The smile was gone. I asked, “Conor didn’t go to Lillie’s with them?”

A momentary shadow of the smile flitted back. “God, no. Not his style.”

“He’s more of a loner?”

“Not a loner. I mean, he’d be down the pub having a laugh as much as anyone, but the pub wouldn’t be Lillie’s. Conor’s kind of intense. He never had any time for trendy stuff; he said that was letting other people make your decisions for you, and he was old enough to make his own. And he thought all the my-credit-card-is-bigger-than-your-credit-card stuff was idiotic. He said that to Ian and Mac, that they were turning into a pair of brain-dead sheep. They didn’t take it too well.”

“An angry young man,” I said.

Fiona shook her head. “Not angry. Just … what I said before. They didn’t match up any more, and that bothered all three of them. They took it out on each other.”

If I stayed on Conor much longer, she was going to start wondering. “What about Shona? Who did she stop matching up with?”

“Shona …” Fiona shrugged, eloquently. “Shona’s somewhere out there being the girl version of Mac and Ian. A lot of fake tan, a lot of labels, a lot of friends with fake tans and labels, and they’re bitchy—not once in a while, the way everyone is, but all the time. When we met up, she’d keep on making little snide comments about Conor’s haircut, or my clothes, and she’d get Mac and Ian laughing along—she was funny, she always was, but it didn’t use to be vicious funny. Then this one time a few years ago I texted her to see if she was on for pints, just like normal, and she basically texted me back saying she had got engaged—we hadn’t even met her boyfriend, all we knew was he was loaded—and she would die of embarrassment if her fiancé ever saw her with someone like me, so keep an eye on the Social and Personal sections for her wedding photos, bye!” Another dry little shrug. “Her, I’m not positive she’s going to outgrow it.”

“What about Pat and Jenny?” I asked. “Did they want to be cool kids about town, too?”

Pain arced across Fiona’s face, but she gave her head a quick jerk and shook it away, reached for her mug. “Sort of. Not like Ian and Mac, but yeah, they liked going to the in places, wearing the right stuff. For them, though, the big deal was always each other. Getting married, getting a house, having kids.”

“Last time we talked, you mentioned that you and Jenny spoke every day, but you hadn’t seen each other in a long time. You drifted too. Was that why? She and Pat were on their own little domestic buzz, and it didn’t match with yours?”

She flinched. “That sounds awful. But yeah, I guess that was it. The further they got down that road, the further they got from the rest of us. Once Emma came, they were all about bedtime routines and putting her name down for schools, and it’s not like the rest of us knew anything about that.”