I was there for so much. I was there, awkwardly loitering, in Conor’s bedroom when he cried himself to sleep because Laura Haines had broken up with him. I was there, shouting from the sidelines with self-conscious abandon, for every Senior Cup match Conor played. I was there when he trained and I was there when they left him on the bench. He seemed to expect this kind of loyalty, and I was glad to give it to him. But I wasn’t – I couldn’t have been – there when he lay bleeding on the ground, waiting for an occupied ambulance. And this is why I can’t tell this story, not properly, not completely. This is why so much of what I have to say is merely guesswork. It’s because I wasn’t there when my baby brother died.

I wasn’t there.

I’ve tried to be as scrupulously accurate as possible in reconstructing these events. Grief is a scrupulously accurate emotion. It gives us a thirst for the precise. I used my sorrow, too, to get people to talk. I have a kind of gravity, now. People give me leeway. They indulge my rambling theories.

I owe the most, perhaps, to Laura Haines.

Laura was my source for much of this – for the stuff I wasn’t present for myself. She was my chief source of information about Richard and his family. For a while we met in UCD, where Laura was now studying Business in the Quinn School. (Her nursing degree, in the aftermath of Conor’s death, had come to seem like an unfeasible proposition.) We had lunch in the Quinn School café, where Richard and Conor had lounged with their laptops and their competing entourages of rouged and bouffant girls. The place was full of the usual people – boys in cords and rugby tops, girls in denim skirts and ursine boots. I looked around at them: the boys and girls, laughing and flirting, carrying on as though everything was still the same. They were all much younger than me, of course. Laura’s was the only face I recognized.

For an hour or so we would talk about what had happened. I asked because I needed to know, and Laura told me because she needed to tell. It was a way of feeling closer to Conor, sitting opposite this girl that he had loved. But it was also a way of feeling closer to someone else. It was a way of feeling closer to Richard Culhane.

We both need Laura, Richard and I, and for the same reason: she is our final link to Conor Harris. She knows this, and she is generous with her time. But this cannot last forever. I will meet her for one last lunch, but after that we will all be on our own.

I have very little left to say. Now that my story is almost told I am too full, not of words but of their opposites: silence, absence, loss.

Conor, I tried my best to keep you safe. I tried to do what an older brother should. But I couldn’t help you. I wasn’t there.