‘It’s absolutely my business. Jeannie was my friend. Jesus, Ma. When did it start? When she was here in Trim with me that summer?’

There was a long pause. She wouldn’t look at him.

‘I need to know,’ he said quietly.

‘He said it happened once. In Melbourne. After you woke up. When you came out of the coma.’

‘Did he always know about Eliza? From the start? Were he and Jeannie in contact?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need to know more than that.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Ma, please, tell me.’

‘I don’t want to tell you. It was hard enough to hear your father telling me. I thought it had all gone away. Where it belonged. But then there she was at the quiz. In our pub. Like a ghost, risen from the dead.’

‘From the dead?’ He thought she was talking about Jeannie. ‘You knew that Jeannie had died?’

She shook her head. Impatiently. ‘Jeannie told him Eliza had died. That she’d been killed in an accident outside her school. Not long before your father was due to go to Australia. When he was offered that trip, do you remember, the GAA one?’

Of course he remembered. There had been such a fuss about it. All for nothing. His father hadn’t even gone in the end. He’d said one of the younger fellows should have his place.

‘When the trip was first announced, he contacted Jeannie. Said he was coming to Australia. He wanted to meet his daughter. Jeannie agreed. Then a month before the visit, she rang him and said her daughter had been killed. Jeannie told him she was too devastated, she couldn’t meet him herself, ever again. It was too painful.’

‘He believed her?’

‘Of course he believed her. Why wouldn’t he believe her? A mother telling someone her daughter was dead? What kind of sick person would make up something like that?’

Her words settled around Emmet, sparking more memories of Jeannie. Her wildness. Her exaggeration. Her fearlessness. Her lows, other times. Deep lows. Had she been sick? Mentally sick?

‘Why did Dad tell you?’

Her hands were still twisted in her lap. ‘He said he couldn’t go to his grave carrying that secret. That he knew it might ruin everything between us but he had to tell me.’

‘Jesus.’ He stood up. ‘Jesus, Ma.’

‘Stop blaspheming.’

He’d heard that thousands of times over the years.

‘Is Jeannie dead?’ she asked. ‘Is that true?’

He nodded. He had no reason to believe Eliza hadn’t been telling him the truth. He told his mother as much as he knew.

‘Was it suicide?’

‘A coroner’s report said no.’

He sat down again. His head felt too full of images. His father. His mother, hearing that news, a month before he died. Jeannie, in a bath, drunk. Dead. Jeannie and his father —