‘And how do you know she doesn’t?’ JJ asked, but before Danny could answer he said, ‘Love will have its way with you in the end, buck. Tell her little bollocks of a father I said hello.’

‘Will do.’

‘Ben’s train,’ JJ said as he stepped from the room. ‘Six ­forty-­five. Good man.’

The rest of the day crawled. Danny could not wait to tear out the door and race across town to the Vaughans’ house. And yet, when five o’clock finally arrived, Danny found himself dawdling, rendered pleasurably irresolute by the imminency of his freedom. He packed away the laptop and tidied the desk, drifted around the room releasing the cords of the window blinds, watching each blind skitter upward with a frantic shuttering sound. He licked his thumb, rubbed ineffectually at the smudge on the wall where the chair had hit it. He sat up on the table and scrolled through his phone.

He checked Ben’s number. Their last exchange was a week ago, Ben responding with a single crylaughing face to some stupid meme Danny had forwarded him. Danny texted will pick you up tonight.

Danny went to Shauna’s number and realised Shauna had sent him a message just before noon:

Hey hun let me know how yr day is going x x.

Danny had not replied. As long and dull as the day had been, he had somehow not been able to stir himself for the five seconds it would have taken to text her back. He wasn’t sure why, except that tedium was its own kind of discouragement, that sitting at a desk not doing one thing somehow made you less inclined to do another, even if you wanted to.

Sorry day was grand busy leaving now x he texted.

Outside, Danny opened the door of his car and left it open to air the vehicle out. He leaned against the boot, pinched the damp scratchy fabric of his shirt from his chest, and looked out across the lot. The lot was surrounded by a shabby scrawl of ­chain-­link fencing the father should have long ago ripped out and replaced. It glimmered in spots and in other spots was black where the silver paint had flaked off the links. Beyond the fence a weedy interval of waste ground led up to a pair of train tracks. Ballina station was a quarter mile west of the dealership. Three times a day a stoic little ­two-­carriage train set out from Ballina for Manulla Junction and three times a day it came back. Manulla Junction was where the central line from Dublin connected to Ballina. Ben would be getting off at Manulla within the hour and would be in Ballina twenty minutes after that.

A message came in on Danny’s phone. He figured it was Shauna or Ben getting back to him, but it wasn’t.

Chancing the arm again. Training this Sunday @ 1pm