"Amazing. How many of those double greats does he have?"

"Oh, well, let me think. Fifteen. No, sixteen, as there was a new one last winter, if memory serves. Not all of them live in the area."

"Sixteen? Good God!"

"Well, now, he had eight children, six still living. And between them I believe they made him near to thirty grandchildren, and I don't have count on how many children they made. So there you have it. You've two of his great-grandsons on your crew, and the husband of one of his granddaughters as well."

"How could I avoid it?"

"Every Sunday after Mass, he goes to visit his wife's grave, she that was Lizzie Riley. Fifty years they were married. He takes with him that same old ratty chair there and sits by her for two hours so he can tell her all the village gossip and family news."

"How long has she been gone?"

"Oh, twenty years, give or take."

Seventy years, give or take, devoted to one woman. It was flabbergasting and, Trevor thought, heartening. For some, it worked.

"He's a darling man, is Mr. Riley," Brenna added. "Hey, there, Declan Fitzgerald, have a care there with that board before you bash someone in the face with it."

With a shake of her head, Brenna strode over to heft the far end of the board herself.

Trevor nearly followed. It had been his intention to spend most of his afternoon lifting, hauling, hammering. The sound of air guns and compressors whooshing and rumbling along with the constant rattle of the cement mixer had the young audience enthralled. Beside them in his chair, Riley sipped tea. Going with impulse, Trevor walked over to him.

"What do you think?"

Riley watched Brenna place her board. "I'm thinking you build strong and hire well. Mick O'Toole and his pretty Brenna, they know what they're about." Riley shifted his faded eyes to Trevor's face. "And so, I think, do you, young Magee."

"If the weather holds, we'll be under roof ahead of schedule."

Riley's weathered face creased into smiles. It was like watching thin white paper stretch over rock. "You'll be there when you get there, lad. That's the way of things. You've the look of your great-uncle."

As he'd been told so once, hesitantly, by his grandmother, Trevor considered, then crouched down so Riley wouldn't have to crane his neck.

It's just that you look so like John, Trevor, his brother who died young. It makes it hard for your grandfather to- It makes it hard for him.

"Do I?"

"Oh, aye. Johnnie Magee, I knew him, and your grandfather as well. A fine-looking young lad was Johnnie, with his gray eyes and slow smile. Built like a whip, as you are yourself."

"What was he like?"

"Oh, quiet, he was, and deep. Full of thoughts and feelings, and most of them for Maude Fitzgerald. He wanted her, and little else."

"And what he got was war."

"Aye, that's the way it was. Many young men fell in 1916, on those fields of France. And here as well, in our own little war for Ireland's independence. Elsewhere, for that matter, at any time you can pick. Men go to battle, and women wait and weep."

He laid a bony hand on the head of one of the children who sat at his side. "The Irish know it comes 'round again. And so do the old. I'm both old and Irish."

"You said you knew my grandfather."

"I did." Riley sat back with his tea, crossed his thin legs at the ankles. "Dennis, now, he was a brawnier type than his brother, and more apt to look a mile down the road instead of where he was standing. A discontented sort was Dennis Magee, if you don't mind me saying. Ardmore wasn't the place for him, and he shook off the sand of it as soon as he was able. Did he, I wonder, find what he was looking for there, and contentment with it?"

"I don't know," Trevor answered frankly. "I wouldn't say he was a particularly happy man."

"I'm sorry for that, for it's often hard for those around the unhappy to be happy themselves. His bride, as I recall, was a quiet-mannered lass. She was Mary Clooney, whose family farmed in Old Parish, and one of a family of ten, if my memory can be trusted."

"It seems sharp enough to me."

Riley cackled. "Oh, the brain's stayed with me well enough. Just takes the body a mite longer to get up and running these days." The boy wanted to know what had been and where he'd come from, Riley decided. And why shouldn't he? "I'll tell you, the babe, the boy who grew to be your father, was a handsome one. Many's the time I saw him toddling along the roads holding his ma's hand."

"And his father's?"

"Well, perhaps not so often, but now and again. Dennis was after making a living and putting by for his journey to America. I hope they had a good life there."

"They did. My grandfather wanted to build, and that's what he did."

