A young woman walked into the wetlands of Ireland.

A peat harvester near Bellaghy, County Derry would find her body in 2023, two thousand years after she died. Laid down on the moss, not sunk in a pool, she still had woven plant fiber gathered below her knees. Her head was taken, and has not been found. They call her the Ballymacombs More Woman and this story imagines who she might have been.

At ten, Bréaca is the fastest thing in the valley. Russet braid coming loose, sky in her eyes, taller than the boys and unbothered by it. She hasn’t yet learned that a woman’s worth is a number, and that hers is small.

At sixteen, they give her to Éogan. He loved her wildness — said so out loud, in front of witnesses, in the good light of the wedding feast. Later he explains himself with his hands. Later still she learns to read the weather in his jaw the way she once read the sky. And by nineteen, Bréaca is already disappearing.

Married to a man who has learned how to hurt her without leaving answers, she lives inside a narrow world of watchfulness, silence and carefully explained bruises. She’s forgotten to notice the seabirds and pretends she doesn’t care when she’s not allowed to climb the cliffs for their eggs. Everyone knows and everyone has something to say. The village has a word for what a wife owes. The Brehons have a price for what she’s worth. Her father has a clan and a name to keep clean. Her mother has a scar on her wrist and a name she won’t say aloud. And Lugaid — who knew her before, who still carries the shape of her, who could stop this if he were braver — has a wedding of his own to get to.

Nobody is coming.

But the river knows her.

It remembers the girl who once ran along its banks, gathering bog cotton. It’s kept record of the girl who noticed light breaking through doorways and believed the world was larger than what she was given. As storms swell the water and old truths rise from the earth, Bréaca discovers that survival is not the same as living. And leaving is not the same as being free.

So at nineteen she goes north with a fist full of bog cotton and her heart leaping like a rabbit’s.

Now he’s coming.

Inspired by the real remains of the Ballymacombs More Woman, found in Northern Ireland after more than two thousand years, Tiffini Johnson’s new novel, The Way of Water, is a raw, haunting novel about domestic violence, memory, and the unbearable courage it takes to reach for a life you have nearly forgotten belongs to you.

Some women vanish quietly.

Some are buried.

And some wait beneath the earth until the world is finally ready to hear them.

Coming soon

Find Sample Chapters Below.

You can watch the Prologue below. It features the choral “we” voice of Water.

Harvesting Air