‘I know, I know.’ She sighed. ‘I’d better go and pack.’

‘Grand,’ he said, stepping forward and putting his arms around her. ‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll only be gone a couple of days.’

‘I’ll still miss you. Tell everyone I said hello, and I’ll be down soon. I promise.’

By the time Nina set off for Kilmitten, the worst of the Friday-evening traffic had cleared. She loved driving west at this time of year when, even as the sky darkened in the east, it remained bright up ahead. Buoyed as she was by the prospect of seeing Tess and Conor, she was disappointed with herself for falling out with Tom. She was more disappointed with him for not getting his life in order. No doubt his story about Val’s brother was true, but it seemed to Nina that he always had an excuse for avoiding home. He was busy, or he was going out with the lads, or he wasn’t feeling well. Not that long ago, she’d challenged him. His response had been cagey. ‘We’re not all sentimental about where we came from,’ he’d said, and changed the subject.

If you asked her, he was reluctant to visit Kilmitten because he didn’t like the village’s nosier residents asking about his job. ‘And you with one of the best Leaving Certs in the school, not to mention two years of college,’ Mags Moynihan had said. ‘Could you not find something in an office?’ Tom had tried to explain that dropping out of college mid-way was the same as never having been at all, but Mags hadn’t wanted to hear. She’d wittered on about Nina’s ‘lovely job’ as a teacher and Conor’s ‘important work’ as a guard. And then there was Tess. ‘Answer me this,’ Mags had said, ‘could any of us have guessed that Tess Fortune would go and become famous?’

Nina believed that if Tom really wanted to find something else he would. The fact was, and this baffled her, he loved what he did. Invariably, he came home from Val’s For Value, an inner-city grocery shop, with a string of stories about local characters and their complicated lives. ‘Some crack today,’ he’d say, or ‘Wait until I tell you what I heard.’ The wages were pitifully low, and he frequently worked overtime for no reward, but to Tom, Val’s was like a vocation. Nina reminded herself that she’d also fretted over Tess’s future. What a waste of time that had been. Still, she wished Tom would move on from Val and his fascinating customers.

He did have ambitions. They just didn’t tally with hers. He wanted to see the world. ‘India,’ he’d say. ‘Afghanistan, Vietnam.’