Sometimes, after a week in respite, Dad would return home, greet her as if he were meeting her for the first time. “Good morning, my name is Eugene Keogh, I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.” She’d accept his hand, shake it, tell him the pleasure was all hers.

He often thought she was a cleaner. Told her she was doing a great job.

“Where is your husband?” he sometimes asked.

“I don’t know,” she sometimes answered, when the day had been too long.

She would not agree with Iris’s decision. Not on religious grounds. Although it’s true that she attended mass every Sunday, and blessed herself every time we passed a graveyard. And fasted on holy days. And gave up choc ices and liquorice pipes for Lent.

No, I think it would have been her sense of duty that would prevent her from agreeing with Iris’s decision.

We must endure.

I wish she were here now. In spite of her reservations. Because she would have come, if I’d asked her to. If I’d said I needed her.

Her sense of duty would have persuaded her. Or is that love?

I don’t know. All I know is that I miss her.

I drive through a pretty town with a lake and a church and a bakery and a train station.

An ordinary town with ordinary people doing ordinary things.

I drive through it, following the directions that Iris drip feeds me from an email on her phone. “Left here, yeah, that’s it, straight on now and then...oh yes, turn at the Aldi there.”

An Aldi. A pizzeria.

One of those cheap chain hotels.

We pass all these places. These ordinary places. Now we are in a business park.

I take the next right and I see it immediately.

Pax looks exactly as it does in the photographs I have Googled online.

Why shouldn’t it, I suppose.

I was expecting it to be bigger. More substantial somehow.

It has a temporary look about it. A prefab sort of appearance.

The building squats in the shadow of an enormous warehouse behind it. A rectangle of cheerful blue. It looks like it’s made of corrugated tin. Deafening inside when it rains, I imagine.

I pull up outside the building, let the engine idle. It will be too quiet if I take the key out of the ignition. It will be too pointed.

“This is me,” says Iris, picking her handbag off the floor. She rummages in the bag, takes out a tube of lip balm, applies it to the circle she has made of her mouth.

I smell honey. Burt’s Bees.

“Want some?” she asks, offering me the tube.

I dip my finger into the soft stickiness, rub it on my dry lips.

“Can I have some?” Dad says, poking his head in between our seats.

“Sure,” Iris says. She applies it to his lips.

“That’s lovely,” he says, smiling.

“You’re lovely,” says Iris, kissing his cheek. She zips up her bag. “Okay then,” she says, looking at me. Her hand is on the door handle.