“And he went ballistic.”

Rosie exploded. “The bastard, the bloody bastard, next time I see Shirley I’m going to splatter her-he didn’t listen to a word I said, might as well have been talking to the wall-”

“Rosie, slow down-”

“He said not to come crying to him when I wound up pregnant and dumped and covered in bruises, Jesus, Frank, I could’ve killed him, I swear to God-”

“Then what are you doing here? Does he know-?”

Rosie said, “Yeah, he does. He sent me round to break it off with you.”

I didn’t even realize I had stopped in the middle of the pavement till she turned back to see where I’d gone. “I’m not doing it, you big eejit! You seriously think I’d leave you ’cause my da told me to? Are you mental?”

“Christ,” I said. My heart slowly slid back down to where it belonged. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I thought… Christ.”

“Francis.” She came back to me and laced her fingers through mine, hard enough to hurt. “I’m not. OK? I just don’t know what to do.”

I would have sold a kidney to be able to come out with the magic answer. I went for the most impressive dragon-slaying offer I could think of. “I’ll call in and talk to your da. Man to man. I’ll tell him there’s no way I’d mess you around.”

“I already told him that. A hundred times. He thinks you’re after selling me a load of bollix so you can get into my knickers, and I’m after buying every word. You think he’ll listen to you, when he won’t to me?”

“So I’ll show him. Once he sees I’m treating you right-”

“We don’t have time! He says I’m to break it off with you tonight or he’ll throw me out of the house, and he will, he’ll do it. It’d break my mammy’s heart, but he wouldn’t care. He’ll tell her she can’t even see me again and, God help her, she’ll do what she’s told.”

After seventeen years of my family, my default solution to everything was a tightly zipped lip. I said, “So tell him you did it. Dumped me. Nobody has to know we’re still together.”

Rosie went motionless, and I saw her mind start to move fast. After a moment she said, “For how long?”

“Till we come up with a better plan, till your da chills out, I don’t know. If we just hang in there long enough, something’s bound to change.”

“Maybe.” She was still thinking hard, head bent over our joined hands. “D’you think we could pull it off? The way people talk around here…”

I said, “I’m not saying it’d be easy. We’ll have to tell everyone we’re after breaking up, and make it sound good. We won’t be able to go to our debs together. You’ll be always worrying that your da’ll find out and throw you out.”

“I don’t give a damn. What about you, though? You don’t need to be sneaking around; your da isn’t trying to make you into a nun. Is it worth it?”

I said, “What are you on about? I love you.”

It stunned me. I had never said it before. I knew that I would never say it again, not really; that you only get one shot at it in a lifetime. I got mine out of nowhere on a misty autumn evening, under a street lamp shining yellow streaks on the wet pavement, with Rosie’s strong pliable fingers woven through mine.

Rosie’s mouth opened. She said, “Oh.” It came out on something like a wonderful, helpless, breathless laugh.

“There you go,” I said.

She said, “Well, then,” in another burst of almost-laughter. “Then it’s all OK, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. I love you, too. So we’ll find a way. Am I right?”

I was out of words; I couldn’t think of anything to do except pull her tight against me. An old fella walking his dog dodged around us and muttered something about shocking carry-on, but I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. Rosie pressed her face hard into the angle of my neck; I felt her eyelashes flicker against my skin, and then wetness where they had been. “We will,” I said, into her warm hair, and I knew for certain it was true because we were holding the trump card, the wild joker that beat everything else in the pack. “We’ll find a way.”

We went home, once we had walked and talked ourselves exhausted, to start the careful, crucial process of convincing the Place we were history. Late that night, in spite of the long cunning wait we had planned, we met in Number 16. We were way beyond caring how dangerous the timing was. We lay down together on the creaking floorboards and Rosie wrapped us chest to chest in the soft blue blanket she always brought with her, and that night she never said Stop.

That evening was one of the reasons it had never occurred to me that Rosie could be dead. The blaze of her, when she was that angry: you could have lit a match by touching it to her skin, you could have lit up Christmas trees, you could have seen her from space. For all that to have vanished into nothing, gone for good, was unthinkable.

Danny Matches would burn down the bike shop and arrange all the evidence artistically to point straight to Shay, if I asked him nicely. Alternatively, I knew several guys who made Danny look like a cream puff and who would do a beautiful job, complete with whatever level of pain I required, of making sure none of Shay’s component parts were ever seen again.

The problem was that I didn’t want Danny Matches, or the bolt-gun brigade, or anyone else. Scorcher was right off the menu: if he needed Kevin for his bad guy that much, he could have him-Olivia was right, nothing anyone said could hurt Kev now, and justice had slid way down my Christmas wish list. All I wanted in the world was Shay. Every time I looked out over the Liffey I saw him at his window, somewhere in that tangle of lights, smoking and staring back across the river and waiting for me to come find him. I had never wanted any girl, not even Rosie, as badly as I wanted him.

Friday afternoon I texted Stephen: Same time, same place. It was raining, thick sleety rain that soaked through everything you were wearing and chilled you down to the bone; Cosmo’s was packed with wet tired people counting shopping bags and hoping if they stayed put long enough they would get warm. This time I only ordered coffee. I already knew this wasn’t going to take long.

Stephen looked a little unsure about what we were doing there, but he was too polite to ask. Instead he said, “Kevin’s phone records haven’t come in yet.”

“I didn’t think they had. Do you know when the investigation’s winding up?”

“We’ve been told probably Tuesday. Detective Kennedy says… well. He figures we’ve got enough evidence to make a case. From now on, we’re just tidying up the paperwork.”

I said, “It sounds to me like you’ve heard about the lovely Imelda Tierney.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“Detective Kennedy thinks her story is the final piece of the puzzle, perfect fit, now he can wrap everything up in a pretty parcel and tie it with ribbons and present it to the DPP. Am I right?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“And what do you think?”

Stephen rubbed at his hair, leaving it standing up in tufts. “I think,” he said, “from what Detective Kennedy’s said-and tell me if this is wrong-I think Imelda Tierney’s well pissed off with you.”

“I’m not her favorite person right now, no.”

“You know her, even if it’s from ages ago. If she was pissed off enough, would she make up something like this?”

“I’d say she’d do it in a heartbeat. Call me biased.”

Stephen shook his head. “Maybe I would, only I’ve still got the same problem with the fingerprints as I had before. Unless Imelda Tierney can explain the note being wiped, it outweighs her story as far as I’m concerned. People lie; evidence doesn’t.”

The kid was worth ten of Scorcher, and probably of me. I said, “I like the way you think, Detective. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure Scorcher Kennedy’s not going to start thinking the same way anytime soon.”

“Not unless we come up with an alternative theory that’s too solid for him to ignore.” He still put a shy little twist on the “we,” like a teenager talking about his first girlfriend. Working with me had been a big deal to him. “So that’s what I’ve been concentrating on. I’ve spent a lot of time going over this case in my head, looking for what we could’ve missed, and last night something hit me.”