Mary Kate felt like she’d been slapped. The shame of her sin, spoken out loud by her father. Heat rose in her face, but she swallowed it down hard. He was right. There were consequences to her actions and wasn’t he putting into words the very reason she could never have brought Nicholas home, no matter how much in love she was. Tarabeg could have been a hundred years behind modern Liverpool. Everywhere was moving with the times, but in Tarabeg it was still as it had been in 1930; nothing had changed.

Despite his words, Michael was so delighted to have his daughter home that at breakfast he dug around for any excuse he could not to drive Mary Kate to Angela’s cottage, even though it was only a mile away on the coast.

‘Can you not wait until tonight? I really have to go into Galway first, even with this banging head. I’ve feed to collect and stock for the shop. There’ll be nothing on the shelves for Peggy to sell if I don’t get to the warehouse quick.’

He was standing with his back to the range, drinking his tea out of a pint-sized pot, washing down the enormous breakfast Rosie had cooked for them all, along with two aspirins.

‘Is your head not feeling any better?’ asked Rosie, who was packing sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper into the wicker basket on the table. Her hair had lost its youthful auburn lustre and the first flecks of grey could be seen at the sides of her schoolmarm bun on the nape of her neck. She wore her customary mid-calf skirt and the caramel-coloured cardigan she had knitted herself.

‘No, my head is doing well, all things considered. You won’t be able to say the same for that lot over the road though. I reckon Josie will be in the bar with the broom soon enough, sweeping some of those bodies out onto the street. She hasn’t changed one iota since you left, Mary Kate.’

They all laughed, including Mary Kate, who was sitting on the chair by the fire, with Finn at her feet. They were all familiar with the words Josie used when she kicked drunken farmhands out of the bar door. They were welcome when they had money to spend, not so much when they were begging for a breakfast.

It occurred to Mary Kate that it was as if she’d left Tarabeg only yesterday, as if Liverpool had been a dream. She had to admit that the trauma of her loss felt different here. The ache in her diaphragm felt softer. Here there was nothing to anchor her to the life she’d lived with Nicholas, none of the people, objects, sounds or smells that had coloured the last two years; there was a strange dissonance between her recent past and her present. It was almost as if Mrs O’Keefe, Cat, Joan, Deidra, the people she’d spent every day with, didn’t really exist. This was not something she wanted to happen. She needed them as the bridge to her Nicholas. But as she laughed at the thought of Josie sweeping out the over-stayers from her bar, a sight she had seen many times during her childhood, she realised with a flashing certainty that letting go a little might be what was needed. Maybe Nicholas, in his dying words, had known better than she did what was best for her.