He takes my hand. I fight the urge to pull it away. I know, just know, something is wrong.

‘That was the undertakers,’ he says. ‘There will be a delay with bringing Joe’s remains back.’

‘Why?’

‘He didn’t say exactly. Just that something had come up.’

An uneasy feeling washes over me. ‘And you didn’t ask what exactly?’

‘He said they just needed to check some things. That’s all.’

I bite my tongue. It won’t endear me to Alex if I say what is going through my mind, which is that there can’t be much to check given that it’s pretty clear he’s dead.

‘Did he say how long?’ I say instead.

‘No.’ Alex shakes his head. ‘He said he’d be in touch.’

‘Well, what are we supposed to do?’ I snap. I feel fidgety. If I have to endure his wake, I’d rather get on with the enduring. I’d rather get to the ‘moving on’ part.

‘Do your best to relax, maybe. Enjoy the calm before the madness of the wake starts.’

I immediately dismiss that idea. There’s no way I can relax. Not when I don’t know what is going on. There is no calm and there never has been when it came to Joe.

‘Maybe I’ll go over to the house anyway. Get a head start on things. No doubt Ciara will be there already,’ I say.

The thought of her poking around the house I grew up in makes me uncomfortable, even though it’s a long time since it felt anything like a home to me.

‘It’s not a competition,’ he says gently.

The rational, adult part of my brain knows that. Another part of me thinks that it is very much a competition and always will be between Ciara and me.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Heidi

Then

I remember holding my pencil. It was red. One of the thicker ones they used to give you in primary school to help with your handwriting. I’d done my homework. Written my sentences using my best handwriting and finished my sums.

I had closed my copybook and slipped it back into my satchel. I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was humming. I can’t remember the tune exactly. I’m not sure I ever knew what it was. But I remember that the noise irritated me.

He was doing a little dance as he set about making dinner. As if he didn’t have a care in the world. As if nothing had ever hurt him. I couldn’t understand how he could be happy. I wondered if I’d ever feel happy again. Mammy was dead more than a year, but it still hurt as much as it did the day she died.

I lifted the jotter my granny had bought me, just for scribbling in, and started to draw. Dark streaks of deep grey lead on the paper. Pushing down so hard that I thought I might tear through several sheets at once.

It helped to release some of the anger that was inside me.