on, I’m so sorry,’ I said straight away, ignoring my life for now. ‘It was a stupid stupid idea of mine.’ I was still shaken up. ‘I have no idea why I thought that would work.’

‘Relax,’ he said and I felt his hand on my back, rubbing me comfortingly. ‘Right after this you’re coming to my parents’ for dinner to pretend to be the long-term currently pregnant girlfriend that I’ve been pretending to have.’ I looked at him with fear. ‘Just joking,’ he smiled. ‘Though that would make their lives.’

The door to the Oak Room opened and all our heads turned. Mum appeared, her hand still on her chest as if that motion alone would bring her breath back, as if it was keeping all her emotions in check, caging her heart in so that it wouldn’t move, wouldn’t feel, would only pump to keep her alive and expressionless, and emotionless, and appropriate. ‘Lucy, sweetheart,’ she said, then took in the two men standing before her and after all her practising she said to Life, ‘Oh, hello. You must be the cleaner.’ The irony.

‘Actually, I’m the cleaner,’ Don said, remembering then to take off Riley’s jacket which was covering the magic carpet emblem on his T-shirt. ‘He’s Lucy’s life.’

‘Oh,’ she said taking him in, hand still on her chest. She didn’t seem embarrassed for mistaking Life for the carpet cleaner but she must have been.

‘Mum, this is Don,’ I said. ‘Don is a friend. He’s a kind friend who decided to step in at the last minute because our guest couldn’t make it and I didn’t want to let you all down. I’m sorry, Mum, I didn’t want to tell you that he couldn’t make it today, I could sense that you were excited.’

‘I’m sorry about that in there,’ Don said, humble and contrite.

‘It was my idea, I’m sorry,’ I apologised, still feeling shaky, feeling a little bit faint, wanting to just get out of there but not knowing how.

‘We should get you some tea,’ Edith said, suddenly at my side, which meant she’d been standing listening.

‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’ Mum finally spoke and I wasn’t sure if she needed it more for her or for me. ‘I’m Sheila, Lucy’s mum,’ she said, holding her hand out to my life. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. And Don,’ she smiled warmly, ‘it’s been lovely to have you in our home. I’m sorry the welcome was not warmer as it should have been, but you are still cordially invited to the wedding renewal ceremony.’

It was unbearable having to listen to the polite chit-chat that was now taking place. Edith was shaking hands with Life and Don and offering them tea and discussing biscuit types and from the way that Mum was talking I knew that she was trying to figure out if it was appropriate for Don actually to clean her carpet or if she should let him go. Then Life and Mum were talking about flowers for the ceremony and Don was looking at me. I knew this not because I was looking at him but because I could sense it from the corner of my eye. And all the while these conversations were going on I could hear my father’s words, loud and succinct in my head.

Life came closer to me. ‘You told a really big lie.’

‘I’m not in the mood,’ I said quietly. ‘And anything you can say can’t make this moment any worse.’

‘I’m not trying to make it worse. I’m trying to make it better.’ Life cleared his throat and sensing something important Mum ended her conversation with Don and Edith.

‘Lucy feels that she’s never good enough for any of you.’

There was an uncomfortable silence and I felt my face flush but I knew I deserved it. A big lie deserved a big truth. ‘I have to go.’

‘Oh, Lucy.’ Mum looked at me, devastated, but then something snapped in her; the Silchester switch was flicked and she gave me a bright smile. ‘I’ll see you to the door.’

‘You didn’t deserve that,’ Life said from the passenger seat as we drove through the Wicklow mountains and back towards the motorway.

It was the first thing he’d said in the fifteen minutes we’d been in the car, in fact it was the first thing either of us had said since we’d got in the car. He hadn’t even tried to turn on the radio, which I appreciated because there was already enough noise in my head. It was mostly the sound of my father’s voice, his words being repeated over and over again and I was very sure there was no way that he and I could ever come back from that. He had said all that he said without difficulty, without emotion; sure, there was anger but it wasn’t driven by anything like hurt that would lead him to say things he didn’t mean. He meant every word of it and I bet he would back it up until the day he died. There was no going back. I hadn’t wanted Life to travel with me but he had insisted and I had wanted to get of there so urgently, I didn’t care if a Bengal tiger was in the back seat.

‘I got what I deserved, I told a lie.’

‘You deserved that alright, I mean, you didn’t deserve what your father said.’

I didn’t respond.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m not in the mood for deep psychological conversation, please.’

‘How about geographical then? You missed the turn for the motorway.’

‘Oh.’

‘I assume we’re going to Wexford now?’

‘No, we’re going home.’

‘What happened to finding the love of your life?’

‘Reality happened.’

‘Meaning …’

‘He’s moved on and I need to too.’

