I said, “It does, all right.”

“I keep thinking I’ll look up and he’ll be there; Kevin will. Just there, like, below Shay. Every time I don’t see him, I almost ask where he is. Do yous not do the same?”

I reached up a hand and gave hers a squeeze. Shay said, with a sudden flick of savagery, “The thick bastard.”

“What are you bleeding on about?” Jackie demanded. Shay shook his head and drew on his smoke.

I said, “I’d love to know the same thing.”

Carmel said, “He didn’t mean anything by it. Sure you didn’t, Shay?”

“Figure it out for yourselves.”

I said, “Why don’t you pretend we’re thick too, and spell it out for us.”

“Who says I’d have to pretend?”

Carmel started to cry. Shay said—not unkindly, but like he’d said it a few hundred times this week—“Ah, now, Melly. Come on.”

“I can’t help it. Could we not be good to each other, just this once? After everything that’s happened? Our poor little Kevin’s dead. He’s never coming back. Why are we sitting here wrecking each other’s heads?”

Jackie said, “Ah, Carmel, love. We’re only slagging. We don’t mean it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Shay told her.

I said, “We’re family, babe. This is what families do.”

“The tosspot’s right,” Shay said. “For once.”

Carmel was crying harder. “Thinking about us all sitting right here last Friday, the whole five of us . . . I was only over the moon, so I was. I never thought it’d be the last time, you know? I thought it was just the start.”

Shay said, “I know you did. Will you try and keep it together, but? For me, yeah?”

She caught a tear with a knuckle, but they kept coming. “God forgive me, I knew something bad was probably after happening to Rosie, didn’t we all? But I just tried not to think about that. D’yous think this is a comeuppance?”

All of us said, “Ah, Carmel,” at once. Carmel tried to say something else, but it got tangled up in a pathetic cross between a gulp and a huge sniff.

Jackie’s chin was starting to look a little wobbly around the edges, too. Any minute now, this was going to turn into one great big sob-fest. I said, “I’ll tell yous what I feel like shit about. Not being here last Sunday evening. The night he . . .”

I shook my head quickly, against the railings, and let it trail off. “That was our last chance,” I said, up to the dimming sky. “I should’ve been here.”