In 2014 I had come to Ireland to revel in my hard-won freedom – freedom from a hospital in Boston where a year prior, at the age of twenty-five, I had finished a grueling, nine-month treatment for osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive bone cancer that had been found in my right femur. Much of the bone in my leg had been replaced by metal, and it was weaker now, but I had regained enough strength to at least carry a backpack and roam far from the confines of a hospital. I was there in Ireland to get lost somewhere in Joyce country, to take time and space to process a year that had left me with, among many things both beautiful and terrible, a deep urge to write. I would spend the summer there on my own, but my dad was joining me for the first week before releasing me into a homeland neither of us had seen before. We had rented a car and were traversing the island, which had led us to a small town at the end of this remote peninsula. It was here, on the third day of our journey, that Donal Walsh found me.

This unexpected encounter was more than a series of remarkable coincidences.