‘I’m going to keep it.’

Ivan nodded, as if he’d already worked that out. Sometimes, Clodagh thought, he seemed to know her better than she knew herself.

‘I would do the same.’ He grinned. ‘Although I’m pretty sure getting pregnant isn’t something I’ll ever need to worry about. Of course you’ll keep it. After so much loss, how could you do anything else?’

And there it was. The reason she’d known all along she would keep this baby. Because these cells inside her already had parts of her dead family in them. This person, whoever she or he became, might look like her mother, have her father’s quirky sense of humour or her sister’s sharp tongue. Clodagh was being given back something she thought she’d lost forever. She couldn’t pass up a gift like that.

She looked out at the sea, grey and solid today, and thought about what brilliant grandparents her mother and father would have been. And she remembered the promise she’d made in the dark months following the crash. She’d promised she would be grateful for every single day of life she was given, that she would never take anything for granted ever again. She would do this for her dead family who’d had that privilege taken from them too early.

She’d spectacularly failed to deliver on that promise. When she’d moved in with Adam, all she’d wanted was consistency and predictability. She’d made the safest choice she possibly could. But life was, by its very nature, messy and unpredictable. Living it to the full meant taking risks. It was time to start taking those risks. Not just for herself, but for this person she hadn’t yet met but she knew would change her life forever.

She looked at Ivan.

‘Why did you lie to me?’

He took another sip from his glass before answering.

‘I didn’t plan on lying,’ he said. ‘Especially not to you.’

‘What happened?’

He looked at her for a long time without answering.

‘If I said I would rather not speak about it, how would that be?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said honestly.

‘Even if I swear to you, on my poor sick mother’s life, that whatever happened between me and Robbie, it is over and is has nothing to do with these two murders?’

‘I can’t make you tell me something you don’t want to,’ Clodagh said. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that. But friends tell each other stuff, even sometimes stuff they don’t want to talk about. I thought we were friends?’

‘Oh we are. You are my closest friend in the entire universe, lady.’