I didn’t tell Lizzie Magee that technically I wasn’t married; she had no problem believing that John was the daddy. She didn’t need to know that I had actually managed to fall pregnant the very first time I made love when she was sleeping not two hundred feet away. She wouldn’t believe me. That it happened with her super-crush, Jacques Bernier, on a gravestone? She would KILL me. That I retired each night with my daughter in what should have been the Good Room, with a torch beside my single bed. That sometimes I could hardly sleep for thinking about when I would be kissed again and knowing it would be no time soon.

I didn’t tell her that I knew escape was not an option. I hadn’t acquired a husband as much as a new owner. I didn’t tell her that most of my days felt like I had fallen down a deep well and had only the certainty of sleep to keep me from going bonkers. Any of the words I needed to explain my sad little life would have stuck in my throat like dry bread.

She got distracted then – luckily – by my girl toddling towards us, her baby bunches bouncing around on her head. Bridie waved from the entrance of the river field in defeat: she couldn’t keep up. Serena was playing peek-a-boo by putting her hands over her eyes and shouting boo-boo-boo. Lizzie scooped her into the air and spun her round and round. That made me smile with my very heart, my two best girls getting acquainted.

They giggled and jostled and played tag ’til Lizzie had to get off. Dessie was still nervous of her at the wheel, she had to drive past the garage and honk every time she was on her way home to prove that she hadn’t wrapped herself around a tree or ploughed into an RUC roadblock.

She pulled some stuff from the back seat of the car: a whole tin of Quality Street for me and a jigsaw and blowing-bubbles set for Serena. The jigsaw was far too complicated for a two-year-old. It was five hundred pieces and had a picture of Paris on it showing the river reflecting the city. Lizzie said Paris was where she was going the first time she felt filthy rich. Jacques Bernier might still be there pining for her at last; he was only human, after all. I grinned, secure in the knowledge she was holding the only bit of Jacques Bernier that she would ever get her randy hands on.