“She shouldn’t’ve been kilt. That’s dirty, that is. Rosie never did anything to anyone. She only wanted . . .” Imelda went silent, smoking and watching her fingers twist through a hole in the threadbare sofa cover, but I could feel her thinking and I didn’t interrupt. After a while she said, “I thought she was the one that got away.”

I raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a faint flush on Imelda’s worn cheeks, like she had said something that might turn out to be stupid, but she kept going. “Look at Mandy, right? The spitting image of her ma. Got married as fast as she could, quit working to look after the family, good little wife, good little mammy, lives in the same house, I swear to God she even wears the same clothes her ma used to wear. Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.”

She mashed out her smoke in a full ashtray. “And look at me. Where I’ve ended up.” She jerked her chin at the flat around us. “Three kids, three das—Mandy probably told you that, did she? I was twenty having Isabelle. Straight onto the dole. Never had a decent job since, never got married, never kept a fella longer than a year—half of them are married already, sure. I’d a million plans, when I was a young one, and they came to fuck-all. Instead I turned into my ma, not a peep out of me. I just woke up one morning and here I am.”

I flipped two more smokes out of my pack, lit Imelda’s for her. “Thanks.” She turned her head to blow smoke away from me. “Rosie was the only one of us that didn’t turn into her ma. I liked thinking about her. When things weren’t great, I liked knowing she was out there, in London or New York or Los Angeles, doing some mad job I’d never heard of. The one that got away.”

I said, “I didn’t turn into my ma. Or my da, come to that.”

Imelda didn’t laugh. She gave me a brief look I couldn’t read—something to do with whether turning into a cop counted as an improvement, maybe. After a moment she said, “Shania’s pregnant. Seventeen. She’s not sure who the da is.”

Even Scorcher couldn’t have turned that one into a positive. I said, “At least she’s got a good mammy to see her through.”

“Yeah,” Imelda said. Her shoulders sagged a notch lower, like part of her had been hoping I would have the secret to fix this. “Whatever.”