Katie draped her arms around Jason’s neck and pulled him into her body.

‘I’m freezing.’

‘I’ll keep you warm. Just wait till I get you into bed.’

‘You’re a creep,’ she joked. He hugged her tighter and she felt a soft flutter in her stomach as he feathered her neck with his lips.

Over his shoulder she surveyed the noisy crowd behind them queuing for taxis.

‘Don’t look now but remember that creepy fart who was watching us in the pub the other night?’

‘What about him?’ he mumbled.

‘He’s in the queue.’

‘It’s a free country.’ Jason turned round and leaned into the freezing air. ‘Where is he?’

‘I told you not to look!’ Katie dragged him back. ‘Now he’s gone.’

‘The invisible man,’ Jason laughed.

‘It’s not funny. He’s freaking me out.’

‘If you see him again, tell me.’

Katie snuggled deeper into his arms and waited patiently with Jason for the elusive taxi. Somehow she didn’t feel safe.

The man quickened his step once he turned the corner. That had been a close one. He was sure the girl had spotted him. He would have to be more careful in future. But it had been worth it. Just to see the boy.

Lottie couldn’t sleep. Again.

Her conversation with Annabelle wrestled within her brain and confused into a knot. Her mother. The one woman who had the power to conjure up tortured memories.

Lottie closed her eyes tight. But she couldn’t dim the image of Rose Fitzpatrick. Tomorrow she would have to see her.

Leaning over the side of the bed, she notched up the electric blanket, nestled deeper beneath the duvet, snuggled into the artificial warmth and drifted into an uncomfortable sleep.

Ten minutes later, she was awake. Pain cut through her ribs and her brow was on fire. She swallowed two painkillers. The pain wouldn’t desist.

The events of the day were invading her night. The past, clawing its way into her present.

She needed a drink.

She really needed a drink.

She needed a real drink.

Scrunching the duvet into a ball, Lottie didn’t want to revert to the unrecognisable person she’d been after Adam’s death. To a time when she screwed her mouth to the neck of a wine bottle and the wine almost screwed her. Until she beat it a year ago. Still, sometimes she yearned to escape into oblivion. That desire obliterated all sense and she struggled to regain a semblance of normality. Struggling now, she fought it ferociously, twisting, turning and eventually she lost the battle.

She jumped out of the bed.

Pulling a hoodie over her pyjamas, Lottie thrust bare feet into her Uggs and tiptoed down the stairs. The kitchen clock said one thirty a.m. She took the key from the hook behind the back door and walked out on to the snow-covered garden to the shed. She wiped the white clumps from the lock. It was frozen underneath. A sign to go back to bed? She breathed on the brass. Stopped. Almost gave up. Tried again. It opened.

Flicking on the light switch, she lifted down Adam’s toolbox and opened it. She eyed the bottle of vodka. Closed the lid and sat on the cold floor. One drink was never enough. She bit her thumbnail and chewed.

After a few tormented minutes staring at the toolbox, she opened it again, removed the vodka, closed the lid and, with the bottle tucked under her arm, hurried back to the house, leaving the shed door swinging in the cold night wind.

1st January 1975

She could not believe it.

He was sitting on their floral couch, in their sitting room, staring at her, while her mammy fussed with china cups and biscuits. Her daddy puffed loudly on his pipe, acrid smoke filling the void between him and the priest.

Her eyes bulged in protest. They were discussing her ‘problem’ like she wasn’t even there. With the tea-towel in her knickers filling up with blood and goo, she held the little baby in her arms and wondered how she hadn’t known it’d been growing inside her. She smiled, thinking it was a perfect baby, though the priest called it ‘a fat sin with arms and legs’. How could he sit there and say such a thing?

She desperately wanted to tell them. To tell her mammy, standing there with the gold-rimmed teapot in her hand, and her daddy, sitting like a fucking eejit with his penknife chopping flakes off a tobacco bar, to tell them it was all the priest’s fault.

She said nothing. Her heart was breaking into tiny pieces. She held her baby wrapped in nothing other than a towel for a nappy.

She had wanted to tell that woman, the midwife. With her smooth face and curled hair, she’d cut the cord and checked the baby’s heart and whispered to her mammy to stop shouting. Almost as soon as she’d arrived, she was gone.

And now, they were talking as if she was invisible. The baby whimpered. Her tiny breast buds leaked, staining her shirt. She began to cry and they all gawked at her.

She clamped the baby to her chest. Fear, for herself and her little one, streaked through every vein in her body.

‘St Angela’s,’ the priest said. ‘That will put manners on her.’