‘So are you going to call Don?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, so now you’re not good enough for anybody.’

I didn’t answer but I was shouting yes in my head.

‘What your dad said isn’t true, you know.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Okay so I may have lost my temper with you earlier and I also may have said some unfair things.’

I looked at him.

‘Okay, I definitely did say some unfair things but I meant them.’

‘What kind of an apology is this?’

‘It’s not one. I’m just saying you shouldn’t have left your job before you had secured another one but that’s all, anything else your father had to say was untrue.’

‘I can’t pay my rent. I don’t even know if I have enough money to get us to Wexford in this heap of crap even if I did want to go. I haven’t got enough money to pay Don, which I most certainly am going to do. I should have stayed in the job for financial stability. I should have been looking for other work while in that job. That’s what I should have done. That would have been the responsible thing to do.’

He was silent which meant he agreed. I hadn’t been paying attention to the road, I took a wrong turn and found myself on a road I didn’t recognise. I did a U-turn and took the next right. Again it was unfamiliar territory. I turned in someone’s driveway, went back to the road. Looked left and right. I rested my head on the steering wheel.

‘I’m lost.’

I felt Life’s hand on my head. ‘Don’t worry, Lucy, you’ll find the right path, I’m here to help you.’

‘Well, have you got a map? Because I mean, geographically, I’m lost.’

He quickly removed his hand from my head and looked left and right. ‘Oh.’ Then he glanced at me. ‘You look tired.’

‘I am. I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘Too much information. Let me drive.’

‘No.’

‘Let me drive. You can lie down in the back seat and I’ll drive us home.’

‘I can’t stretch my arm in the back seat, never mind lie down.’

‘You know what I mean, have a rest. Switch off your mind for a while.’

‘Can you drive?’

He reached into his inside pocket and retrieved more paperwork. He offered it to me. I didn’t take it; I was too tired to read.

‘It allows me to drive any vehicle as long as it’s in keeping with the assistance and development of your life.’

‘Any vehicle?’

‘Any.’

‘Even motorbikes?’

‘Even motorbikes.’

‘Tractors?’

‘Even tractors.’

‘Quad bikes?’

‘Even quad bikes.’

‘What about boats, can you drive boats?’

He looked at me with exhaustion so I gave up. ‘Fine. He’s all yours.’ I got out of the car and tried to settle down in the back.

And so Life was in the driving seat.

I woke up with a crick in my neck, a headache from where my head had been pressed up and repeatedly thudded against the cold hard glass with every vibration and bump in the road, and my neck was stinging from where the seat belt had continuously rubbed against my bare skin. It took me a moment to realise where I was. In the car, with Life in the driving seat, and he was singing to Justin Bieber in a high-pitched voice that would rival any six-year-old boy who had just been punched in the balls.

It was dark outside which wasn’t particularly unusual as we had left Glendalough at eight p.m., and though it would take a normal car without psychological issues less than an hour to get to my apartment, it took the complex Sebastian longer. On a June summer’s night it wouldn’t become dark until ten so I was expecting a certain amount of darkness but not this. This was pitch black, which meant we had been travelling for a lot more than an hour, and I couldn’t see any lights apart from the occasional small oval in a porch or a square of light from a window in the distance, which meant we were not in Dublin city. Then we stopped moving but the engine kept running. We had arrived somewhere only we weren’t anywhere. I looked at Life, he had his iPhone out on the dashboard and was looking at his sat nav. Alarm bells rang. Seeming satisfied he indicated to nobody, because there wasn’t anybody; the car crept forward again and we maintained a steady speed once more. I leaned forward then and spoke in Life’s ear.

‘Where are we?’

‘Jesus!’ he shouted, startled, and he momentarily lost control of the wheel as he turned around to see who was shouting at him. The car went veering to the left, he quickly grabbed the wheel and swung it to the right, stopping us from dropping into a ditch just in time, only he pulled it too far to the right and sent us flying over to the opposite side of the road. Despite my seat belt I went flying to the left like a rag doll, and then was pushed forward into the seat ahead of me as we nosedived into a ditch.

Then we were still and it was silent, apart from Justin Bieber who was singing about his baby, baby, baby.

‘Uh-oh,’ Life said.

‘Uh-oh,’ I repeated, pulling the seat belt away from my body so it was no longer threatening to amputate me. ‘Uh-oh? We are stuck in the middle of a ditch, in the middle of nowhere, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘You gave me a fright,’ he said, his pride wounded. ‘And anyway, we’re not in the middle of nowhere, we’re in the middle of Wexford.’ He turned to me. ‘Surprise. I’m helping you follow your dream.’

‘We are stuck in a ditch.’

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ He fumbled with his phone.

