They knew it by heart, just like every family that’s lost a child—I once had a mother show me which glass her son drank out of, the morning before he took his overdose. A Sunday morning in Advent, cold, with a gray-white sky and breath hanging in the air like fog. Rosie had come in early the night before, so she had gone to nine o’clock Mass with the rest of the family, rather than sleeping in and getting the noon Mass, the way she did if she’d been out late on Saturday night. They had come home and made a fry-up for breakfast—back then, eating before Holy Communion earned you a string of Hail Marys at your next confession. Rosie had done the ironing while her mother washed up, and the two of them had discussed when to buy the ham for Christmas dinner; it grabbed my breath for a second, the thought of her calmly talking about a meal she had no plans to eat and dreaming about a Christmas that would be just hers and mine. A little before noon the girls had walked over to New Street to pick up their nana Daly for Sunday dinner, after which they had all watched the telly for a while—that was another thing that had put the Dalys a cut above us peasants: they actually owned their own TV. Reverse snobbery is always fun; I was rediscovering subtle nuances that I’d almost forgotten existed.

The rest of the day was more nothing. The girls had walked their nana home, Nora had headed out to hang around with a couple of her mates, and Rosie had gone to their room to read, or possibly to pack or to write that note or to sit on the edge of her bed and take a lot of deep breaths. Tea, more housework, more telly, helping Nora with her maths homework; there hadn’t been a single sign, anywhere in that day, that Rosie had anything up her sleeve. “An angel,” Mr. Daly said grimly. “All that week, she was an angel. I should’ve known.”