Chapter 1
Fiona
Blackburn Farms, Kentucky - Present Day
The house is silent.
Too silent.
And it’s times like these that the grief moves back in, settling upon me like a weighted blanket that never feels comforting, merely claustrophobic.
I’m in the formal sitting room, my favorite because of the big windows that overlook the long, oak-lined driveway. Next month the leaves will start turning colors and dropping, but for now, we’re soaking up the last warm rays of summer.
A cup of tea sits on the table, untouched but only because it’s still cooling. The boxes of photo albums from the attic are stacked beside me, on the floor, and piled onto an adjacent chair. More spill across the coffee table—frozen moments of a life now fractured.
It’s been almost a month since my youngest son, Wade, died, and there are times I think I can survive this.
And there are times… like right now… I don’t want to go on.
I pick up an album, a dulled burgundy canvas covering with a placard on the front that doesn’t identify the year or what’s inside. While I was the type of mother who took a million pictures of my kids as they grew up and dutifully put them in protective coverings inside the albums, I never labeled them. Over the years, I would memory surf, and the disorganization never bothered me. On the contrary, it was always a lovely surprise, not knowing what I would find when I opened one up.
I flip the cover and my heart lurches at the very first photograph. It’s of all my children, taken a good twenty-five years ago, if I’m guessing at their ages. Ethan, the oldest, already looking so serious, as if he knew he’d be running the Blackburn empire one day. My precious twin girls, Kat and Abby, holding hands as they jump off the dock and into the pond.
And there’s Wade… always the most mischievous, pushing his brother Trey into the water from the bank. A perfect moment frozen by the snap of the shutter, when everyone was happy and carefree and never suspected the tragedy that would befall us one day.
I focus on Wade with his toothy grin and smile at the look of shock on his brother’s face as he realizes he’s about to get very wet. I close my eyes… calling back the memory, letting it play in my head like a beloved motion picture. Their shrieking laughs that never once grated on my nerves, no matter how rambunctious or playfully rotten my brood could be.
My throat tightens. I press my fingers against my lips, willing myself to hold it together. It’s been a month and it’s time to let the pain go and only remember the good times.
Another photo—Trey, Kat and Abby splashing in the pond shallows as Ethan watched over them. Wade, no older than five, drowsily curled in my lap. My beloved Tommy must have taken this picture when I wasn’t paying attention, and I run my fingertip over Wade’s precious face. His life so full, so bright. And now, we’re all missing a piece we can never replace.
I bite my lip, but it doesn’t stop the tears that spill. I don’t bother to wipe them away, knowing more will just replace them.
Besides, I’m Irish. We’re big on our feelings and I’ve never been one to quash them for the sake of unnecessary stoicism. I’m a mother, and I’m allowed to grieve the loss of a child.
A quiet shuffle of feet pulls me from my thoughts. I glance up to see Sylvie standing in the doorway, her small frame hesitant, her green eyes filled with something I recognize—pain and uncertainty. She’s only been with us for five months, a granddaughter who was a stranger to me when she stepped foot on Blackburn Farms, and now as precious to me as all my children. She’s Ethan’s only child and still finding her place, still adjusting to a family she didn’t know existed until recently. Wade was her uncle for only a handful of months, and yet they bonded tight. She’s mourning him, same as we all are.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she says softly, her accent lilting over the words. She was raised on a beautiful winery in France, a legacy that she might return to one day when she’s older.
But for now… she’s ours.
“Yer not interrupting,” I assure her, patting the space beside me. “Come, sit.”
She pauses only a moment before crossing the room and curling up beside me. Her small hand presses against my arm, offering comfort. A child, but so intuitive, so aware of emotions bigger than she should have to carry.
“Where’s yer dad?” I ask.
“Working with Skylar,” she murmurs.
I wince at the reminder. The new hire who’s taking over Wade’s duties as one of our horse trainers.
She peers down at the album. “Who is that?” she asks, pointing to the photo I’d just been looking at.
“Yer uncle Wade.” I point out her other aunts and uncles, and Sylvie giggles at their shenanigans.
Glancing at the multitude of photographic memories scattered around, she asks, “Were you going through all of these?”
“There’s way too many to get through them all.” I close the album on my lap and set it on the table beside my tea. “I had hoped to start organizing them. Ye could help if ye want.”
Sylvie’s face lights with excitement. She’s been voraciously devouring any information about her new family, and I feel bad that I’ve not hauled these boxes down until now. Scrambling off the couch, she rifles through one of them and pulls out a very old leather-covered book with gold stitching. I don’t need a blank placard to know what’s in that one. It’s my memories as a child that I brought over from Ireland when I moved here to Kentucky in 1978.
“This one’s huge,” Sylvie says as she sits down next to me again and balances it on her lap. She opens the cover. “And the photos are so old.”
“Thanks,” I say dryly. “Those are of me and my family in Ireland.”
She nods, flipping through photos that start back when I was a baby. My mother put it together for me before I left, tearfully making me promise to never forget my roots. In the end, she finally did something for me that showed she cared.
“Who are these people?” Sylvie asks, indicating a family photo of the Conlans.
I lean over and study the old black-and-white, pointing them out in no particular order. “That’s my mam, Brigid. And my da, Seamus. Right there in a row is my sister, Siobhan, a year and a half my younger, and the baby, Paddy, three years younger than her.”
“And who’s this?” she asks, tapping her finger on the photograph.
My eyes mist slightly, missing him as much today as I ever did. “That’s my uncle Rory. We were very close, but he died long ago.”
“Was he not married?”
“No, but he did know the love of a good woman for a while, and I guess a short period of time with the love of yer life is better than no love at all, aye?”
