Captain Bob had opened the door for her. ‘It’s late,’ he’d said. ‘The excitement of the day has been enough for anyone.’ The unspoken words ‘especially someone recently bereaved’ hung in the air.

‘Daddy said he would call into Paddy’s when he gets back from taking Dana to Belmullet,’ said Mary Kate. ‘Will you too?’

‘Me, no. I’m away to collect Bee from Bridget’s. Bridget is teaching Bee all she needs to know to take over, should anything happen to her.’

Mary Kate was confused. ‘But Bridget’s always been here. I don’t suppose she’s likely to be going anywhere, is she? She’s as fit as a fiddle.’

‘Aye, true enough. Anyway, it’s bed for me after Bridget’s or it’ll be my ghost out at sea tomorrow. I’m dead on my feet, so I am.’ He slapped his hand to his head. ‘Aargh, I’m so sorry.’

Mary Kate hadn’t even noticed his slip. ‘Oh, that’s all right. Don’t watch what you say on my account.’

‘Don’t worry about your da,’ said Captain Bob. ‘Rosie can more than handle him. She’ll tell him that the secret is out, once she has him alone. She’s always been able to cope with your father. She loved him even before your mammy did, you know. In all fairness to Rosie, she had no idea he was seeing Sarah at the time – your mammy was living here in this cottage, and Rosie was in the schoolteacher’s house in the village. When Michael went off to war, Rosie waited for him to return, and he did, but not to her.’

Mary Kate looked at him for a long hard moment. ‘I had no idea.’

‘Aye, well, we don’t speak of such things. ’Twas a bad business, all of it, but I can tell you this, the reason Rosie can manage your father when she tells him that the whole flaming village is alight with the gossip is because he loved Sarah just as you loved your Nicholas. I can promise you this: he will understand. You have nothing to fear.’

Mary Kate looked out towards the dark ocean. The breaking of the waves on the shore provided the background to their conversation. ‘Captain Bob, when you came back to Tarabeg from Liverpool, did you find it hard? As in, was it like you’d expected it to be?’

He studied her face, noted the bags beneath her eyes from not sleeping, and the loss reflected from them. ‘If I’m honest, no. But then it doesn’t matter to me where in the world I live, as long as Bee is with me. It’s people not places that matter.’

His words hit home as realisation dawned. ‘I feel so stupid,’ she said. ‘I raced back here to Tarabeg thinking that because it was what Nicholas had said he wanted, his last wishes, I should comply. I thought I had to be here because… oh I don’t know, it sounds too stupid now, but I thought I would be healed from the pain of losing him and that maybe that was what he meant.’