After a week spent in bed, avoiding calls from her daughter, the Fingal Four, the shelter, the clothes bank and the soup kitchen, Molly finally dragged herself up and went to her GP. Angus had been her GP for thirty years.

‘You don’t look like yourself,’ he said.

‘I don’t feel like meself.’

‘What’s going on, Molly?’

‘You know the way my mother suffered a bit with her nerves?’

‘I do.’

‘It used to terrify me that someday I’d end up like her.’

‘How do you feel, Molly?’

‘Like I’m dying inside, like I want to shut down and everything just needs to stop. It’s too fast, you know?’

‘It’s OK to be depressed.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘You’ve lost your daughter.’

‘I have,’ she said, and tears slid down her face. ‘I have lost her.’

‘I’m going to prescribe some antidepressants. Will you take them?’

‘I don’t want to be like my mother,’ she said.

‘You’re not like her, Molly, you’re just grieving and you need some help, that’s all.’

‘I don’t know if I can find me way back.’

‘You’ll come back. You’re Molly Hayes,’ he said, and he chuckled to himself.

‘Yeah, and what’s so great about her?’

‘Seeing is believing,’ he said.

She left with a prescription. She filled it that day and started her first pill the same evening.

Marjorie called to the house three days later to tell her that she was pregnant. The news came as a shock; Marjorie was no spring chicken – forty-two and her first pregnancy.

‘Christ on a bike. Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph . . .’ she said, immediately placing her hand on Marjorie’s stomach.

‘Is it Davey? Did he do this to you, love?’ she asked.

‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ Marjorie said.

‘So it’s his?’ Molly said, and Marjorie nodded. Molly inhaled and tears built in her eyes. She clapped her hands together and she smiled the brightest and biggest smile.

‘Well now, isn’t that something?’ she said, and for a moment she looked around and she was about to call out to her husband. Jack, did you hear that? Did you hear, our Marjorie and Davey are having a baby? But she didn’t because he wasn’t there, so instead she took Marjorie in her arms and she held her tightly.

‘Best news ever,’ she said. ‘Oh, our Rabbit would have loved this.’

Marjorie burst into tears. ‘Thanks, I really needed that.’

‘Have you spoken to Davey?’

‘Two nights ago. He says he’s coming home.’

‘For you and the baby.’

‘He says he was coming home anyway for Juliet, but yeah, I suppose. It’s complicated – he’s happy, though.’

It was everything Molly had dreamed of and hoped for, her son and granddaughter returning home, and still she felt so very numb.

‘You’d think he’d tell his mother.’