Irish Inheritance

Every July, Natalie Clarke goes to Ireland.

The rest of the year, she’s an award-winning actress living in Los Angeles. Her life is public and carefully managed.
But in one quiet village in the west of Ireland, nobody cares about her career. There, she’s just Bridget’s granddaughter.
For five summers, those visits meant her grandmother’s cottage and Emma Dempsey.
Emma’s a local nurse, fifteen years younger, and completely rooted in a place Natalie has only ever visited.
They spent years sharing daily routines and quiet walks. They never spoke about the pull between them. Natalie was never going to stay. Acting on her feelings would have meant leaving Emma behind when summer ended.
Then one July, Natalie arrived, and Emma was gone without warning, leaving an empty house next door and a summer that felt wrong from the first morning.
Now, five years later, Natalie is forty-five. Her grandmother is gone, and the cottage is hers. And Emma is back from Australia. She’s thirty now. She still wants the same things. But she’s done waiting for them.
Summer had always been enough. But it isn’t anymore.
And Natalie is running out of reasons to pretend she doesn’t know why.