She dials the number and listens to the ringing tone, imagines the sound of it echoing around the house, up through the hall to the bedrooms above. She imagines her mother in the kitchen, hurriedly wiping her hands on a tea-towel, or her father sitting up in bed and putting down the newspaper, listening. As always when she makes these calls, she feels a murmuring of sadness deep in her chest, the pull of something painful.

‘Hello?’ Her mother’s voice, breathless with enquiry.

‘Mum, it’s me.’

‘Leah.’ The name breathed out with something like relief. This is chased with instant anxiety: ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes. Everything’s fine. I’m fine. How are you? How’s Dad?’

What follows is her mother’s cheerfully brisk monologue about her father’s continuing health woes – complications from a heart attack some years ago keep him largely an invalid – before moving on to fill Leah in on various pieces of gossip that currently permeate the small town where they live. Leah listens, trying to picture it all, but sometimes the descriptions are lost on her. Her recollections of home have faded in the past eleven years, although some things remain stark and vivid. Not everything can be erased.

‘And how are things in the office?’

Leah can hear in her mother’s voice the effort involved in keeping this conversation light. Trying to act normally. What hard work it must be for her mother, trying not to frighten her away.

‘Fine. Good.’

‘Dad wants to know are you playing?’

The thought of her father concerned about her music threatens to bring on emotion, so she says quickly: ‘Actually, the piano has found a new home.’

‘Oh?’ Sharpness in the question, yet she knows her mother is trying to hold back. These phone-calls between them are delicate.

‘I’ve moved, Mum. I’m in a new flat. In Dún Laoghaire.’

‘Well. That sounds lovely, sweetheart,’ she says cautiously.

‘The thing is,’ Leah says, arriving at the real purpose of the call, ‘I’ve met someone. His name is Jake. We’ve moved in together.’

She waits, and into the silence that follows she reads her mother’s pain and disappointment and anxiety. The distance between them – the necessary distance – is bearable, but at times like this, she must wonder at Leah, at why she shuts them out, punishes her parents, when, really, they don’t deserve it.

‘This is all very sudden.’

‘Not really. We’ve been together for a while now,’ Leah says, deliberately vague. She doesn’t tell her mother that it’s a whole five months since she met Jake. Five months since she fell head over heels.

‘Is he a good man?’ her mother asks then, her voice softening. ‘Is he kind to you?’

‘Yes. He is, Mum. He really is. He’s kind and warm and open.’

‘And you? Can you be open with him?’