Annie O’Doherty was never supposed to live, but she had. Abandoned in the toilets at Connolly train station in the center of Dublin almost thirty years ago, she’d barely been breathing when she was found by a curious Irish Rail cleaner, who heard a noise from inside the ladies. There he found an infant, scarcely a few hours old, and had called for an ambulance.

Even before she had a name, Annie was making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Placed into the Irish foster system from the start, she eventually found herself part of a family. Robert O’Doherty, her foster father, had doted on her. He was the reason she’d been chosen by them—a real-life orphan Annie.

He always said he saw something in her eyes, a spark, which told him she was the right child for him and his wife, Eileen. They’d formally adopted her when she was five, and over the following twelve years she had the most amazing life she could imagine. They didn’t have much money, just enough to get by, but after Robert suffered a heart attack and died, life was upended.

That’s when Eileen started drinking and Annie had no choice but to rely on herself. Life had steadily declined after that. The tongue-lashings, accusations of theft, and even the added bonus of being accused of trying to seduce Eileen’s boyfriends. As if she would stoop so low.

Now she sat on her bed thinking about just how badly her life sucked. She was thirty-two years old, working at a low-budget hairdressing salon for a woman who didn’t know a perm from a curl, paying an exorbitant rent for her tiny Dublin shoebox, and nothing or no one stable in her life whatsoever.

Most of the friends she had during her teens were by now settled with families of their own, while Annie embarked on a string of disastrous hookups with lads who were only after the craic. That had suited her down to the ground all throughout her twenties, but now it was getting old—as was Annie.

These days she mostly went out on the town with some of her hot young coworkers from the salon, and was already starting to feel (and no doubt look) like the desperate old one.

Feeling a fresh wave of hangover-inspired exhaustion, Annie fell back on the bed and lay atop the exposed mattress. She stared at the cracks in the yellowed ceiling as she tried not to cry. She was frustrated and disillusioned.

Life was supposed to improve the older you got, wasn’t it? Life was supposed to be a series of ups and downs. So when was her up coming? When was it her turn to have something good finally come her way?