To the pond to smoke. It was hard to be confronted with it, to imagine all the birthdays she’d had. The attention lavished on her while Matty drifted, fatherless.

The evening was coming in.

Joe opened the back door and walked slowly out. ‘You should give those up.’

‘All right.’ One last draw, and the half-finished cigarette was dropped, swiped under a toe.

He glanced over, eyebrows raised in slight surprise. A nod. He put his hands into his armpits.

‘You should go inside.’

‘No.’ He sounded feverish, almost confrontational. ‘I wanted to say. You’re both mine. You’re both part of me. You always have been. You’ve never been gone. Do you hear me?’ He turned his head.

Matty didn’t turn. But nodded.

Later, the two of them watched the night from the front garden, the gravelly crunch of fireworks across the west of the valley.

The year didn’t just change, a quick click of digits, the world cracking apart. It was a slow bleeding. One thing into another.

Joe looked at his watch. ‘Well, we’re all still here,’ he said.

Part Three

2000

The pondwater was pale. The twilight sky leached. One coot floated out into the centre with a scraping, matter-of-fact call.

Grief took the colour from everything.

***

Joe had lasted seven months. After New Year, after waiting for the gardaí who never came, Matty had gone back to London, to Heather’s sofa above The Haggerston, to the halal meat and kebab shops, the Hindu centre and the techno club. It had felt better to be out of Ireland, away from Cormac, away from Brigid. But knowing he was there – it was impossible. He was impossible. He would send text messages to the mobile phone he’d given as a present. Postcards, addressed to the pub. ‘Another one from The Father,’ Heather would say. ‘Fuck’s sake, Matts, get the prodigal son thing over with.’

We miss you. Over and out.

Come and see us, Matty. It’s stopped raining.

So Matty had returned. It had been shocking to see how the weight had fallen from him in only six weeks. The greyness in his skin as well as his beard. Franklin had cleared his work from the study to make more room, and didn’t glare as he had the first time round.

One day, Matty had got a lift to the village that had a bus to Sligo, and waited outside the Garda station for an hour, hands in pockets on the pavement opposite. Eventually Cormac had come out and stopped dead before crossing the road.

‘You’ve got some balls,’ he said. They’d watched the school traffic edge past. ‘You know I could still arrest you.’

‘I know.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to say sorry.’

‘For which part?’

‘Hurting you.’

‘Which part?’ he said, a little more quietly.

Matty looked down at the concrete.