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she recognized it for what it was.
    Bernadette was eight years Michael’s senior but of all Annie’s nine children, she was most like him. They were black-haired and round-eyed, typical shanty Irish, but beneath their fine-boned, sharp-cheeked beauty lay a shimmering brightness that went beyond straight teeth and clear skin, a shining, ethereal glow that artists ached to capture but never could. Even their photographs were different from the others’. Bernadette was the only girl, so it was natural that Annie should be partial to her unusual, slender-hipped beauty. But there was no logical explanation for the way every eye, including her own, singled out Michael in a Devlin family photo.
    Clear and blue-green as the Irish Sea, his eyes, set above a prominent Roman nose and a mouth only God could have shaped, laughed back at her. He was six feet, tall for a Devlin, and wiry thin, with straight shoulders, a deep chest, and narrow hips. People were drawn to him just as they were to Bernadette. They were ambitious, these two middle children, more so than the others.
    Only Michael and Bernadette had finished their schooling and gone on for university degrees, courtesy of the British Empire. Of course it was absurd for a Catholic to be ambitious in the Six Counties. Those who were emigrated to the mainland or America. Bernadette had settled with a husband and children. Perhaps it would be better for Michael if he made his home away from Ireland. When the two were together, there had been no peace in the house, until the winter of Meghann’s wedding.
    At first Annie had brushed aside her misgivings, explaining away the change in Michael as maturity. He had grown up. It was past time to give up that boisterous, laughing gregariousness that lured every drunk from the pubs home to the Clonard for a wash and a fry. She had always expected more from Michael. Gifted in his field, he had produced several published volumes of poetry, two novels, and multitudes of essays featured in the Irish Press and other periodicals, none published in the United Kingdom, of course. He was Sinn Fein, as were all the men and women of her family. No one belonging to Sinn Fein had ever been allowed a voice outside the Republic. She had reconciled herself to a lifetime of monthly visits to Long Kesh, rationalizing with her usual wry humor that as long as her children were in prison they were safe from RUC bullets. After all, beatings were better than funerals.
    But when Bernadette came home and the two of them were seated together in their old place near the Aga, she realized that something was missing in Michael, something that had nothing to do with maturity. The eagerness, the laughing optimism, the magical flame that had illuminated him from birth was gone. Seeing it burn in the bright eyes and quick hands of her only daughter, its absence in Michael was all the more evident. Concentrating on exactly when the change had occurred, Annie realized that it had been missing for quite some time.
    She pinpointed it to the day Michael came home with the Times . He rarely bought the London Times , preferring to read it at the library and not contribute to a British newspaper. But today he placed it on the table before her. Annie noticed that his hands shook and his face was pale even for winter. Ignoring the paper, she’d felt his forehead for fever but there was none. It wasn’t until later in the evening, after the meal was cleared and the dishes put away, after Michael had gone out to one of his endless meetings, that she sat down with the paper.
    It shook her, of course, but not as much as it should have. Meggie was different. She’d always been different. Causes held no allure for her. Annie had seen it from the beginning. The silent, terrified child from Cupar Street had no desire to avenge the murder of her family. All she wanted, all she had ever wanted, was a peaceful place to fit in. She’d found it in the heart of the