Imelda nodded, hard, into her palm. I lit a smoke and leaned back in the armchair. “Good,” I said. “So talk.”

I could have told the story myself. The pub was some place off Wexford Street, Imelda didn’t remember the name: “We were going dancing, me and Mandy and Julie, but Rosie had to be home early—her da was on the warpath—so she didn’t want to pay in to the disco. So we said we’d go for a few pints first . . .” Imelda had been up at the bar, getting her round in, when she spotted Shay. She had got chatting to him—I could see her, tossing her hair, jutting one hip, slagging him off. Shay had flirted back automatically, but he liked them prettier and softer and a lot less mouthy, and when his pints arrived he had gathered them up and turned to head back to his mates in their corner.

She had just been trying to keep his attention. What’s wrong, Shay? Is Francis right, yeah, are you more into the fellas?

Look who’s talking, he’d said. When was the last time that little prick had a girlfriend? And he had started to move off.

Imelda had said, That’s all you know.

That had stopped him. Yeah?

The lads are waiting on their pints. Go on, off you go.

I’ll be back in a sec. You just hang on there.

I might. Or I might not.

Of course she had waited for him. Rosie laughed at her when she dropped the drinks down to them in a rush, and Mandy faked an outraged sniff (Robbing my fella), but Imelda gave them the finger and hurried back up to the bar in time to be lounging there, all casual and sipping her glass of lager and one button undone, when Shay got back. Her heart was going ninety. He had never looked twice at her before.

He bent his head close and gave her the intense blue gaze that never let him down, slouched on a bar stool and slid one of his knees in between hers, bought her the next drink and ran a finger over her knuckles when he passed it to her. She spun the story out as long as she could, to keep him with her, but in the end the whole plan was spread out on the bar between them: the suitcase, the meeting place, the boat, the London bedsit, the music-business jobs, the tiny wedding; every secret thing Rosie and I had spent months building up, fragment by fragment, and keeping safe and precious next to our skin. Imelda felt like shite about doing it; she couldn’t even stand to look over at Rosie, cracking up laughing with Mandy and Julie over something or other. Twenty-two years later and the color still flamed up in her cheeks when she talked about it. She had done it anyway.