Before yesterday, what had I known about my past? There had been a lot of alcohol, I knew that. And depression. I knew that too. Assumed it, given my birth mother’s suicide. And there had been chaos and neglect and terror. I felt that, a shadow barely glimpsed at the edge of me, a darkness, unknowable, at the core of me. I had faint memories, like scenes from an old TV show. The rest was burnt into my brain like melted plastic, the true shape of what happened long gone. I had read up on the theory, and putting a label on it helped a little. I had been exposed to relational trauma, certainly. And ‘Big T’ trauma, probably. Though there had been love, too, some warmth, some care. And now I’d found out that there had been a secret sister. What effect would this new information about my background have on me? Were there other secrets? And, if there were, did I want to know?

Jessica lived near the church in Ballyphehane, one of the necklace of churches built around Cork during the 1950s, at the height of the Catholic Church’s institutional power. At the time, some of the women in the surrounding area had donated their engagement rings to fund the enormous and, these days, mostly empty church. But the hierarchy’s influence on Ireland had declined over the intervening decades, precipitously so after the revelations of recent times: the Mother and Baby homes, the priests and Christian Brothers convicted of serious sexual offences, and how Church institutions had colluded in serial cover-ups. I wondered what those women would think of their sacrifice now.

By 10.35, I was knocking on the door of an ex-City Council end of terrace, an ordinary home that was becoming more extraordinary with every passing year. Most of the houses in the area had been built when the State was young and poor and had had many faults but had, at least, cared enough to house those of its citizens who hadn’t been forced to emigrate. But for a long time now, government policy had decreed that large schemes like this one were a source of social problems, and publicly funded house-building had more or less ceased. The resulting homelessness crisis, a spectacularly serious social problem in itself, hadn’t yet led to an effective change in policy.

I rang the doorbell, and stood down off the front step again. I saw that the house had been renovated and extended. The work looked less than ten years old and, with a ramp and handrail, there was a granny flat with a separate entrance built on to the side.

‘Coming,’ a voice said from above.