There were Christmas cards on the windowsill. Boxes of cereal, kids’ and adult types. A bird feeder hanging outside. Everything was so – homely. Joe couldn’t seem to be still, washing crockery, putting more toast on, casting discreet looks over. His ears seemed bigger. Longer. There were creases in his neck. It was alarming, still, to see how small he was, and to remember that it was only because Matty had grown.

They were all talking again, Sheanna with a raft of bird facts, Joe asking her for more detail, Franklin gently correcting her.

‘Where did you go in Canada?’ Matty said.

They all looked over. Franklin glanced at Joe, as if perhaps he and Sheanna should leave them to it again.

Joe shook his head. ‘It’s fine,’ he said to him.

Franklin wasn’t American, but Canadian, and a house-builder. Not an architect, he’d said, but he organised everything. Project manager. He’d lived in London for a while and had wanted to head home to Nova Scotia and build his own set of houses. Expand. He made it sound like it had almost just been business, Joe ending up doing the interiors, a partnership.

‘And this one came along,’ Franklin said, putting two knuckles lightly over Sheanna’s nose. She wriggled out of his grip and cocked her head to listen again, adult-like. ‘And a few years ago, we started noticing that over here was coming up in the world.’

‘This so-called Celtic Tiger and all that,’ said Joe. He looked discomfited, itchy.

‘There’s a tiger?’ said Sheanna.

‘Not that kind,’ said Franklin. ‘The money kind.’ He closed the paper. ‘So we thought we’d try and make a go of it over here. Build houses both sides of the border, eventually. It’s been good, hasn’t it?’ He and Joe exchanged a quiet, untranslatable look, proud but strangely melancholy.

‘It has,’ said Joe.

Simple as that. Except for the things that Franklin had left out. That Joe had run away with him. Abandoned his child. That two men had had another child by surrogacy. That two gay men were living together in Ireland, full stop. That we sounded very much like Franklin, rather than the both of them.

Matty couldn’t say anything.

‘So I did what I thought I’d never do,’ Joe said, over-brightly, glancing out of the window at the rain. ‘Came back to all this miserable shite.’

Sheanna slid off her stool. ‘That’s twenty pee, Daddy.’

It went through Matty like an arrow. Daddy.

‘Ah, bollocks.’

‘Daddy.’

Joe leant down to a coat that hung over the back of a kitchen chair, before holding out his cupped hand with a few coins. Sheanna walked round and gazed at them very seriously, before picking one out. ‘I’ll make you rich yet,’ he said to her, and winked.

‘Then I can put you in a home for people who swear all the time,’ Sheanna said, disappearing into the hallway.