‘I’ll get a Coke,’ she said. ‘Sit where you are. Bit early in the day for me and whiskey.’

Tony watched her as she walked away. She wore jeans and a white top. Her hips had widened a little, but that aside, it was as if the past three decades had not touched her frame; her waist still pinched, her legs fine. Unbidden, he saw her as he had seen her that first night as she walked to her front door, as if time had set itself in abeyance just for her.

‘She’s aged well,’ Duggan said, whistling softly to himself. ‘Not like us two old codgers.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Tony said, half-jokingly. But he considered how he must look to her; his face rounder and fuller, his body saggy, his pot belly a permanent feature, his hair thinned and greying. He took off his glasses, as if that defect might be just one too many for her.

Maguire, she’d said, not Logue. He’d expected she’d be married, a girl like her; he was still disappointed, though, that she had moved on with her life. It was hypocritical, of course; he too had married, after all. But that seemed different, somehow. And without ever having met the man, he felt immediately a sense of bitterness towards her husband.

Had she waited for long, he wondered. He’d met Ann in his thirties. He’d been back in Derry almost ten years at that stage. She was a primary school teacher, already settled into her routines and with that habit that those who work with children have of speaking to other adults as if they are infants. Ann hadn’t particularly wanted children. He remembered hearing the sobs from the bathroom the morning she took the test and found out she was pregnant.

And again, the sobs in the hospital, six months later, when she found out the child had died.

It was that which convinced her; that realisation that grief was the inevitable cost of having loved, even something which she had not held in her hands, even as she held it inside her, near her heart.

Tony had remained solid, pragmatic, dependable on the ward and when he took her home. He’d cleaned the house, bought flowers for the hall and kitchen, set up the portable TV in the bedroom for her. Once, while she slept next to him with fitful dreams, he allowed tears to slide down his face as he mourned his lost child. And, in that moment, he had remembered Martin Kelly’s tears so that, in his mind, the two losses were fused into one. The loss of this life was a balancing for his role in the loss of another. Both deprived of a proper burial; his own son’s remains taken by the hospital to be ‘disposed of’: the doctor who took him masked and shrouded as Charon.

‘Safe crossing,’ he’d whispered to the dark. His unborn son’s journey across the river Styx made that bit less lonely by his father’s voice should he somehow hear him.