Mrs O’Keefe said nothing. Secretly, though, she had given thanks that at least there’d been no child. If there had, there’d have been no possibility of Mary Kate returning home to her small Irish village, not ever in her lifetime. There were no second chances then.

Now, in the darkening twilight, Mary Kate’s eyes were drawn across to the white walls of the Church of the Sacred Heart. A memory snagged on her mother’s looming gravestone. Sarah was there, always would be, had never left, and Mary Kate felt a new wave of grief wash over her. It was as though the death of Nicholas was making her suffer the loss of her mother afresh.

She saw herself as a little girl kneeling at her mother’s grave, laying lady’s-tresses watered with endless tears. She thought of the night she’d run away from Tarabeg and left her mother. She’d not visited the grave to say goodbye, so full of herself had she been.

She turned to look up at the school. Was Declan still in Tarabeg? She had barely given him a thought in the past two years and was filled with sudden shame. He had put his job on the line by helping her to run away, taking her all the way to the port in Dublin and seeing her onto the boat for Liverpool. He had kissed her, told her he would wait for her. Her friends, she’d lost contact with them all, too ashamed to tell them about the life she was leading: a mistress in another woman’s house, a part-time mother to a married woman’s children.

She’d spent the last two years with a man she’d loved with all her heart, but it had by necessity also been a life full of pretence, a half-life. Only now did she feel the weight of the secrets she’d kept slipping from her shoulders, to be replaced by remorse for all the people she’d let down. She gazed up at the church spire. She could never take confession again. Her love had not been a sin and she would never recant it for as long as she lived.

She took deep breaths and filled her lungs with the damp air, relishing the familiar sounds of her childhood. The raw smell of the fields almost stung the insides of her nostrils and she closed her eyes for a moment to lose herself in the thunder of the Taramore river as it crashed down over the rocks.

It took her a while to realise that something about the village was very different. The lights were on in the butcher’s and bar, but there was no sign of Paddy, Josie, Keeva or Tig, nor any of the children. The meeting place on the main street where the young men and women of the village gathered at dusk, huddled against walls to ward off the cold, flirting and talking noisily, stealing first kisses and promises of more to follow, was also empty and silent. Bemused, she turned towards the shop. Her heart was banging in anticipation of meeting her father and having to explain herself, having to lie. But the lights there were off too.