Emmet still had good memories of the summer he’d brought Jeannie home with him. She’d leapt at the chance. She loved the idea of staying in a family pub beside an actual castle. They’d decided to surprise his parents. They got a bus from London to Holyhead in Wales, the ferry to Dún Laoghaire, caught a bus to Trim. The whole journey from London took three days. There’d been no way of affording to fly back then.

His parents liked her. He remembered that. His mother had said she was ‘refreshing’. Jeannie was a hard worker, enough to endear anyone to his father. He’d been obsessed with hard work, as Emmet learned to his cost. But Jeannie had also made Hugh laugh, with her irreverence, her cheekiness. ‘Tell me every single thing I should know about Ireland, Mr Foley,’ she’d said. ‘From A to Z.’ His father took it seriously, Emmet remembered. Each day of that month, he’d given Jeannie a new fact.

She’d wanted information about the castle, especially. Emmet remembered something else then. His father taking Jeannie on a tour of the castle. Emmet was invited but didn’t join them. He’d been on enough castle tours, thank you. They’d come back laughing. Was his memory playing tricks, or had Jeannie been arm-in-arm with him when they came into the pub again?

Possibly. Jeannie had always been so tactile. She’d hugged him often during their friendship. She flirted with every man she met. It was her way. Teasing them. Complimenting them. She got plenty of male attention in return.

But Jeannie and his father?

Together?

It suddenly seemed important to talk to Eliza again. He’d stepped away from Liam, taken out his phone and called the hotel. The receptionist put him through to her room. It rang out.

He was relieved, he realised. What on earth had he been going to say? ‘Eliza, I’ve been giving it some thought. I don’t know for sure, but there’s a faint possibility you could be my father’s daughter.’

He thought of her height. Her colouring. Her eyes.

He wished he and Dervla had taken a photo of Eliza. At first meeting, he’d only seen Jeannie in her. But that’s who he’d been looking for. Not every child resembled their mother and father in equal amounts, after all. He and his brothers looked more like their mother’s father than their own father.