“Me too.” She squeezed me tight. “You deserve it. You’re going to prove them all wrong. You’re going to find Ivernis.”

Two hours and a keg of celebratory Guinness later, my phone vibrated. When I saw the caller, I grinned widely and hitched myself up on the bar. “It’s Jeremy!”

Cam shook her head as she muddled together a mojito. “You are a hot mess. Don’t answer.”

I stuck out my tongue. “I have to answer.”

“That’s a bad life choice.”

Deliberately turning my back, I raised the cell to one ear and covered the other with my free hand. “Hey! Jeremy! How are you?” I maneuvered out of the bar, grinning and waving at my friends as I squeezed past and through the doors. Outside, a breeze cooled the air considerably. “Sorry, what was that? I didn’t catch it.” Almost bursting with pride, I prepared for more congratulations.

His steady tenor came clear from three thousand miles away. “I said, Patrick O’Connor is dead.”

When I was six years old, my father left on a two-week business trip, and I asked every night when he’d be home. And even though Mom kept giving me the same answer, I kept asking, because it didn’t make sense, and it didn’t stay in my head.

This didn’t make sense.

Patrick O’Connor? It had taken me three months to persuade the crotchety old Irish man to grant permission to dig on his land. Three months of pleading and proposals and gradually increasing the amount of money we’d give him. He couldn’t be dead. “How dead?”

“Natalie.”

On the other side of Amsterdam, people spilled out of bars. A young couple laughed. The girl leaned forward and sparked her cigarette off the guy’s lighter. The ember burned dully in the growing dark.

I should be panicking. Or hyperventilating, or at least feeling icy tendrils closing over my heart. Instead, I just watched the flirtation play out without a hitch. The girl twisted a lock of hair, the boy leaned closer and they both laughed again. “How’d he die?”

“Heart attack.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. I just got off the phone with his executor.”

I felt slow and stupid. “But—he signed the contract.”

During the long silence that followed, I was unable to form a single thought. “Natalie,” my old professor finally said, “it doesn’t matter. It’s invalid.”

My legs felt floppy, and I frowned at my knees and tried to lock them. Would it be weird to sit on the sidewalk? It was kind of gross, and darkened with gum stains—not to mention smears of dog poop. I leaned against a metal lamppost instead. “But I just got the grant. Everything’s set. We’re digging at Kilkarten.”

Jeremy sounded grim. “Not unless we get the new landowner to sign the contract.”

I swallowed. Inspected under my nails for the ever-present dirt. “Okay. Yeah. Of course.” The rights to the farmland hadn’t just disappeared into the nether with O’Connor’s death. His wife would surely agree to the same terms. Or maybe even agree to sell the land. “So I just get in touch with the widow?” I swallowed my groan. I didn’t want to interrupt Mrs. O’Connor’s mourning with business, but the excavation was set to begin in just over a month, and we couldn’t do anything without her signature.

Jeremy cleared his throat.

I’d studied with Jeremy long enough to recognize the sound of the other shoe falling. “What? He didn’t leave it to her?”

“She got the house and the money. The property went to his late brother’s son.”

Great, so now I’d have to track down some long lost heir. I dug into my purse for a pen. After I sandwiched my cell between my ear and shoulder, I positioned the pen above my hand. “What’s the nephew’s name? Does he live in the village—Dundoran?”

“It’s Michael O’Connor.”

Well, I didn’t need a pen to remember that name. “Like the running back?”

“Actually—it is the running back.”

My fingers loosened and the pen slipped down to clatter across the pavement. I’d fallen into some surreal world where clocks melted and famous football players inherited my lost city. “No.”

“Yeah.” Jeremy let out a hassled breath. “Think you can deal with this before your flight at the end of the month? I’m emailing you the forms that need his signature.”

I closed my eyes. Michael O’Connor. Running back for the New York Leopards. His image formed beneath my lids. O’Connor’s strong, Roman nose, his habitual grin and his curly, dark-red hair. His warm, brown eyes that squinted when he smiled. A mish-mash of dozens of screenshots and photos flashed though my mind. Of him in his uniform, the black and red of the Leopards. Of him on the bench, his auburn head in his hands, skin gleaming with sweat. Of him in a group hug after a win. Of that amazing touchdown last year. My throat worked but nothing came out for a good minute. “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

Did this mean I would actually meet Michael O’Connor?

