“You were at the pub, he was your bartender that first night—his mam, Marcia, owns the pub, by the way. You two got to talking, God knows about what—probably something about how Hemingway is overrated or some such pretentious shite. Anyway, you started up all innocent-like at first, you were both too shy to make a move. It took ages, my God, Aimee and I were dyin’ for you two to get together. You both had these ridiculous puppy eyes for each other. You were always trying to get us to go to the pub instead of any parties or anything like that. You used to have him come fix things at Surrey House when you and Aimee lived there—”

“Aimee and I lived at that house together?” I asked.

“For years, yes. Fia owns it. Charges you nearly nothing. You both stayed there until Theo. But that’s another story. Okay, so he’d come over and fix things. He’d ask for your help buying Mother’s Day presents, you’d help him find shoes that didn’t make him look like an old man. I’ve never seen two people more obsessed with each other or more blind to it. You were in complete denial about each other. It was madness.”

“I mean, it’s also kind of cute,” I say.

She rolls her eyes and pours another splash of wine, this time the Chablis from the third spigot. “It sounds cute now, but for me as your overly involved pal, it was exhausting, I’ll tell you. Anyway, so then you finally, after four bleeding years of this, you go out to dinner. It was him who finally made the first move. He asked you to be his plus-one at a wedding in Dingle and you shared a room. Believe it or not, you still didn’t do anything, but you stayed up all night talking. I actually remember that you had some kind of amazing-sounding chicken fried rice and ate it in the backyard of a pub, oh what was it now—O’Sullivan’s! Yes, and there was music that night, you said. Then you had espresso and beer from the hotel bar and sat outside until the sun came up.”

“Aw, that’s so nice.” It sounds like something out of a fantasy. “But are you serious, four years? I mean, that’s a little insane.”

“It was like you both knew it would be the real thing when you got together, so you were both in conniptions every time it got close, afraid you might feck it up.”

“So how did it finally happen?”

“Ah,” she says. “Well, one day after he broke his collarbone—”

A shiver runs through me, involuntarily. Aimee broke her collarbone on a ski trip when she was twelve. The scar had always given me chills.