Think of something nice, my mother used to tell me when I couldn’t go to sleep.

I feel bad now, telling Kate I didn’t need to speak to Brendan earlier, on the telephone. I should have spoken to him. That’s what husbands and wives do, isn’t it? They speak to each other.

It wasn’t always like this. With Brendan and me. We used to speak to each other. And not just about the house and the girls and his job. Real talk. Proper talk. It’s hard to remember what about now. Interesting things. I’m sure of it.

He was handsome. I shouldn’t say was. He is handsome. I’ve just... I suppose I’ve grown accustomed to his face. I don’t think familiarity breeds contempt, but it’s probably fair to say that it makes you stop noticing after a while.

I met him at work. I was one of dozens of girls—fresh out of a secretarial course—in the typing pool at the insurance company. Brendan had started with the company as a runner. Delivering documents to various offices around Dublin. The girls joke that he was like an olden-days Zip File. He was a loss adjuster by the time I met him. He’d come into our section with his files neatly stacked and bound with an elastic band and the little tape with his dictation sealed inside an envelope with his name and the date on it.

I think it might be true to say that I fell in love with his voice. That was the first thing. He has one of those low, smooth voices that put you in mind of melted caramel. But not in a sleazy way. There was a lot of sleazy going on back then, but that was not Brendan’s way. He wasn’t shy exactly, but he was quiet. And mannerly. He’d always say please and thank you on the tapes. It might not make it into a romance novel, but my mother was a stickler for manners, and I suppose it rubbed off on me. I would sift through the piles of dictation and pick out his tapes and do them first, even though we were told to do the work in strict date order.

And then—and this is the romantic bit, even though the girls laugh when I say that—one day, there I was, going through my in tray, looking for Brendan’s dictation.

When I opened the envelope to fish out the tape, there was another envelope inside, and this one was addressed to me in Brendan’s tidy hand, my name—Terry Keogh back then—in small, block letters. The envelope was sealed. I glanced around to make sure no one was looking, but when you work in a typing pool, someone’s always looking, so I pocketed the envelope and got on with my work and didn’t open it until I was on the bus home that evening.

It wasn’t exactly a love letter.

It wasn’t even a letter really. It was a note.

Dear Terry,

I received two tickets to a play in the Abbey from a grateful broker. I wonder if you would like to accompany me? It’s this Saturday. If you are agreeable, we could eat in The 101 first (they have a theater-early-bird menu that is quite nice).