‘Your twin.’

‘I don’t have a twin.’

‘I was looking at your eyes,’ he explained, a comment which caused Karen to blush and glance down at her hands. ‘You joked that you ate your own twin. Do you feel like you had a twin? Really. Is it odd not having one?’

‘I don’t know. I never had one to know the difference.’

Tony blushed now, feeling silly for having asked the question and compelled to try to explain himself more clearly.

‘I mean, do you have a sense of one? An absence?’

She smiled. ‘I’d never thought of it like that,’ she said. ‘An absence? I suppose I was aware that I was alone when I was growing up. I missed having a friend. Did you have only the one brother?’

Tony nodded.

‘Do you miss him?’

‘He’s an absence, definitely,’ Tony said. ‘I was away from home at university and that, so we didn’t spend as much time together recently as we used to, you know? So, we kind of drifted a bit.’

He paused. He’d not, he realised, really thought about Danny being gone. Moving to Scotland had taken him from the things that would most have reminded him of his brother; he could, on some level, imagine that Danny was still OK back at home. That in some other world, Danny had stopped for a burger, or left the game early because the scoreline was already clear and he’d wanted to beat the crowds at the gate.

‘It was the randomness of it,’ he said, finally. ‘Like it could have been anyone walking on that path. He could have been early, or late. Or not gone to the game, or met a girl or met his friends, or stopped for a drink somewhere.’

Karen did not speak, though she held his gaze, her expression soft.

‘I needed someone to blame,’ he said. ‘My dad didn’t; he just accepted it as fate, or accident, or whatever. But I couldn’t do that; someone had to be to blame, and someone had to be held accountable for what they did. Accident didn’t kill my brother; a Brit did, you know?’

Karen nodded, her eyes glistening in the light thrown from the small tea candle in the holder on their table.

‘If you have someone to blame, you have something you can do,’ she said. ‘We need to feel active; like we’re doing something about what happens to us. I understand that.’

Midway through dinner, Tony excused himself to go to the toilet. He walked back by a circuitous route that allowed him to go outside for a moment, in the hope he might spot anyone near the car but it sat exactly where he had parked it, seemingly untouched.

They chatted through dessert about a mutual friend of a friend they both knew back home and about Karen’s job; she worked on the reception desk at a health centre.

‘That was where I met Martin Kelly,’ Karen explained. ‘Before I met him through Duggan.’