I hear a wail from Lily again and I have to close my eyes and force myself to sit on my hands not to run directly to her and pull her from Ciara’s arms.

Marie pales, looks at me like I’m quite mad. I hear Marie say something, which I can’t catch because there’s a buzzing in my ears, and I blink to try to bring myself back into focus.

‘Sorry?’ I ask. ‘What was that?’

I see Father Brennan has turned a funny shade of puce.

‘I don’t know how you don’t know this, Heidi. But Joe and I were never divorced. We were separated yes, but legally and in the eyes of the Church, we were still very much married.’

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Heidi

Now

Still married? After all these years? I don’t understand. My brain doesn’t process what Marie is saying.

‘I suppose we just never got round to it, and there didn’t seem so much of a reason after …’ Her voice trails off.

I know what she means to say. That there didn’t seem to be much of reason after my mother died. Marie’s replacement was gone – no longer a threat.

Joe didn’t ever have another serious relationship after that. There was no one who wanted to usurp her role as Joe’s wife and clearly she was happy to retain the title.

‘The notion of divorce never really rested easy with Joe,’ she says and I truly wonder if I am going mad.

This man who left his wife, his daughter, and inveigled his way into my family, into my mother’s bed – wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of divorce? He’d a funny way of showing it.

‘Yes, well, he was a religious man, a good man,’ Father Brennan says, and I can no longer sit and listen to these platitudes or resist the urge to run to my daughter.

I get up without speaking, because I don’t trust myself not to say something that will be used against me in the future.

I am furious like I have never been furious before. I can feel the anger surge in me as if it is running through my very veins. I’m angry not only on my behalf, but also on behalf of my mother – who loved him. Who trusted him. Who sat down and wrote in her will that this man she had known just over a year could stay in the house she owned until he remarried or passed away. This man who had no intention of ever remarrying. Or unmarrying anyone.

I wonder, did my mother, my beautiful, trusting, kind-hearted mother know that he had never divorced Marie? That he found the idea of divorce uncomfortable. That he was a hypocrite of the highest order – knelt at the altar rails every morning and prayed while he betrayed, lied to and hurt everyone he came into contact with. How could Marie be so calm? How could she be so forgiving of him? After all he had done?