‘Better give this a try, then,’ he says, and smiles at her, as if nothing has passed between them in this room. Nothing at all.

She listens to his step on the stairs, then the creaking floorboards overhead, the sigh of his office chair as he drops his weight on to it.

The saucepans need to be scoured, but instead she takes out her cigarettes, sits at the kitchen table exhaling smoke towards the windows, open on to the garden. Shadows draw across the lawn, shrubs and bushes squatting darkly beyond it as light drains from the sky. And as she sits there, she thinks of all the times they might have left here. Sold this house and moved away. All the times she’d tried to persuade Greg that they should move, but always he’d held firm, adamant in his refusal. And now it is too late.

A feeling of unease comes over her, like the cool surface of still water being broken, unearthing something murky in the depths.

4

Leah

She wakes with a jolt, her heart still racing from the dream. As her breathing steadies, Leah takes in the room around her – the walls and furnishings, the stacks of books on the floor, the green glow of the alarm clock through the early-morning gloom. For a moment, the old panic comes tumbling up inside. It’s the unfamiliarity of her surroundings coupled with the streaked memory of her dream. But then Jake’s arm snakes around her and she remembers.

This is home now.

‘Tell me we have a few more minutes,’ he mumbles against her neck. She feels the warmth of him, the heaviness of his arm against her ribs, and realizes that she will wake next to him like this each morning now, possibly for the rest of her life.

The thought rises and threatens to overwhelm her, a giddy feeling starting in her chest. After all these years of being alone, after resigning herself to the fact and inevitability of her aloneness, now to feel the warm bustle of possibilities in this life they’re sharing – this love – it feels green and new and invigorating, like the sap rising in spring. No more sneaking around, no more withstanding the irritated sighs of her flatmates at his presence, no more eking out their weekends away in B-and-Bs from Wexford to Cork to Belfast. Their own place. Their own home, with no one to bother them. She turns over and folds herself into him, savouring the sweetly stale smell of his early-morning skin, the tickle of his chest hair against her nose. He begins to wake, desire stirring, and she feels him reaching for her thigh, drawing her leg up over his hip. When he moves inside her, it feels natural and intimate and right. She clasps her legs about him, pushing him deeper, needing him to touch her very core. The bed creaks beneath them, and overhead she thinks she hears a floorboard groan.