For the next few days, still utterly caged by pain, by stupefying guilt, Matty watched the news and fiddled with the radio, a large, leather-bound oddity with gold-coloured knobs. Brigid didn’t buy a newspaper. There’d only been one more report of it, a local TV bulletin, saying the same things as the first time. Nothing since.

Brigid would make them food, tried to get Matty to talk as the voice returned, about anything, about family. It had been shrugged off as not much to tell. If it wasn’t for Joe, none of this would have happened. Instead Brigid talked about herself. How she’d grown up in this house, how she’d painted it and filled it with her own things to put something of herself in there. Their mother – she had a brother – now had early dementia and lived with an aunt down in Cork who had more time to care for her. Their father had died young. She was divorced, having lived further south where the work was, the husband spoken of cursorily just once. She talked about being in charge of the upper half of the local primary school, some of the more idiosyncratic pupils.

She talked about what it had been like to live so close to the border – they were Catholic, though Brigid didn’t seem very religious – of her mother being an expert in smuggling sugar and butter back home. Of a boy she knew as a child who’d been part of larger racket taking turkey and tobacco over the river further up. A few years ago, there had been parties when particular roads were re-opened. It still felt transgressive to cross over.

Brigid was kind. She seemed to have a total lack of judgement, an absence of curiosity about Matty. The thought of having to go back out into the world again, to not know where the next suspicious glances, the cruel questions might come from – and of worse, of much worse – was pushed further away. Brigid bought emollient cream for the eczema, even though Matty had never mentioned it. Made hearty meals, cottage pie with lentils instead of beef, vegetable lasagne. She said not to bother washing the dishes. To rest.

So Matty rested. Waited for the wrist to improve, making hot-water bottles for it now instead of ice. Watched TV, lay in bed, avoided the sour, rheumy-eyed cat – its name was Athena – and watched the weather. The mountains changed their face every day – every fifteen minutes. A few days in, the light hit them and they were revealed not to be just blackly sheer but mottled, variously forested, even a couple of houses high up that had looked like rocks. The bungalow was always warm, slightly moist, the feel of a greenhouse.