"Then that was enough for him. I remember your father, the younger Dennis, coming back here when he was old enough to have grown a few whiskers." Riley paused to pour himself more tea from his thermos. "He seemed to've grown fine, had a pleasing way about him, and set some of the local lasses fluttering." He winked. "As you've done yourself. Still, he didn't choose, at that time, to leave anything behind him here but the memory. You've chosen different."

Riley gestured toward the construction with his cup. "Building something here's what you're about, isn't it?"

"It seems to be, at the moment."

"Well, Johnnie, he wanted nothing more than a cottage and his girl, but the war took him. His mother died not five years after, heartbroken. It's a hard thing, don't you think, for a man to live always in the shadow of a dead brother?"

Trevor glanced up again, met the faded and shrewd eyes. Clever old man, he thought, and supposed if you lived past the century mark, you had to be clever. "I imagine it is, even if you go three thousand miles to escape it."

"That's the truth. Better by far to stand and build your own." He nodded, this time with a kind of approval. "Well, as I said, you've the look of him, long-dead John Magee, in the bones of your face and around the eyes. Once they landed on Maude Fitzgerald, she was his heart. Do you believe in romance and ever after, young Magee?"

Trevor glanced away, up toward Darcy's window, then back again. "For some."

"You have to believe in it to get it." Riley winked and passed his cup to Trevor. "What's built isn't always of wood and stone, and still it lasts." Reaching out, he once again laid one of his gnarled hands on the head of the child nearest his chair. "Ever after."

"Some of us do better with wood and stone," Trevor commented, then absently drank the tea. He lost his breath, his vision blurred. "Jesus," he managed as the heavy lacing of whiskey scored his throat.

Riley laughed so hard he fell to wheezing, and his wrinkled face went pink with humor. "There now, lad, what's a cup of tea without a shot of the Irish in it, I'd like to know? Never say they've diluted your blood so over there in Amerikay you can't handle your own."

"I don't usually handle it at eleven in the morning."

"What's the clock got to do with a bloody thing?"

The man, Trevor thought, seemed old as Moses and had been steadily sipping the spiked tea for an hour. Compelled to save face, Trevor downed the rest of the cup and was rewarded by a wide, rubbery grin.

"You're all right, young Magee. You're all right. Since you are, I'll tell you this. That lovely lass inside Gallagher's won't settle for less in a man than hot blood, a strong backbone, and a clever brain. I'm considering you have all three."

Trevor handed Riley back his cup. "I'm just here to build a theater."

"If that's the truth, then I'll say this as well: It goes that youth is wasted on the young, but I'm of a mind that the young waste youth." He poured another cup of tea. "And I'll just have to marry her meself." Amusement danced in his eyes as he sipped. "Step lively, boyo, for I've a world of experience with the female of the species."

"I'll keep that in mind." Trevor got to his feet. "What did John Magee do before he went to war?"

"For a living, you're meaning." If Riley thought it was odd that Trevor wouldn't know he didn't say so. "He was for the sea. His heart belonged to it, and to Maude, and to nothing else."

Trevor nodded. "Thanks for the tea," he said and went back to join his crew.

He skipped lunch. There were too many calls to make, faxes expected, to take time for an hour in the pub and his afternoon dose of Darcy. He hoped she looked for him, wondered a little. If he understood her as he thought he did, she would expect him to come in, to have to come in. And it would annoy her when he didn't.

Good, Trevor mused as he let himself into the cottage. He wanted to keep her a little off-balance. That careless confidence of hers was a formidable weapon. Her arrogance played right along with it. And damned if he didn't find them both attractive.

Amused at himself, he went directly up to his office and spent thirty minutes immersed in business. It was one of his skills, this ability to tune out every other thought and zero in on the deal of the moment. With Riley's memories fresh in his own mind, and Darcy dancing at the edges of it, he needed that skill now more than ever.

Once current projects were handled, faxes zipped off, E-mail answered and sent, he gave his thoughts to a future project he was formulating.

Time, he thought, to lay the groundwork. Picking up the phone, he called Gallagher's. He was pleased that Aidan answered. Trevor made it a point to go straight to the head of a company. Or in this case, a family.

"It's Trev."

"Well, now, I thought I'd see you sitting at one of my tables by this time of day."

Aidan raised his voice over the lunchtime clatter, and Trevor imagined him pulling pints one-handed while he talked. In the background he heard Darcy's laugh.