Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.

‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.

One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her thumb.

Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father. Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.

‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’

That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway for anything? He walked in and out of my life, leaving damage in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.

‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.

Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back at her. She understands me in a world where it feels like no one else does.

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’

‘Or maybe it would help you find your own peace and move on a bit?’ Stella asks. ‘But, you know there’s no right or wrong in this? You do what you want to do. If you want to see him, I’ll come with you. If you want to tell him to go to hell, I’ll hold your hand while you do it.’

I brush away a second pesky tear, take a deep breath. I’ll be damned if he can force me to make a decision like this quickly. Who does he think he is to get his mousey little minion to call me and ask me to come over?

‘Is there much wine left in that bottle?’ I sit back and ask Stella.

‘Not much,’ she says. ‘But there’s a second bottle in the fridge and I’m sure there’s another bottle of something in the rack.’

‘Okay,’ I say, sniffing and sitting up straight. ‘That dinner we spent all of fifteen minutes cooking is going to be absolutely ruined if we don’t eat it now. So, I say we eat. I don’t want to waste any more energy today thinking about that man.’

Chapter Five

Ciara

Then

I was an only child and I was deliriously happy in my only-child status. I was never lonely. I had lots of friends. We lived in a busy street in the Creggan Estate – a proudly working-class area on the west bank of the River Foyle.