From #1 bestselling Irish author Cathy Kelly comes a witty, warmhearted novel about friendship, forgiveness, and second chances... They say you can’t go home again, and truth be told, Eleanor Levine never planned to. Yet here she is, back in Ireland after a lifetime in New York, moving her treasured possessions—including her mother’s handwritten book of recipes for living—into a cozy Dublin apartment. With its picturesque Georgian villas, redbrick houses, and central garden, the Golden Square is just large enough for anonymity. At least, that’s what actress Megan Bouchier hopes, when a tabloid scandal sends her fleeing the paparazzi, back to the place she felt safest as a child. Rae, manager of the local café, has noticed the lovely, sad-eyed girl. There’s little Rae doesn’t notice, and every customer feels nourished by her food and her kindness, yet Rae’s own secret remains hidden. Connie O’Callaghan—with her fortieth birthday looming—has a secure teaching job, an abundance of blessings...and a deep-seated loneliness only her new neighbor Eleanor understands. And as the lives of the four women intertwine, each in her own way is learning about love, letting go—and that finding your way can lead to the last place you expected. “Warm, lyrical, fascinating and comforting . . . genius!” —Marian Keyes Cathy Kelly is the #1 bestselling author of fifteen bestselling novels in Ireland, which have all hit the Sunday Times ’ top ten in London. She lives in Ireland with her husband and twin sons. In 2005 she was appointed an ambassador for UNICEF Ireland. Contact her on Twitter at @CathyKellyBooks or follow her on Facebook or at CathyKelly.com. 1 New Year It didn’t take long for Eleanor Levine to unpack her things in the apartment in Golden Square. She’d brought just two suitcases on the flight from New York to Dublin. For a simple holiday, two suitcases would probably be too much luggage. But for the sort of trip Eleanor planned, she was traveling light. When she’d arrived at the hotel in the center of the city just two weeks before Christmas, the receptionist had simply nodded politely when Eleanor said she might need the room for more than the three weeks she’d booked beforehand. Nothing shocked hotel receptionists, even elegant elderly ladies with limited luggage who arrived alone and appeared to have no due date to leave. Equally, nobody looked askance at Eleanor when she gently turned down the invitation to book for the full Christmas lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and instead asked for an omelet and a glass of prosecco in her room. After a lifetime spent in New York, a city where doing your own thing and not apologizing for it was almost mandatory, it was comforting to find the same behavior had traveled across the Atlantic to the country of her birth. It wasn’t what she’d expected, truth to tell. But then, it was so long since she’d been home, she didn’t really know what to expect. On the plane journey, still reeling from having left her warm, cozy apartment and her family behind her, Eleanor had thought about the Ireland she was about to see. She’d left over seventy years before in the steerage of a giant steamship, a serious eleven-year-old traveling to the New World with her mother and her aunt. Their belongings had fitted in a couple of cardboard suitcases, and her mother, Brigid, held the family’s meager fortune in a purse round her neck. Now here she was, returning with several platinum credit cards, a line of letters after her name, and a lifetime of experience behind her. Apart from Eleanor herself, only one thing had made both trips: her mother’s recipe book. Now that she’d put her toiletries in the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom and had unpacked her clothes and books, she took a white shoebox out of the second suitcase. Her wedding shoes, white satin pumps from Christian Dior, had lived in the box for many years until she’d given them to her daughter, Naomi, for her prom night. Now her granddaughter, Gillian, borrowed them from time to time, wearing them with the full-skirted vintage dresses that had been all the rage during Mr. Dior’s New Look in 1947. Like many modern teenagers, Gillian loved wearing vintage and often visited her grandmother proudly bearing something she’d paid $50 for, and which was a replica of something Eleanor had thrown out twenty years previously. Fashion comes full circle, Eleanor thought, smiling. Thousands of miles away from Gillian, Naomi, and life in New York, Eleanor tenderly opened her box of treasures. None of them were treasures in any monetary sense. But as tokens from a life lived with great happiness, they were treasures indeed. There was a dyed-black ostrich-feather mask from a Halloween party, the silk ribbon still tied in a knot from the last time she’d worn it, half a century before. A single pressed rose was visible through the thin layer of tissue in which it lay. Ralf had given her the rose as a corsage one night at a ri