Mrs Hannigan was the music teacher at school, and since she was nine years old, Leah had been going to Mrs Hannigan’s house for private piano lessons two afternoons a week. The Hannigans were a youngish couple – he worked for Guinness, a rep for the region – and they had a little boy, Cian, who was eight months old when they asked her if she’d babysit. Yvonne and Jim, as they kept urging her to call them, had been invited to the wedding of one of Jim’s college friends in Belfast, a two-hour drive away.

‘Any problems, anything at all,’ Yvonne had urged her, ‘you’re to call me.’

They’d left the phone number of the hotel, as well as Jim’s mobile, and she’d promised to alert them if anything happened, or if she felt she couldn’t cope. But she knew she could. Cian was a sweet baby whom she’d known since he was born, and it wasn’t the first time she’d babysat for him. With his fat round face and blond curls, there was a comedy to his sweetness that touched something within her. Even then, in the throes of her adolescence, a victim of hormonal mood swings and irrational rages, something about him reached inside her and brought out softness and affection that were just for him.

‘How’s everything there?’ Yvonne had asked, when she rang that evening, and Leah had held the phone up to the baby’s mouth so that his mother could hear him gurgling, making his own sweet, happy noises.

‘Listen, we had some trouble with the car on the way here,’ Yvonne had told her. ‘I’m a bit nervous about travelling back in the dark, in case it breaks down. Would it be too much to ask you to stay over until the morning?’

‘Of course not!’ Leah had said.

‘Just say, now, if you’ve had enough. I know he can be exhausting and you’ve already given up so much of your weekend.’

‘Honestly. I don’t mind.’

And she didn’t. Yvonne promised they’d be home first thing in the morning, in time to give Cian his feed. When Leah’s mother called in to check she’d be all right for the night, Leah was firm about sending her mother away, determined to do this all by herself.

She began playing a fantasy game. Alone in the house with the baby, she imagined that the Hannigans’ home, with its framed old movie posters and shelves full of vinyls, was her own home. When she reached to take Cian from his bouncer, she imagined it was her own child she was lifting, her own son held against her shoulder, the softness of his hair against her face.