“Why are there always girls in the songs?” Danny interrupted.

“I guess people like to hear about love,” Riley said. He really didn’t understand it, either. He would have preferred songs about battles or murder or even aliens. But most of the songs he knew were about love and sadness. And someone was always dying. “Da says if you can sing a sad tune, the lassies will love you.”

“Go to sleep!” Kellan shouted.

“Feck off!” Riley and Danny said simultaneously. They started to laugh, then pulled the bedcovers over their heads.

“Stupid gits,” Riley whispered.

“Sing the rest of the song,” Danny begged.

Riley continued, the sound of the wind and rain his only accompaniment. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever like a girl enough to sing her a song. And if he did, would she follow him around the same way the girls followed Kellan?

Love was much easier to understand when it was words in a song than when it happened in real life.

1

THE LINE FOR Customs and Immigration snaked around the room and out the sliding glass doors into the hallway. Nan Galvin searched for a clock, not sure about the local time. Back home in Madison, Wisconsin, it was five in the morning. Here in Ireland, at Shannon Airport, it was… “Eleven o’clock,” she murmured, catching sight of a clock on the wall.

She smiled to herself. Though she’d planned hundreds of exciting trips in her head and flipped through travel books during her lunch hours, this was the first time she’d actually gotten on a plane and flown across an ocean. Everything around her seemed exotic, from the shape of the trash cans to the voice over the loudspeaker to the signs written in Gaelic.

“I’m in Ireland,” she said, smiling to herself.

The line moved and she pulled her luggage along with her, getting ever closer to the row of desks and dour-faced immigration officials.