‘I’d rather you just spat it out,’ Ciara says. ‘What is it? Does he need money? Has he met someone else?’

I take a deep breath.

The easiest way to do something you really don’t want to is to do it quickly, like tearing off a plaster. That’s what my mother would say, so I say the next sentence quickly. Probably too quickly. The words rattle off my tongue.

‘It’s nothing like that. Ciara, he’s not well. He’s just been in hospital for surgery and well, the news isn’t good. It isn’t good at all, I’m afraid. And he has asked me to call you to let you know he’d like to see you if you’d be willing.’

There’s a pause. ‘Are you telling me he’s dying?’ Ciara asks, as forthright as she always was.

I nod before saying, ‘Yes, Ciara. It’s cancer. He’s been given maybe three to six months, at best.’

The phone line goes quiet. I wonder if she has hung up, take the phone from my ear to see if the call is still connected.

‘Good,’ she says eventually, although I hear a trace of emotion in her voice that wasn’t there before. ‘Good. He’s dying. Good enough for him.’

‘Ciara …’

I start to talk but the line goes dead. She has hung up. I sit staring at my phone, my face blazing, wondering how I tell Joe what has just happened.

Chapter Four

Ciara

Now

‘Dinner’s ready,’ Stella calls from the kitchen.

I don’t answer. I’m staring at my phone, trying to process the conversation I’ve just had with Heidi bloody Lewis. The golden child. It had to be her to tell me, didn’t it? It couldn’t have been anyone else. He couldn’t have spoken to Mum and got her to break the news. No, he was always one to go for maximum impact. Maximum distress.

The bastard.

Anger wells in me and I throw my phone at the sofa, watch as it bounces off the cushion and hits the solid wooden floor with a crack. I’ll have broken the screen, in my anger.

‘Good enough for him,’ I’d said to Heidi. It had been my gut reaction, to feel angry and shocked and think fuck him for getting her to contact me only to tell me he was dying.

He is dying.

My father, for all that word really meant to me, is dying.

‘Ciara,’ I hear Stella, ‘are you still on the phone, only the pasta …’

She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again. The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.

‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for information that I’m still trying to process.

‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.