A kept and childless woman, she had the luxury of the morning to prepare for her day, but Nicholas had only minutes to spare. He hated to be late for work and was always keen to arrive at his GP practice long before his patients. His signed letters were waiting on the desk in his office across the landing from their bedroom, letters he had handwritten the night before just as soon as he had finished his supper, ready to be dropped into his bag and handed to his loyal receptionist, Bella, to post. He never liked to keep patients waiting for test results a moment longer than he had to. Some of his letters were asking patients to call in and see him, so that he could explain the findings in person. ‘No appointment required,’ he would write at the bottom in his almost illegible scrawl, and then Bella would scold him for overloading his surgery. The list of phone calls he would need to make that day sat next to his letters. As he became more popular and his surgery busier, the list grew. Dr Nicholas Marcus loved his work, and in his drive to improve the health and wellbeing of his poor dockside patients nothing was ever too much trouble.

His cufflinks lay on the dressing table in a lime-green lustre dish, next to Mary Kate’s discarded gold crucifix. Long since abandoned, it could never save her now. He bent over her to retrieve the cufflinks, his apologetic smile always spontaneous, full of love and gratitude because he knew, or he thought he did, the price she had to pay for being in love with a man who was still handcuffed in law and in the eyes of God to the woman who had left him and taken his sons with her. In truth, he had no idea. How could he? How could she explain a way of life that was totally alien to him?

There was nothing more she would have loved than to alight from the bus and walk into Tarabeg holding his hand, taking him into every home and shop and announcing to the people she had grown up with all of her life, people who would greet her as though they had seen her just yesterday, ‘Look what I did! This wonderful, kind and clever man – he’s mine. Are you proud of me now?’ But she knew that no matter how much time passed, that could never happen. If they walked in through the doors of the Church of the Sacred Heart, Father Jerry would see beyond her smile to the sin beneath, and at the very least a bolt of lightning would strike and the doors would slam shut behind her.

But Tarabeg was with her. She lived this life in Liverpool with the man she loved, but Tarabeg would never leave her. When she closed her eyes at night, the familiar rumble of Nicholas’s deep, rhythmic breathing morphed into the rushing of the Taramore at the back of her old bedroom. It pulled at her heart and blotted out the caterwauling of the cats and the squealing of brakes as the buses came to a halt down at the bottom of Duke’s Avenue. In her dreams she saw the grave of Daedio, her great-grandfather, even though she’d never seen it in person, having been too ashamed to attend his funeral. How had she done that, lied to her own family? In the darkest hours, the guilt came to haunt her. What price had she paid for love? How could she take Nicholas home?