“I’ll see ye in a week, yeah?” I asked her, breaking the silence.

“Yeah, it’ll be nice to be on home soil again,” she replied uncomfortably.

Fuck this.

I stepped forward and gripped her arms, pulling her against me before she could protest. Wrapping one hand securely around her waist, I moved the other to the hair at the base of her neck so I could tip her face toward mine.

“One week,” I said, my voice raspy. “I’ll see ye in one week, and den we’re goin’ to figure dis out.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything—”

I refused to listen to her tell me that we couldn’t be fixed and I stopped her words with my mouth. She stiffened as my teeth bit into the fleshy part of her bottom lip, but I didn’t stop, and soon she was relaxing against me and sliding her hands under the back of my coat to grip the t-shirt underneath.

“I love ye,” I said harshly before pressing my tongue into her mouth. “We will sort all of dis as soon as ye get to America.”

Tears began to roll slowly down her cheeks, and I shuddered. How the hell was I supposed to leave her?

“We’ll sort it out,” she agreed, bringing her hands up to cover my cheeks. “I love you so much.”

“I love ye, too. Me beautiful wife,” I groaned back, thanking God that whatever I’d said had finally gotten through to her.

I’d find a way to earn back her trust. I had to. There was no other option.

I loved her more than anything else on earth—more than my mother, more than myself. I’d do whatever it took, jump through whatever hoop I could, beg on my knees if I had to.

I would not allow her to pull away from me.

“You have to go,” she whispered achingly, running one of her fingers over my eyebrow. “I’ll see you in a week.”

“Be careful. I took care of Moira’s brudder, but ye still need to be careful, yeah?” I kissed her hard. “I don’t want to leave ye.”

“It’s only a week,” she reassured me, and I wasn’t sure how our roles had become so reversed that it was as if she was comforting me. “That’s not so long.”

“Trick, we need to go, man.” Charlie called, popping his head inside the front door.

“I love ye,” I said again hurriedly. “If I get dere before ye leave, I’ll call ye.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding even as I kissed her. “Now go.” She planted her hands against my stomach and pushed me away, but I immediately grabbed her hair in both hands and pulled her back, kissing her harshly.

“Trick! Let’s go.” Charlie called again.

I tore my mouth from Amy’s and dropped my hands from her hair. I knew that if I held her for a second longer, I wouldn’t leave. I’d fuck everything up worse, because I’d refuse to take one step from her side.

I grabbed my duffel from the floor and threw it over my shoulder before looking back at the woman who held my entire world in her hands. Her arms were wrapped around her waist, and her shoulders were bunched up nearly to her ears as she huddled against the wall, watching my every movement. I wanted to go back to her. Everything in my body was screaming for me to reach for her again, but I knew I couldn’t.

Instead, I nodded at her and pursed my lips in a kiss before turning my back and striding toward the door.

I didn’t look back again. I didn’t have the willpower.

Years later, I wondered what I would have seen on her face if I’d glanced back just once.

Chapter 36

Amy

It was my last shift, though no one in the pub knew it. Three days had passed since Patrick had left, and though I missed him, I also felt a little numb about it all. I had to pull all that numbness in around me like a cloak. Thinking about Patrick alone with Moira made me want to scream and rip my own hair out. It was agony… so I didn’t think about it. Late the next night, Peg, Doc and I would be headed for the steamer that would carry us to the US and my husband, who I was sure was waiting impatiently for our arrival.

I wasn’t nervous, not really, but I’d had this weird energy running through my body that entire night and it made me feel like I was going to jump out of my skin. Intuition? Maybe. But I couldn’t tell if it was because we were going to be on a freaking boat in the middle of the ocean for days, or if it was because I was so anxious to see Patrick again.

I was still so angry with him.

I’d had so many different emotions since he’d left. I was angry, sad, confused, nervous…jealous. God, it felt as if the jealousy would completely eat me up from the inside.

I hated Moira for taking away the one thing that I’d known I could give Patrick, the one thing reserved for me and me alone. She was having his child. His child. And here I was after months of marriage with nothing in my belly but a seething mass of emotions. It wasn’t fair.

I knew that life wasn’t fair, of course I did. But the whole situation with Moira was just too much for me to handle. I wanted to cry and scream and scratch at the hives that had become a constant reminder of my husband’s infidelity every second of every day. Instead, I just kept living like nothing was wrong and I pulled that cloak of numbness tighter around me.

Underneath it all, I just missed him so badly. Having him away at college was nothing like knowing he was somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean. I had no way to even contact him.

My night was finally almost over, and I was thinking about the things I needed to pack as I carried some garbage out the back door of the pub. I tried to ignore the hair prickling on the back of my neck as I lifted the dumpster lid and threw out the bag of trash, but something had me reaching up to rub it.