Sylvie nods and slowly flips through the album, asking questions and soaking in my history. I watch as I grow up with each new set of photos.
When she turns the page, I can’t help but smile at the photograph of a young lady sitting atop a chestnut thoroughbred and a handsome man holding the reins. Sylvie studies the faded colors, the printed memories having progressed with technology to move us into the age of Polaroids. It’s faded, but ye can still make out the sunlight catching in my auburn hair. There’s not enough detail to see the bluish glint to the black hair of the man I’m staring down at.
“That’s Papi,” she says with delight as she recognizes my Tommy. It’s her French name for her grandpa. “And that’s you on the horse, Mami.”
“Ah, we were so young then,” I muse with a chuckle.
“How old?”
“Let’s see… that was the summer of 1978, and I was only a few months away from turning eighteen. Yer papi was nineteen.”
I study Tommy and even after all these years, my heart patters a little faster. I remember that day so well. A beautiful summer day in Ireland. A girl on horseback, cheeks flushed after an exhilarating steeplechase ride and my future husband standing beside me, holding the reins, black-haired and broad-shouldered, his grin cocky and full of mischief.
Sylvie glances up at me. “So Papi was in Ireland when you met him?”
“Aye. He was sent to our farm because he was… how should I say it… a little wayward back here in Kentucky and his parents thought some hard work on a thoroughbred farm might calm his wild ways.”
Sylvie’s looks at me with surprise written across her face. “Tell me more,” she demands so precociously, I laugh. “I want to learn all about how you fell in love with Papi.”
While the grief in my chest is still raw, the weight of Wade’s absence crushing, the past is warm in my mind. Bright. Alive. I allow myself to slip into it, just for a moment. Just for the escape.
A memory stirs—Tommy, standing too close, his gaze dark and full of something unspoken. The scent of hay and leather, the heat of summer in the air. My heart pounding as he leaned in, lips almost touching mine—
I blink, coming back to the present. Sylvie watches me expectantly.
“Before I tell ye that,” I say, taking the album from her lap and placing it on mine, “let me tell ye about where I come from. Because that’s part of yer heritage too. Ye’ve got a lot of Irish in ye.”
I turn the pages back to older pictures we’d glossed over. We move back in time to the black-and-whites, but even with the monochromatic scheme, I can still see verdant green rolling fields, towering stone barns covered in moss and dappled in golden sunlight, horses standing regal in the morning mist. My home before Blackburn Farms. Before America.
“This is where I grew up,” I say, admiring the large manor house with pastures and barns scattered across undulating hills in the background. “It’s called Glenhaven Estates and it’s just outside a town called Fethard in County Tipperary.”
“It was a horse farm, right?” she asks because she’s not completely uninformed about the deep lines of horse blood that run through us all.
“More than just a farm… it was one of the largest breeding and training facilities for Irish thoroughbreds in our country. Still is, for that matter. It was founded in 1925 by my grandfather, Patrick Conlan.”
Sylvie leans in as I speak, her small fingers tracing the edges of the photographs, her voice soft with curiosity. “What was it like?”
The mix of feelings that hits me makes the answer a little difficult. “At times, it was magical.”
“Like how?”
“Well, Ireland’s a country of great beauty and magic.” Sylvie cocks her eyebrow at me and I chuckle. I tap on a photo of the farm. “Ye can’t see it here, because it’s black-and-white, but if ye were standing here on this ridge, ye’d be dazzled by the colors. There are a million shades of green alone, but nowhere near as pretty as yer own eyes.”
My granddaughter blushes, her eyes a mirror image of my own.
“And did you work at Glenhaven the way everyone in the Blackburn family does here?”
I shake my head. “My father didn’t believe girls had much value when it came to horses.”
Sylvie’s disbelief is evident, because she’s seen her aunts work hard and be accomplished horsewomen here at Blackburn Farms. “What did he think girls were good for, then?”
“Marrying,” I say with a disapproving expression. “He wasn’t very progressive.”
Sylvie makes a scoffing sound. “He doesn’t sound very nice.”
“He was a hard man,” I say softly as I stare down at the pictures. It’s of him and Uncle Rory, helping to foal a mare. I don’t know how many times I’d stand outside the stall door watching, wanting to help, but never being invited in.
“But you rode horses,” Sylvie points out.
“Aye,” I agree. “And truth be told, I did things on horses that yer great-grandfather never knew about.”
“Like what?” she asks in awe, an impish smile on her face.
“Well, Uncle Rory secretly trained me to run steeplechase.”
“Did your dad ever find out?”
“Aye, he did. And he wasn’t happy with me at all. But that was low on the list of my transgressions.”
“Mami,” Sylvie says with a sidelong glance. “You were a rebel.”
“Yer grandfather seems to think so.” I laugh.
“She wasn’t a rebel until I taught her how to be a rebel.”
My skin prickles and my heart pulses at the sound of my love’s voice. I look over my shoulder to see Tommy standing in the doorway. Grief over the loss of our son is still written on his face, but the soft smile tells me he’s been standing there listening for a while. He loves the story of how we met.
Sylvie glances back and forth between her grandmother and grandfather. “Papi taught you how to be a rebel?”
Tommy walks into the room, as always, his large frame commanding attention. He sits on the other side of Sylvie, drapes his arm across the back of the sofa and his fingertips brush against my shoulder in a show of love and support. “Your mami was already a rebel deep in her heart. I just helped pull it out a bit.”
“Tell me more about how you two met,” Sylvie demands, cuddling in closer to me, and I relish the release of my grief, which has been replaced by pure love for this sweet girl.
I look to Tommy and he gives a tiny nod that says, Go back. To the place where it all began.
I smile at the greatest love of my life and fall back in time.
And just like that, the past welcomes me home.
