She smiled, as if she knew I was just trying to be kind, but she went along with it. “Bob was fun, he could always make me laugh. He changed as he got older, but he never stopped being able to make me laugh.” She reached inside her shirt and lifted out a silver chain. “He bought me a ring. I’ve never taken it off.”

It was the chain I’d noticed her playing with when she’d come into the office that first day. There was a ring on it, a solitaire, with a precious stone like an engagement ring. Green, like her eyes.

“It’s pretty,” I said, although it was impossible now not to wonder where the money to pay for it had come from.

“He said some day I’d be able to wear it on my hand, but that never happened.” She tucked the chain back in. “I’ve often thought that it was my own fault that he never left her.”

“Why was that?”

“I was like a second wife to him, the one he told all his problems to. I don’t think he could have stayed married to her if he hadn’t had me.”

“It must have been hard for you, the times when he wasn’t in Ireland.”

She took a deep breath. “I saw him while he was in London. We planned to be together when he came back. I’d even told my parents about him. They said they’d move out of the farm. They were getting too old to stay there anyway and they wanted to move into town. They’d have been able to have a carer for my mother and I could have helped.” She paused. “We would have been living there, Bob and I, looking out over Trawbreaga Bay.”

I was pretty sure Bob had been married while he was making plans to live with Mary in Inishowen – Mary had said that he’d married Amanda a year after they split up and I’d seen pictures online of them at charity balls in London. He was also having a short-lived affair with Jude Burns’s wife. But I said nothing. Leah had been right about one thing. There was a haunting sadness in Mary’s smile.

Molloy appeared in the doorway. Mary saw him but didn’t react, just a little nod of acknowledgement.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “But then he went to Nigeria. My parents both died while he was out there. He never met them; he wasn’t at their funerals. All the milestones of my life. I was there whenever he needed me but …”

I finished the sentence. “He wasn’t there for you.”