The word ‘loved’ landed on me like a slap that I didn’t see coming. He made it sound so simple. He was telling me he had wanted me all along, stupid me. He had looked out for me, he had found me. His was no silly schoolboy crush; his was a feeling as constant as the Cloon flowing past our house.

I had made a fool of my precious time with him. You never miss the water until the well runs dry, says Auntie Eileen when she’s sad but needs to say something as she fires up the cigarette that will make it better. I tried to open my mouth but a decades-old fear of just not being good enough squeezed my throat like a vice. John had no such troubles.

–  I understood how young you were, how unformed, how naive. But at least try to imagine what my life was like? Please tell me that you at least thought about me? Once? I had another man’s child under my roof and you looking at me like I was the Devil himself? I was in a pit again just after I’d managed to get myself out of one. Every day I thought it would get better but every day I was wrong. Can you imagine being locked out by the person you love? What would you have had me do?

–  I don’t know. And stop shoutin’, you’re making people look!

–  Well, Jesus! We don’t want to risk something so terrible, Sadie!

He was angry, fed up dealing with an idiot, an idiot with my mother. My head was light. The last few days and weeks had pulled everything I thought I had buried up by the roots and it left me feeling exposed, displaced. I was sitting with a man I could talk to, one who would understand my life if only I could find the words and time to tell him. I was sitting with the man I loved.

I considered the lie I had spun myself all these years that I had given in to his love-making with a martyr’s grace, when in truth I had longed for the moments he had made me feel alive over and over and over again in the pitch-dark of Johns Farm. Right this minute I would give anything to be back in his priest’s cell with him and the cold linen sheets on my naked skin. He touched my arm but it was my heart that leapt.

–  Mary, are you going to mention the fact that I’ve told you I love you?

–  Stay with me then!

–  It’s too late!

–  Give me a chance, I’ll stop being scared!