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weeks, so it was deep. I could not swim, and I knew the demons would be ready for me after what I had done.
    I opened my arms and I swayed, but I could not do it.
    So I thought about what I was left with.
    I could flee, but I had nowhere to go. I could not stay at home, that much was clear. And then I realized I had no choice. I had to marry James.
    *
    As the weeks crept towards the wedding I tried to keep up a front. It didn’t help anyone for me to be surly and sad. My mother and Mae sold him hard to me, and I took heed of them the best I could. James Nolan was clean, respectable, and kind. A tall man, he may have been more than ten years my senior but he was well built and strong. Not handsome, but his fine features gave him a gentle, intelligent appearance that was not entirely unattractive. His mother was decent, and we would have our own house. I could do a lot worse.
    But this route of thinking wasn’t mine and while I went along with them, all I could think about was how this was supposed to be happening with somebody else. Every inch of me burned again for the young man who had gone to America five years before and taken with him my heart, my soul, my spirit: the tools I thought I needed to love.
    On the morning of my wedding, I wore the cream gown my mother had worn. It was silk and smelt of lavender. Cousin Mae put rouge on my cheeks and on my lips. As her fingers touched my mouth, she slipped her hand around the back of my neck and held my head so that I could weep. I shook into the silk of her shoulder and thought of how nothing would ever be the same again.
    When I had finished, I determined then that I would not cry again over any man. James Nolan was supposed to be good, but here he was dragging a young woman into a loveless marriage. So if he was happy with a wife who didn’t love him, then that was exactly what he was going to get.
    I smiled and charmed my way through the day of celebrations. I was, everyone agreed, the most beautiful bride Achadh Mor church had ever seen and James, being the popular teacher, drew out every neighbor in the vicinity to wish us well. It was gone ten before the last of them left the house and we settled into our first night alone together.
    Two complete strangers—and I was determined that we should stay that way.

7
    Dan was great the day we went out to Yonkers. He said that if I didn’t like it, we didn’t have to move there. He just wanted me to look, as it was something that we had to decide about together. He was trying so hard and with the patience of a saint, but the joint ownership thing hit me like a brick. Another complicated layer of commitment kicking in.
    It’s not that I never travel out of Manhattan; it’s just that I prefer not to. I have lived on the Upper West Side most of my life, except for my university years in Galway. I found my apartment back in my twenties. Everyone was renting, but I had enough of my grandparents’ Irish insecurity gene to push myself financially and purchase.
    The thing that I love about the city is that it is always changing. You don’t need to move because it moves around you. Restaurants transform themselves from Indian to Italian overnight; neighbors replace themselves every couple of years. If you redecorate, then sit still for a while and a new neighborhood will join you.
    Since then, I have lived in this two-bedroom apartment on West Seventy-seventh every which way. Lived with a single futon until my job as a magazine editor yielded enough for me to decorate in late-eighties chrome and white leather. Then Parisian purple and gold-leaf chic through the self-consciously stylish nineties until, after years of lobbying the board, I finally got to knock down that wall and get the huge open-plan kitchen and living space I’d been dreaming of forever. My apartment is finally home. My home. First and only problem right there. I am not alone anymore.
    The superintendent’s hole in the basement was never an option, so Dan had