Olivia laughed, a startled, explosive breath. “Surprise,” I said. “I’m not a complete prick.”

“I know that. I never thought you were.” I shot her a skeptical eyebrow and started hauling myself off the bar stool, but she stopped me. “I’ll get her. She won’t want you knocking while she’s in the bath.”

“What? Since when?”

A tiny smile, half rueful, moved across Olivia’s lips. “She’s growing up, Frank. She won’t even let me into the bathroom till she has her clothes on; a few weeks ago I opened the door to get something, and she let out a yell like a banshee and then gave me a furious lecture on people needing privacy. If you go anywhere near her, I guarantee she’ll read you the riot act.”

“My God,” I said. I remembered Holly two years old and leaping on me straight from her bath, naked as the day she was born, showering water everywhere and giggling like a mad thing when I tickled her delicate ribs. “Go up and get her quick, before she grows armpit hair or something.”

Liv almost laughed again. I used to make her laugh all the time; these days, twice in one night would have been some kind of record. “I’ll only be a moment.”

“Take your time. I’ve got nowhere better to be.”

On her way out of the kitchen she said, almost reluctantly, “The coffee machine’s on, if you need a cup. You look tired.”

And she pulled the door shut behind her, with a firm little click that told me to stay put, just in case Dermo arrived and I decided to meet him at the front door in my boxers. I detached myself from the stool and made myself a double espresso. I was well aware that Liv had all kinds of interesting points, several of them important and a couple of them deeply ironic. All of them could wait until I had figured out what in the dark vicious world to do about Shay, and then done it.

Upstairs I could hear bathtub water draining and Holly chattering away, with the occasional comment from Olivia. I wanted, so suddenly and hard it almost knocked me over, to run up there and wrap my arms around the pair of them, tumble the whole three of us into Liv’s and my double bed the way I used to on Sunday afternoons, stay there shushing and laughing while Dermo rang the doorbell and worked himself into a chinless huff and Audi’d off into the sunset, order avalanches of takeaway food and stay there all weekend and deep into next week. For a second I almost lost my mind and gave it a try.

It took Holly a while to bring the conversation around to current events. Over dinner she told me about the hip-hop class, with full demonstrations and plenty of out-of-breath commentary; afterwards she got a start on her homework, with a lot less complaining than usual, and then curled up tight against me on the sofa to watch Hannah Montana. She was sucking on a strand of hair, which she hadn’t done in a while, and I could feel her thinking.

I didn’t push her. It wasn’t until she was tucked up in bed, with my arm around her and her hot milk all drunk and her bedtime story read, that she said, “Daddy.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Are you going to get married?”

What the hell? “No, sweetie. Not a chance. Being married to your mammy was plenty for me. What put that into your head?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

Ma, it had to be; probably something about divorce and no remarrying in the Church. “Nope. I told you that last week, remember?”

Holly thought that over. “That girl Rosie who died,” she said. “The one you knew before I was born.”

“What about her?”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“Yep, she was. I hadn’t met your mammy yet.”

“Were you going to marry her?”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

Blink. Her eyebrows, fine as brushstrokes, were pulled tight together; she was still concentrating hard. “Why didn’t you?”

“Rosie died before we could get that far.”

“But you said you didn’t even know she died, till now.”

“That’s right. I thought she’d dumped me.”

“Why didn’t you know?”

I said, “One day she just disappeared. She left behind a note saying she was moving to England, and I found it and figured it meant she was dumping me. It turns out I had that wrong.”

Holly said, “Daddy.”

“Yep.”

“Did somebody kill her?”

She was wearing her flowery pink-and-white pajamas that I had ironed for her earlier-Holly loves fresh-ironed clothes-and she had Clara perched on her pulled-up knees. In the soft golden halo from the bedside lamp she looked perfect and timeless as a little watercolor girl in a storybook. She terrified me. I would have given a limb to know that I was doing this conversation right, or even just that I wasn’t doing it too horrifically wrong.

I said, “It looks like that could have been what happened. It was a long, long time ago, so it’s hard to be sure about anything.”

Holly gazed into Clara’s eyes and thought about that. The strand of hair had found its way back into her mouth. “If I disappeared,” she said. “Would you think I had run away?”

Olivia had mentioned a nightmare. I said, “It wouldn’t matter what I thought. Even if I thought you’d hopped on a spaceship to another planet, I’d come looking for you, and I wouldn’t stop till I found you.”

Holly let out a deep sigh, and I felt her shoulder nudge in closer against me. For a second I thought I had accidentally managed to fix something. Then she said, “If you had married that girl Rosie. Would I never have been born?”

I detached the strand from her mouth and smoothed it into place. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo. “I don’t know how that stuff works, chickadee. It’s all very mysterious. All I know is that you’re you, and personally I think you’d have found a way to be you no matter what I did.”

Holly wriggled farther down in the bed. She said, in her ready-for-an-argument voice, “Sunday afternoon I want to go to Nana’s.”

And I could make chirpy chitchat with Shay across the good teacups. “Well,” I said, carefully. “We can have a think about that, see if it’ll fit with the rest of our plans. Any special reason?”

“Donna always gets to go over on Sundays, after her dad has his golf game. She says Nana makes a lovely dinner with apple tart and ice cream after, and sometimes Auntie Jackie does the girls’ hair all fancy, or sometimes everyone watches a DVD-Donna and Darren and Ashley and Louise get to take turns picking, but Auntie Carmel said if I was ever there I could have first pick. I never got to go because you didn’t know about me going over to Nana’s, but now that you do, I want to.”

I wondered if Ma and Da had signed some kind of treaty about Sunday afternoons, or if she just crushed a few happy pills into his lunch and then locked him in the bedroom with his floorboard naggin for company. “We’ll see how we get on.”

“One time Uncle Shay brought them all to the bike shop and let them try the bikes. And sometimes Uncle Kevin brings over his Wii and he has spare controllers, and Nana gives out because they jump around too much and she says they’ll have the house down.”

I tilted my head to get a proper look at Holly. She had Clara hugged a little too tight, but her face didn’t tell me anything. “Sweetheart,” I said. “You know Uncle Kevin won’t be there this Sunday, right?”

Holly’s head went down over Clara. “Yeah. Because he died.”

“That’s right, love.”

A quick glance at me. “Sometimes I forget. Like Sarah told me a joke today and I was going to tell him, only then after a while I remembered.”

“I know. That happens to me, too. It’s just your head getting used to things. It’ll stop in a while.”

She nodded, combing Clara’s mane with her fingers. I said, “And you know everyone over at Nana’s is going to be pretty upset this weekend, right? It won’t be fun, like the times Donna’s told you about.”

“I know that. I want to go because I just want to be there.”