The Promise

It was 1995, and my mother had just become something new: divorced, unmoored, and quietly determined to find herself again. I was ten years old, old enough to understand that something had ended, but not old enough to know what comes after.

She decided a summer in Ireland would be her cure. While she was gone, postcards arrived like small lifelines—green hills, stone cottages, looping handwriting that always ended with I miss you. I missed her too, in that deep, childlike way where absence feels permanent even when it isn’t. When she returned, our house was filled with new music—Old Blind Dogs, Enya, and Loreena McKennitt drifting through the rooms, songs that sounded ancient and aching and full of longing.

She would often sing along, her voice clear and strong, carrying the melodies as if she had brought a piece of Ireland back with her.

When she came home, she wasn’t the same woman who had left. She had fallen in love—with Celtic music, with Irish history, with

Renaissance fairs and tartans and ancient stories. Ireland had seeped into her bones. She dragged my sister and me to Highland Games all over the Southwest, determined that we would know where we came from, that our roots mattered. A year or so later, she even met her favorite author, Diana Gabaldon, at the Tucson Highland Games— an encounter she spoke about with reverence, as if it were proof that dreams were closer than they seemed. But what I remember most from that time wasn’t the festivals or

the music. It was the sound of keys clicking late into the night.

 

Our family computer sat in the living room of our small apartment, and my mother spent hours there, shoulders slightly hunched,

completely absorbed. She was writing a romance novel. I didn’t understand it then, only that this story mattered deeply to her.

 

Years passed. She mentioned the book now and then, always with a mixture of pride and fear. She wanted to send it to publishers—

but never quite did. Eventually, she stopped bringing it up, and I stopped asking. Life moved on, as it always does.

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Then, in 2011, everything stopped.

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My mother was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Within eighteen months, she was gone. My last conversation with her took place in

a hospice bed set up in her living room. It was summer again. She couldn’t leave the bed, but she was sitting upright, alert, almost lu-

minous with a sudden burst of energy. I sat beside her, and we talked about the things that matter when time is short.

 

She told me she didn’t want my five-year-old son or my two-year-old daughter at her funeral. She wanted their memories of her to be warm, not heavy. She loved them fiercely. Then she looked at me, serious in a way that made my chest tighten, and she brought up her book. The romance novel from my childhood, I hadn’t thought about in over a decade.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll publish it.” She told me where to find the thumb drive. Had me retrieve it. There wasn’t room for hesitation. All I could say was yes.

 

I don’t know how many deathbed promises people receive from their mothers, but this one lodged itself into me. It would haunt me

for the next ten years. She passed away a few days later. I was twenty-seven, with two small children, trying to understand how to live in a world without my mother. After her funeral, my own marriage began to unravel. I tucked the thumb drive carefully into an important drawer. With every move, every new chapter of my life, I packed it with intention— always knowing where it was, always not quite ready to open it. I went back to school. I raised my children. Time passed. In 2021—almost ten years after her death—I finally plugged the thumb drive into my laptop and read her novel for the first time. Only half of it was there. The drive had glitched. The second half was gone. Heartbroken, I called my stepfather. We searched for backups, old computers, anything. Too much time had passed. But he did find something: her original typed manuscript from the 1990s. So I did the only thing I could. I retyped the second half of her book by hand. I’ll never know what she may have changed in later years, what edits lived only in her mind. To honor her, I published the novel under her maiden name—Neff—the name she had when the story was first born in 1995.

I think everyone should be so lucky to have their mother leave behind a piece of herself in a love story.

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Caroline was based on my mother. And reading her words now brings happy tears—because through this book, I found another

piece of her, long after she was gone. Thank you for being part of the promise I made to her.

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—Amanda, in memory of Mom