Rosie read the letter without a flicker of emotion crossing her face and then carefully, having scanned it a second time to make sure she had read every word, slipped it back into the envelope and placed it on the table. ‘God love her, indeed,’ she said. ‘Do we know when she’ll be here?’

‘No. As you can see, Cat doesn’t say, but I imagine it will be any day now. The letter was posted several days ago.’

‘I don’t know what you are thinking, but this is a women’s thing, I’d say. Should we keep this just to us, Bee? No one else needs to know and it’d be the best way of making sure no one ever does.’

They both knew that the opinion of the village would be that the flames of hell would be roaring up in readiness for the day Mary Kate arrived, so unspeakable was her sin.

Bee tutted. ‘Sure, she won’t be wanting anyone to know her business, Rosie. When the poor girl arrives here, she needs to be dealing with her grief, not the opinions of the people in this village. That’s what we need to concern ourselves with. She will have made her own peace with God and herself, and if I know Mary Kate, she will not be troubled by guilt. She must have loved him a great deal.’

Rosie stared at the envelope on the table as the words swam. She knew the pain of love. The worst kind of love. Unrequited love, or in her case a love that had been acknowledged but never truly returned. Michael tried to hide it from her, but Rosie knew he still longed for Sarah, still talked to her even, the one true love of his life. She sighed. ‘We can manage between us,’ she said. ‘I will tell Michael, and I don’t expect you to keep a secret from Captain Bob. Couples shouldn’t keep secrets from one another, but that will be as far as it goes.’

There was no time to discuss the matter further. Peggy shouted through from the shop that she was back from the post office and had brought Nola and Bridget with her. They all bustled into the kitchen and Bee said her goodbyes and headed home. Unusually for Rosie, a woman who had spent the greater part of her life concealing her feelings, she blurted out, ‘Mary Kate is coming home.’

Nola glanced at Bridget as they both pulled out the pine chairs from around the table and sat down. ‘Well, sure, we know that, it was in the tea leaves. We came here to learn something we didn’t know.’

If the situation hadn’t been so serious, Rosie possibly would have smiled. She should have known. Bridget, the village seer, reader of teacups and fortunes, the thorn in the side of Father Jerry, always knew everything there was to know in Tarabeg before anyone else. ‘I’ll tell Michael tonight,’ she said, unaware, even after all these years, that in the Malone family she was always the last to know. ‘Right now, we can all have a cup of tea and the cake I made yesterday. I used your jam, Nola, and your butter too.’