‘Sorry, Harry.’

‘I didn’t physically leave her. I just started to get my priorities wrong. Once the business really took off, I threw my heart and soul into making more and more money. I lost sight of why I was making it. It was all for her, you know. To give her the life I thought she deserved. I wanted to show her that I was good enough for her. It was like a thank you, if you like, for choosing me. I suppose I never truly felt worthy of her, what with my background and all. Oh, on the surface, nothing much changed over the years, but then slowly we just drifted, and before we knew it we weren’t on each other’s horizons anymore. You know you can be in the same room as someone, the same bed, even, and yet be further away from them than if they were a stranger on a train. She tried, God knows she tried. Booking holidays, special nights just for us, taking time to make time. But all of it I threw in her face. I’ve lost count of the number of holidays I have cancelled because I was too busy. The nights I ruined because I was too drunk. And then two months ago, she went to our offices in America, phoned me that night and told me she wasn’t coming back.’

‘Go and get her. Tell her what you have just told me. She obviously loves you; otherwise she wouldn’t have made all the efforts she has.’

‘You don’t understand, Cormac. She stopped making those efforts two years ago and I didn’t even notice. There would be no dinner when I got home, so I’d go to the pub and eat there. Some nights she wouldn’t be home, so I’d open a bottle and play my guitar. She would book holidays with ‘friends,’ and I didn’t even ask who they were or where she was going. Then she started seeing Marcus, one of our solicitors. Can you believe it? My wife left me for a solicitor called fucking Marcus!!! He’s in America with her. They’d been planning it for a year, apparently. On the day she left, I got a call from my lawyer to say she had commenced divorce proceedings. So now, my friend, I have all the money that I ever wanted, but no one to share it with. I have a beautiful daughter, who is oblivious to the fact that her parents are separated, because she has gotten so used to her mother’s trips abroad, she thinks it’s perfectly normal for her to be away for months at a time. The irony of it all is all this time when I thought money was what I wanted more than anything else, I lost the one true thing I needed the most: the love of my Roisin.’

They walked the last few steps in silence.

Harry pulled open the door of O’Donohue’s and pushed Cormac into another world.