‘I’ll call the hotel first thing and invite her,’ Dervla said. ‘And, who knows, you might still help her find her father. You or Orla. You were both around at the right time. Maybe Jeannie met him at the pub you both worked in? Or he was a friend of a friend in that share house you lived in?’

‘Maybe. It was open house, as much as I can remember.’

‘Shame you can’t ask your dad. He was there then too, of course. Maybe he noticed her flirting with someone.’ She turned over, switched off her light and was asleep in minutes.

Her last words had stayed like neon letters above his head.

Shame you can’t ask your dad. He was there then too, of course.

The next morning he’d come into the bar early, as usual. His barman Liam was there, taking in deliveries, chatty as ever. Emmet barely listened. He was too preoccupied, trying to summon up even some small memory from those weeks in Melbourne. But it was as if they’d been wiped out by a blackboard duster, just traces left behind, the odd word here or there. He recalled moods rather than details, of fun nights and lazy mornings in their share house, for example. Nights out after their shifts in the pub. But no facts.

It had only been much later, when he was back home in Ireland, that he’d learned his father had stayed in his bedroom the entire time he was in that coma, of which he also had no memory. Jeannie had insisted a hotel was too expensive. Orla had been living there too, working as a temp, taking it easy before she started her medical studies. They’d had two other flatmates. A Dutch girl, or was she German? And a girl from New Zealand. Or was it Canada?

His father and Jeannie.

In the same house for those weeks.

Could they —

No. Of course not. Of course they couldn’t have. Jeannie was only twenty-one years old, for God’s sake. His father would have been . . . Emmet did the maths. Thirty-one years ago. His father would have been forty-three, forty-four. He had seemed so old back then. Now, at the age of fifty-two himself, it seemed young.

His father and Jeannie?

No, it couldn’t have happened.

It was his father he was thinking about. And he would have noticed something, surely? Flirting between them? Something?

Except no, he wouldn’t have. Because he’d been in hospital then, hadn’t he? Lost to the world.

But it wasn’t the first time they met, a voice inside him was saying. They’d met before. Here in Trim.