‘Tell her now,’ Liam had said to him as they shook hands.

‘No,’ Tommy was defiant, ‘I’ll tell her on the deck, as soon as I can see Liverpool,’ and since that conversation, the secret had burnt in his mouth desperate to escape and each time he almost told her and didn’t, he felt a sense of atonement for his mistakes of the past.

The only time Kitty was ever spoken of was late at night, in the dark, in bed but not tonight.

‘Maura,’ Tommy said, ‘it’s time to look to the future, for all of us – and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with a new babby, can you?’ He had pushed Maura’s dark hair away from her face. ‘Don’t you be looking like that,’ he said, noting the sadness that crossed her eyes. ‘No one can ever replace our Kitty, but a new birth, that would be exciting for the others and especially for Angela. It might make her smile and you, you’re not too old yet, missus.’

Maura had grinned. ‘You have a nerve, you. If we weren’t sleeping under someone else’s roof, you wouldn’t get away with that.’

Tommy had silenced her as his lips found hers and, as it had been throughout their married life, Maura was lost. Despite the fact that they had been together for all of the years they had, he could still make her insides flip over at his gentlest touch and that night, he was like a man possessed. Maura knew, as the first watery light of morning had slipped in though unfamiliar curtains, that she was with child…

*

‘Mammy, are we nearly there?’ asked Angela as she lifted her head from her father’s chest and rubbed her sleepy eyes. They were in a taxi which Tommy had hailed at the Pier Head to transport them on the last leg of the journey home. The cobbles of the Dock Road rumbled beneath the tyres as the taxi jolted along past the tall red-brick warehouse buildings that towered above them.

‘We are, Angela, can you smell the Mersey?’ said Tommy. They had been on the road since before first light and they were all exhausted, but as the ferry had drawn closer to the shore and the lights of Liverpool sparkled before them, Maura had perked up.

‘Would you look at that,’ Maura had said to Tommy. ‘The Liver Birds. Tommy, we’re home!’

Her eyes had filled with tears at the sight of the three graces and the skyline of Liverpool that lay before them. Tommy had slipped his arm around her shoulder. ‘We are, queen, and I never thought I’d say it, for I will always be an Irishman through and through, but Liverpool is where my kids belong and that is where my heart is. Fancy that! I call a country that produces wet potatoes, home.’