“Great. Oh, and good job on getting us the funding. We can retroactively use that for the past ninety days, so can you start that paperwork? See you soon.”

I lowered my phone. One did not just get in touch with a starting Leopard. Did he have a PR person? Or an agent? How was I supposed to talk to him without fangirling?

How could a contract I’d worked my ass off for be invalidated in a heartbeat?

In the lack of a heartbeat.

Oh, God, I was a terrible person. I’d better order some flowers for the widow.

I took one more deep breath. And then I started searching for O’Connor’s contacts.

* * *

When I entered middle school, I shot up several inches higher than any of my peers. My mother, who had abandoned her own modeling career before I was born, decided my height meant she should introduce me to some of her old fashion contacts. When the magazine spread of me in weird flowy dresses came out, it further cemented my classmates’ opinions of my freakiness.

Now, I thought those pictures were cute. At the time, they were the instrument of my unpopularity. I refused to ever stand in front of a camera again, and I still twitched uncomfortably when friends corral me into group photos.

During those middle school years, I found solace in an exquisitely illustrated book of Celtic myths in my dad’s home office. Someone had given it to him as a present, due to our last name being Sullivan, though we weren’t any more Irish than any other eighth generation American.

I loved that book. I especially loved the pictures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, depicted as tall, beautiful people with streaming hair that reminded me of my own. I fixated on them, and the myths, and by the time I reached high school I related almost every project I worked on back to ancient Ireland. At fourteen, I wrote a detailed analysis of The Tain, a Celtic epic set in the first century of the Common Era. I wanted to prove that one of the central figures, Queen Medb, was an actual ruler. I was obsessed with proving that the mythological Tuatha Dé Danann and Fir Bolg were actually based off real people.

In the last years of high school, that settled into a more academic interest in the original people of Ireland, who were mentioned in several of the classical Greek sources. The explorer Pytheas of Massalia visited in the fourth century BCE, and Ptolemy wrote a general geography in around 150 CE. Ptolemy called the island as a whole “Ivernia,” and noted that the name was the same as that of a people who lived in the extreme southwest, who may once have been the first inhabitants of the land. He located a city in their territory named Ivernis.

Which I decided to find.

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Archaeology didn’t happen as quickly as it looked in two-hour NOVA specials or made-for-TV movies. Archaeologists didn’t just show up on a plot of land armed with shovels and machetes and have at it. Instead, we had to broker deals with landowners and governments and partner universities.

And by “we,” I really mean grad students.

It had taken me three months to get Mr. Patrick O’Connor to give permission for me to excavate his property, Kilkarten Farm, which I had identified as the most likely place for Ivernis. A study had tested the earth there seven years ago and found it used to be saline water. Since I knew from old maps that Ivernis had been located on a bay, it seemed probable that the inlet had silted up, thus covering and hopefully preserving the harbor.

Patrick O’Connor had agreed to the dig after a fair amount of grumbling and haggling over price, but his nephew was being even more elusive. I spent late into the night and most of the next day trying to get in touch with O’Connor through various methods: fan email, the team itself, his agent.

But I didn’t get any answer until three days later when I was on the commuter rail up to Westchester for my weekly dinner with my parents. I’d refreshed my email on my cell for the millionth time, and I almost didn’t believe it when a response from O’Connor’s agent popped up. I came very close to yelping for joy on public transit, but managed to keep it to grinning wildly and swinging my foot. I’d be meeting with O’Connor tomorrow.

And thank God for that bit of good news, because I needed to get through dinner with my parents. I didn’t expect them to be happy that I’d received the grant for Ivernis, but I sort of expected them to be proud of me. That’s what parents did, right? Showed pride when their children achieved success.

I walked the several long blocks from the station to my parents’ house. They’d upgraded after I left for college, and while the new house was undoubtedly nicer, it seemed too large for only two people.