‘We will probably always love each other in one way or another,’ Lorcan said. ‘But we can’t be together. We want things that are so vastly different out of life. I just can’t believe it took us so long to work it out.’

Jo realised she’d been lucky in many ways. That her relationship with Colm had been relatively short-lived.

‘So, you see, the reason I’ve not been back here before now is because that was a tough thing to work out,’ Lorcan said, and at this stage he was crying too. Jo was so grateful they were still hidden away in one of the writing nooks where no one could see them. This moment was one so deeply personal, something only people who had experienced this pain could understand, that she didn’t want them to have any kind of audience.

‘So that’s why we split, you see,’ Lorcan said. ‘And it was messy. So I came here to get away. I need to remember the nice things in the world. To find new nice things, like Derry Girl murals and crazy rescue dogs. I don’t think I realised how much I needed that until I was here. How good it felt to have a conversation that doesn’t have some big, deep, sad undertone running through it.’

‘And yet, here we are having a conversation that has a big, deep, sad undertone running through it,’ Jo said, with a watery smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry you felt you had to tell me.’

‘I didn’t have to tell you, Jo,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to. That’s the difference.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ she admitted. ‘And I understand. How hard it is. How awful it is.’ She felt her heart constrict so tightly she thought it might implode. She knew in that moment, on the day she was on the cusp of achieving her biggest dream, that she was about to share her biggest secret.

Only a handful of people knew the real reason she had come home from Spain and exactly what had happened. Her mum, of course. Noah and Erin. She hadn’t even told Libby. But she sat, in her writing nook, and she told Lorcan just how and why she understood what he had been through. More than that, she told him that she knew, categorically, that it would get easier, but that it would never, ever go away. And that there would always be a piece of his heart reserved for his almost-child, just as there was for her.

He had held her hand while she spoke, and that touch had meant the world. There was such tenderness to the way he stroked her hand with his thumb. There was such recognition of pain, it made her feel as if she was finally seen for the person she was – good and bad, broken and healed.