“And that annoyed Pat, or Jenny? Or both of them?”

“Both. They were like, ‘How else are we supposed to get on the property ladder? How else are we supposed to buy a decent-sized house with a garden for the kids? It’s a brilliant investment, in a few years it’ll be worth enough that we can sell it and buy somewhere in Dublin, but for now … If we were millionaires, yeah, we’d get a great big place in Monkstown straight off, but we’re not, so unless Conor wants to lend us a few hundred grand, this is what we’re getting.’ They were really pissed off that he wasn’t supportive. Jenny kept saying, ‘I don’t want to listen to all that negativity, if everyone thought that way then the country would be in ruins, we want to be around positivity …’ She was genuinely upset. Jenny’s a big believer in positive mental attitude; she felt like Conor would wreck everything if they kept listening to him. I don’t know the details, but I think in the end there was some kind of big blowup. After that Conor wasn’t around, and they didn’t mention him. Why? Does it matter?”

I asked, “Did Conor still have feelings for Jenny?”

It was the million-dollar question, but Fiona just gave me a look like I hadn’t heard a word she had said. “That was forever ago. It was kid stuff, for God’s sake.”

“Kid stuff can be pretty powerful. There are plenty of people out there who never forget their first loves. Do you think Conor was one of them?”

“I don’t have a clue. You’d have to ask him.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

I had expected her to snap at me on that one, but she thought about it, her head bent over his face in the album, her fingers tangling in her hair again. “It depends what you mean by feelings,” she said. “I miss him, yeah. Sometimes I think about him. We’d been friends since I was, like, eleven. That’s important. But it’s not like I get all wistful and pine for the one who got away. I don’t want to get back together with him. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

“It didn’t occur to you to stay in touch after he had the blowup with Pat and Jenny? It sounds like you had more in common with him than they did, after all.”

“I thought about it, yeah. I left it a while, in case Conor needed to simmer down—I didn’t want to get in the middle of anything—but then I rang him a couple of times. He didn’t get back to me, so I didn’t push it. Like I said, he wasn’t the center of my world or anything. I figured, same as with Mac and Ian, we’d find each other again, somewhere down the line.”

This wasn’t where or how she had pictured the reunion. “Thanks,” I said. “That could be helpful.”