Mandy was watching me, a little worried, trying to work out if I got what she meant. “Makes sense,” I said. “I can’t see Rosie taking well to being sent to the corner, though. Was she planning on trying something? Nicking her keys back from her da, maybe?”

“Not a thing. That’s what tipped us off something was up, sure. Me and Imelda said to her, ‘Fuck him, come out with us anyway, if he locks you out you can sleep here.’ But she said no, she wanted to keep him sweet. We said, ‘Why would you be arsed?’—like you said, it wasn’t her style. And Rosie said, ‘Sure, it’s not for much longer.’ That got our attention, all right. The pair of us dropped everything and jumped on her, wanting to know what she was on about, but she wouldn’t say. She acted like she just meant her da would give the keys back soon enough, but both of us knew it was more than that. We didn’t know what, exactly; just that something big was happening.”

“You didn’t try for more details? What she had planned, when, whether it was with me?”

“God, yeah. We went on at her for ages—I was poking her in the arm and all, and Imelda smacked her with a pillow, trying to make her talk— but she just ignored us till we gave up and went back to getting ready. She was . . . Jaysus.” Mandy laughed, a soft, startled little catch, under her breath; her brisk hands on the washing had slowed to a stop. “We were just through there, in that dining room—that used to be my room. I was the only one of us had my own room; we always met up there. Me and Imelda were doing our hair, backcombing away—God, the state of us, and the turquoise eye shadow, d’you remember? We thought we were the Bangles and Cyndi Lauper and Bananarama all rolled into one.”

“You were beautiful,” I said, and meant it. “All three of you. I’ve never seen prettier.”

She wrinkled her nose at me—“Flattery’ll get you nowhere”—but her eyes were still somewhere else. “We were slagging Rosie, asking her was she joining the nuns, telling her she’d look lovely in a habit and was it because she fancied Father McGrath . . . Rosie was lying on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and biting her nail—you know the way she used to do? Just the one fingernail?”

Right index fingernail; she bit at it when she was thinking hard. Those last couple of months, while we made our plans, she’d drawn blood a few times. “I remember,” I said.