Mammy squeezed my hand tight. I heard a small groan, barely perceptible, leave her lips. ‘Joe!’ she said in an angry whisper before nodding her head in my direction.

I felt as if the ground had just shifted under my feet and things were never going to be the same again. My mammy was sick. They didn’t know what time they had left. What did that mean? Did that mean my mammy was dying? No, that was impossible. It was unthinkable. I remember putting my hands to my ears to block out the noise, but it was already too late. The damage had been done. The words had been said and they couldn’t be taken back.

Chapter Nine

Heidi

Now

Alex sits on the edge of our bed, taking off his shoes. They clunk to the floor and he kicks them out of his way before standing up to undress.

‘That wasn’t as bad as it could have been,’ he says.

‘It wasn’t great,’ I say, stroking Lily’s head as I give her one final feed before bedtime. ‘It was awkward.’

He pulls his T-shirt over his head, exposing the fine smattering of hair on his chest, before he pulls back the duvet and climbs in beside me.

‘It was always going to be awkward,’ he says, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek and then to kiss Lily on the top of her head. ‘You haven’t seen her in what, ten years? And when you do, it’s not under the nicest of circumstances.’

‘I suppose,’ I say, unlatching Lily from my breast and putting her on my shoulder to try to get her wind up.

‘She seemed upset after she saw him,’ he says. He’d arrived while Ciara was upstairs and had sat with Stella until I finished breastfeeding. ‘Do you think she’ll get involved in his care?’

I shrug. ‘I hope so, but I don’t know. And that girlfriend of hers wasn’t giving anything away.’

‘Stella? She seems nice,’ he says. ‘They seem to be happy together.’

And they do. I saw how Stella had looked at Ciara when she had come back into the room, how she’d held her hand and mouthed ‘are you okay?’ before I had the chance to ask after her. I saw how Ciara placed her head on Stella’s shoulder as they sat together, letting her usually impenetrable guard down for just a moment or two.

‘Are you okay?’ I had asked as if I hadn’t witnessed the interaction between the two of them.

‘What do you think?’ Ciara had said. Or snapped. It felt like more of a snap.

‘It must be a shock for you, all of this,’ I added, trying to be polite.

‘That’s one way to describe it,’ she sniffed, looking around the room. ‘This house hasn’t changed much over the years.’

Her judgement, even though it wasn’t the house I lived in, and even though I had no say over the decoration of it, made me bristle.