‘I didn’t confront him. I told him I wasn’t moving in, told him I was resigning from the job and going home. I told him it was time for me to move on. He couldn’t believe his ears.’

‘You dumped him! And he doesn’t know why! I LOVE it!’ Lizzie clapped her hands. ‘Hoist by his own petard. Oh well done, woman, well done! I’d love to have seen his face!’

‘He was gobsmacked for sure.’ Marie-Claire managed a small smile. ‘Don’t you ever let on that I know about Amelia,’ she warned her friend.

‘As if!’ scoffed Lizzie. ‘But you do know he’ll quiz me.’

‘So tell him I felt like a change. And because my lease was up, it was the right time to do it.’

‘OK,’ Lizzie agreed glumly. ‘I’m really going to miss you, though, Marie-Claire. Couldn’t you leave the job but stay in Canada and look for another?’

‘I’d like to go home for a while and sort out my head. I’m not sure what I want to do next in my life. I’ll put my belongings in storage here. If I decide to come back, fine, if not I’ll have them shipped home.’

‘Please come back, Marie-Claire,’ Lizzie begged. ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving. Work won’t be half as much fun without you,’ she said mournfully, giving her a hug. Marie-Claire hugged her back.

‘It will give you a reason to come to Ireland, if I decide to stay,’ she comforted. Lizzie was a great pal. She’d made some lovely friends in Canada, but she’d great friends at home too, she reminded herself, and they would keep her going as she ended one chapter of her life and began another.

CHAPTER EIGHT

KEELIN

It was always bittersweet coming home, Keelin reflected when Armand took the slip road off the motorway and headed west. When they got to Ardcloch, ten minutes from where her mother lived, she would ring Imelda and tell her to put the kettle on.

This journey home never failed to bring mixed emotions. Delight because she loved Ardcloch and Glencarraig, the small town Imelda lived in and where Keelin had grown up. Sadness because she would be visiting the graveyard in Ardcloch where her beloved father lay buried with his parents. And painful memories too of a grim and fraught time when harsh words had been flung between them. That had been the worst phase of her life, and though the passage of time had healed some of the hurt, there was still an underlying residue of anger and resentment that Keelin didn’t think would ever leave her, no matter how hard she tried to let go of it.

Her uneasy relationship with her mother was all the more prickly without the balm of her father’s patient, even-tempered presence.