cringed a little at the sound of Mr. Davis’s voice. And she was reeling from the news about Mairin—her best friend,

the sister of her heart. Gone . The neighborhood, the whole world just didn’t feel right without Mairin. Fiona looked up at Mrs. Davis, who used to have

two kids and now had none. But at least she’d been allowed to be a mother to her children.

“I should get going to school,” Fiona said. “So long, Mrs. D.” She hurried down the front steps, chased by the sound of Mairin’s

stepfather yelling for his morning coffee.

It was kind of freaky, thinking about Mairin with the nuns. No, not just freaky but infuriating. Because Fiona knew Mairin

didn’t belong in some walled institute run by nuns. She deserved to be running around the neighborhood like always, waiting

for the spring snowmelt and hanging around with her friends.

Fiona could guess at the real reason Mairin had been sent away. It wasn’t because she was bad or in trouble. It wasn’t because

she had done something wrong or terrible.

It was because of Mr. D. Fiona knew it. She had never liked the guy.

Deirdre Davis watched Mairin’s friend hurry along the sidewalk in the direction of St. Wilda’s, off to school like any girl

in the neighborhood. Then, feeling the chill through her threadbare robe, she went inside. She paused at the antique hall

table, where Fiona’s letters to Mairin lay unopened in a tray.

Letting out a sigh, Deirdre slid open the drawer of the hall table, a repository for odds and ends. At the very back was a

tiny parcel wrapped in layers of tissue. She took it out, parting the paper, and stared at the contents—a small white candle

and a single baby’s bootie made of snow-white knitting wool. She ran her thumb over the bootie, touched it to her cheek, and

then put the keepsake away.

She lifted the loose end of her cloth belt and dabbed at her eyes, then let out her breath with a shudder.

A sadness filled her, prompted by a wave of nostalgia.

Seeing poor Fiona Gallagher at the end of her ordeal dredged up memories in Deirdre that popped up like sucker roots under the apple tree. Memories that refused to stay buried.

“Deirdre, goddamn it, where’s my coffee?” Colm’s bellows made her grimace.

“Coming,” she yelled back peevishly. “Give it a rest, already. I’m up to ninety doing my morning chores, while you’re in there

faffing about, giving out orders when you could come down and make your own damn coffee.” She stalked into the kitchen to

find him already seated at the Formica table. He was scowling at the lottery numbers in the morning paper.

Feck . The man couldn’t even be bothered to pour his own coffee. The percolator was finished on the stove. She turned off the flame,

then picked up the carafe and filled a thick porcelain mug, adding a scoop of sugar just the way he liked it. She set it before

him and spun away to pour a cup for herself.

“Who the hell was that?” he asked in his grainy post-drinking voice.

“Mairin’s friend Fiona,” Deirdre said curtly. “She came by looking for Mairin. Fiona’s been away and didn’t know Mairin’s

been sent up to the nuns.”

“Fiona? Oh, the dirty one that got herself knocked up, then?”

There was so much wrong with his question that Deirdre almost laughed. Almost. “Fiona’s not dirty, but decent,” she retorted.

“She’s a sweet-natured girl I’ve known since she and Mairin were tiny.”

“So sweet-natured that she got herself knocked up,” Colm insisted.

“She didn’t get herself knocked up. It took the willing participation of a boy, for Christ’s sake.”

“She’s a filthy chit,” he continued, steamrolling over the point she was trying to make. “The Gallaghers went too easy on

her, if you ask me.”

“No one asked you, and it’s none of your business anyway,” Deirdre retorted. Her husband was always so ornery after a night

at Kell’s. She leaned against the counter and sipped her coffee, letting the hot, bitter taste of it slip over her tongue.

“She should have gone to the nuns,” Colm pontificated. “That’d be the way for sure. Then the girl would get what she deserved.”

Deirdre lost herself in thought, unable to bear listening to more of his rantings on things he knew nothing about. Every word he said regarding unwed mothers and babes out of wedlock was a stab to Deirdre’s heart, even though no one in this life would ever know why that was.

When Fiona showed up at her door this morning, Deirdre had been taken aback by a flood of unexpected emotion. She had recognized

Fiona’s sadness as if the girl were holding up a mirror.

The stark recognition reminded Deirdre that she, too, had once known the heat of teenage passion. Back in her day, in the

Irish town of Limerick, she herself had been that girl—a pretty, promising youngster full of youthful energy and impossible

dreams. But oh, so naive and careless.

Her mum had figured it out in the first three months, noting Deirdre’s frequent trips to the loo, her sudden aversion to cabbage-laden