She’d had such interesting, thought-provoking conversations with Keelin and Armand on all the scandals, lies, and abuses of power that were so prevalent in the news. She read accounts of nuns throwing ice-cold water over children who had wet the bed, leaving them shivering and terrified; and mothers who had babies torn from their arms to be sold to American families. Brigid had wept reading the stories of the women trapped in the Magdalene laundries. And of their children, ill-treated and fostered to families as slave labour. It beggared belief that anyone could treat young women and children with such cruelty – let alone do it in the name of God. And then there were the accounts of those who didn’t survive: the bodies of nearly eight hundred babies found in an old septic tank in a mother-and-baby home in Tuam. How could her fellow nuns in that religious Order condone and be a part of such horror? Where was their humanity?

What would have been her own fate if her pregnancy had run to term, she wondered. Would her parents have sent her to a mother-and-child home? The shame of being pregnant outside of marriage and carrying an illegitimate child was so enormous in those days, Tom and Elizabeth Dunne might have thought they were doing their best for their daughter, hiding her shame by sending her to such an institution. After all, the nuns ran them, and no one questioned the holiness of nuns back then. There but for the Grace of God went she, Brigid thought to herself whenever some new revelation broke about the cruelty perpetuated by the Church on young, unmarried pregnant women and their babies.

She’d trained with nuns who were cruel and sarcastic in a mentally abusive way, but she’d known far more Sisters who were kind, patient and giving, and who had inspired her own behaviour when she’d become a Reverend Mother herself.

These last months in France had changed her radically. Brigid had never felt so free physically or intellectually, and as she cycled into the nearby village of Bois d’Abbés to get the daily bread and pastries from the boulangerie, she vowed that she would come back to this heavenly place. There was a situation that needed to be resolved at home, before she could truly settle into her retirement. Her very active retirement, she thought proudly, placing her bike outside the bakery, not the slightest bit out of breath.

‘Bonjour, Brigid,’ Madame Gironde, the owner, greeted her warmly when she entered the shop, the smell of freshly baked bread making her feel hungry. ‘What a beautiful morning.’

‘Indeed it is, Louise. The wind has died. It will be a good afternoon for our boules match.’