Sara thought of the red stains on the stone kitchen floor. She remembered picking at them with her fingernail. Without meaning to, she wiped her fingertips on her jeans, hard enough to hurt.

“When did you see Mary again?” she asked.

“It was a few years. My father gave his testimony at the hearings, and that was that for a while. All the fuss died down after a few months. The newspapermen stopped calling. That was around the time things were starting to go bad here. It was before the shooting and the bombing, a good few years before the army was out on the streets, but there was trouble brewing in Belfast and Londonderry, or Derry, or whatever you want to call it. What happened out the road was soon forgotten about. Wee Mary was in care until she was sixteen, then she was turned out. She had nowhere to go but back to that house. It was hers by right, seeing as she was the last survivor of that family, if you could call it a family. No one ever knew for sure which one of them was her father.

“Anyway, when my father found out she was living out there, him and me filled a box with bits and pieces, whatever fruit and veg was about to turn, and we drove out there in his wee van. The place was wild, all overgrown, weeds everywhere, half the windows broken. My father knocked on the door for a good five or ten minutes and there was no answer, but we knew she was there. You know the way you can tell if someone’s in or not? You can feel them there. I knew in my bones she was watching us.

“My father calls out, says he, we’ll just leave this here for you. We’ll come back in a lock of days and see what you need.”

“He sounds like he was a good man,” Sara said.

Mr. Buchanan’s gaze became distant, a warm smile on his mouth.

“He was. My father was a proper Christian man. Not like these auld hoors who just pretend to be Christians so they can excuse their own hatred. He knew what it meant, what Jesus said on the mount. He never refused anyone in need, no matter who they were. And that wee girl was in need.