When we met, she was a lawyer in the Office of Public Prosecutions. She wanted to prosecute a D-list smack dealer called Pippy who had been picked up in a Drug Squad sweep, while I wanted to let him skip along his merry way, on the grounds that I had spent the last six weeks becoming Pippy’s new BFF and I didn’t feel we had exhausted his many interesting possibilities. I called round to Olivia’s office, to convince her in person. We argued for an hour, I sat on her desk and wasted her time and made her laugh, and then when it got late I took her to dinner so we could keep arguing in comfort. Pippy got a few extra months of freedom, and I got a second date.

She was something else: sleek suits and subtle eye shadow and impeccable manners, a mind like a razor, legs that just kept on keeping on, a backbone like steel and an aura of up-and-coming that you could almost taste. Marriage and babies were the last things on her mind, which as far as I was concerned was one of the fundamentals of any good relationship. I was just disentangling myself from another one—the seventh or maybe the eighth, I don’t know—that had started cheerfully and then descended into stagnation and bitchery after about a year, when my lack of intentions became clear to both of us. If the pill were infallible, Liv and I would have gone the same way. Instead we got a church wedding with all the trimmings, a reception in a country-house hotel, a house in Dalkey, and Holly.

“I’ve never regretted it for a second,” I said. “Have you?”

It took her a moment, either to decide what I meant or to decide on the answer. Then she said, “No. Neither have I.”

I put out a hand and covered hers, where it lay on her lap. The cashmere jumper was soft and worn and I still knew the shape of her hand like I knew my own. After a while I went back into the sitting room, got a throw off the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Olivia said, without looking at me, “She wanted to know about them so badly. And they’re her family, Frank. Family matters. She had a right.”

“And I had a right to have a say about it. I’m still her father.”

“I know. I should have told you. Or respected what you wanted. But . . .” She shook her head, against the back of the sofa; her eyes were closed, and the semidarkness rubbed shadows like great bruises underneath them. “I knew if I brought it up it would turn into an enormous argument. And I didn’t have the energy. So . . .”

“My family is terminally fucked up, Liv,” I said. “In far too many ways to go into. I don’t want Holly to turn out like them.”