At the carousel I collected my bags, stumbled through passport control and grabbed a taxi. Thankfully, given the sleepless fog I was in, I didn’t have to drive back to Glendara till the morning. I’d left the Mini with my parents in Dublin and I was spending the night with them. I had some concerns as to whether the engine would turn over; she was an old car, but I suspected my dad would have started the engine periodically while I’d been away. It was the kind of thing he would do. It would be good to see them both; we’d all come a long way in the past couple of years.

The journey took longer than I expected; I’d hit Dublin at rush hour and rain bucketed down the whole way into town. But eventually we pulled into my parents’ road and rounded the corner to their house, a 1940s semi-detached in a row of identical terraces with neat front gardens, although my parents’ house was easy to spot today because there was my old Mini parked out front. I smiled when I saw her.

They’d told me they might not be here when I arrived, but I’d had a text from my mother saying that they wouldn’t be long and to use my key and let myself in. So, I hauled my case out of the taxi and stood on the steps trying to balance it while I turned the key in the lock.

Once inside, I left my luggage in the hall and made my way towards the kitchen, thinking suddenly of tea, something I realized I’d missed. Americans don’t understand tea, not in the way the Irish do anyway.

I pushed open the door, then stopped dead. There was a man poking about in the fridge, a man who certainly wasn’t my father, a man I didn’t recognize. I must have yelped in surprise because he turned around quickly, a carton of milk in his hand. Then his face broke into a smile and he put down the milk and came over to me hand outstretched, welcoming me as if he were the host.

“Hello, you must be Benedicta.”

His hand was clammy and his handshake limp. It didn’t help to warm me up. I saw now that he was conservatively dressed in chinos and a shirt and tie, not the attire of your average house breaker, but who the hell was he?

“It’s Ben,” I said. “And you are?”

He studied my face. “Stuart. Stuart Chambers. I’m a good friend of your parents.”

“Right.”

He went back to the fridge and closed the door. “You must be tired. I’m making some tea – would you like some?”