Nina had assumed that when they moved to Dublin she would hook up with Tom, but the situation had proved far from straightforward. He was living on the southside with four UCD classmates. She was in northside digs, her host family so strait-laced they made the Waltons look like the soul of debauchery. She had fallen into a relationship with an engineering student called Derek McNulty. While Derek wasn’t the brightest bulb in the circuit, he was a nice guy, and she’d lost her virginity in a dusty bedsit on the Drumcondra Road, the experience neither as joyful nor as painful as anticipated. Derek had gone to Cape Cod for the summer, and Nina had no particular interest in rekindling their romance.

So, if there was no reason not to have a fling with Tom, what was holding her back? What she’d said to Tess about them knowing each other for too long was part of the story, but only part of it. Nina often found him difficult to understand. There was your regular Tom: witty, mischievous, engaged. And then, in a finger click, there was someone else. Someone evasive, distant, hard to decode. Someone who could give a harsh response to the most innocent of comments. A couple of weeks back, Tess had joked about the smell in the bathroom being so rank that there must be a dead body under the bath. Tom had snapped at her, saying it really was time she learned to think before opening her mouth. While they’d all been affected by the death of Father Galvin, Nina guessed the impact on Tom had been especially deep.

She couldn’t be certain he was still keen on her. If he was, why hadn’t he made a serious move? That this went against everything she believed in was beside the point. While Nina wanted women to be free to ask men out, it wasn’t a freedom she intended to exploit. Not with Tom, at any rate.

‘If you ask me, you’re a hopeless pair,’ Tess was saying. ‘Now, pass me those tweezers while you still have some eyebrow left.’

‘What? Oh, yeah, will do.’ Nina got to her feet. ‘I’d better do something with my hair. The humidity has made it go wild. I’d take an iron to it only …’

‘… we don’t have an iron. Honest to God, Nina, the nonsense you worry about. I’d give anything to have hair as thick as yours.’ Tess lifted a hank of her own hair. She might have meant to emphasise how thin it was but succeeded only in highlighting its shine.

‘It’s true what they say, you never want what you’ve got.’

‘Is that about hair or life in general?’

‘Both,’ said Nina.