I battled with the seat belt to try and free myself from this downward position but it was stuck. ‘Can you reverse us out of this?’ I asked, full of frustration. The belt finally clicked, and unprepared, I went face first into the headrest in front of me, squishing my nose. I looked out the window. The only thing giving away our position was a house in the distance; I could see a few windows diagonally lit from my position.

‘You can’t reverse out of a ditch. At least not in this car. I think the problem was that I came off the motorway too early. Now let me see …’ he mumbled to himself while he fumbled with the sat nav again.

I pushed open the door. It opened a tiny slit but something behind the door on the other side prevented it from opening fully. It was so dark I couldn’t see out the window so I wound it down and stuck my head out. It was a tree that had come down and now lay there, a pile of complicated branches and dead leaves blocking my path. I reached up to the roof and pulled myself out of the car and onto the window ledge and then I tried to figure out how to get the rest of my body out. I tried to twist and take one bent leg out the window but it was complicated. I removed one hand from the roof to assist in squeezing my bent leg out of the open window. It wasn’t a good idea, because I lost my grip and I went flying backwards, out of the car and straight onto the tree, which hurt, a lot more than any pain I’d felt recently. Silchesters didn’t cry, but Silchesters did curse and scream to the high heavens. I heard a car door bang shut and Life was above me, looking down at me from the top of the ditch. He reached out his hand.

‘Are you okay?’

‘No,’ I grumbled. ‘How did you get out of the car?’

‘I just went out the other door.’

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. I reached out and Life pulled me out of the ditch.

‘Did you break anything?’ he asked, spinning me around and checking my back. ‘Apart from the tree, that is?’

I jiggled around a little, shimmied a bit, tested out all my joints. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘If you can do that, trust me, you’re okay. Physically, anyway.’ He surveyed the car with his hands on his hips. ‘We’re not far from the B&B that I booked, we could walk it.’

‘Walk? In these shoes? And we can’t leave the car here in the ditch.’

‘I’ll call the AA on our way to the house.’

‘We’re not asking for help, we can do this ourselves. You and me. Come on.’ I whipped him into action and soon I was behind the wheel of the car while he tried to push us. Then when that didn’t work, he was behind the wheel of the car and I was pushing. And when that didn’t work we were both pushing. And when that didn’t work we took our bags from the boot and trudged down the country road following Life’s iPhone sat nav. When I say road I use the term loosely – it was more of a track or a trail, a surface for farmyard animals and tractors to travel, not for a wedge-heeled wrap-around-dress-wearing woman with an aching back and twigs in her hair. We were walking for forty-five minutes before we found the B&B, which we realised was overlooked by a brand-new Radisson Hotel on the motorway. Life looked at me apologetically. The B&B was a bungalow with old-style carpets and wallpaper and smelled of air freshener; it was old-fashioned but it was clean. Because I hadn’t had any microwave dinners for lunch and I had sipped only a few spoons of courgette and pea soup which my palette had been too stunned to taste as my father shouted insults at me, I was ravenous. The lady of the house rustled up some ham sandwiches and a pot of tea which hit the spot, and a plate of biscuits I hadn’t seen the likes of since I was ten years old. I sat on the bed with rollers in my hair painting my toenails. The words my father had spoken rattled around in my head, which felt hollow and empty – a perfect barren place for such words to echo around for all eternity.

‘Stop thinking about your father,’ Life said.

‘Do you read minds?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Because sometimes you say exactly what I’m thinking.’ I looked at him. ‘How do you do that?’

‘I suppose I pick up on what you’re feeling. But it would be obvious for you to be thinking about your dad. He said some harsh things.’

‘Father,’ I corrected him.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No.’

‘So your parents are rich,’ Life said, talking about it anyway.

‘Wealthy,’ I said automatically, not even thinking, it was an immediate response.

‘Pardon?’

‘They’re not rich, they’re wealthy.’

‘Who told you to say that?’

‘Mum. I went to a summer camp when I was eight and the other kids kept saying I was rich because they’d seen me roll up in a BMW or whatever we had at the time. I’d never even thought about it before, money was never an issue, never a thought.’

‘Because you had it.’

‘Maybe. But I ended up using the word myself at our annual winter solstice breakfast with the Maguires. I said that we were rich and my parents looked at me in such a way I knew never to use the word again. It’s as if I swore or something. It’s a dirty word, to be rich.’

‘What other rules did they put in your head?’

‘Lots.’

‘Like …’

‘No elbows on the table, no shrugging or nodding … no drinking poitín with nine men in a barn.’ He looked at me. ‘Long story. No crying. No emotion whatsoever, no expression of oneself. You know, the usual.’

‘Do you follow them all?’

‘No.’

‘Do you break them all?’

I thought about the crying rule, which was never technically a rule, just a learned habit. I just never saw them cry, not even when their parents died; they were as stoic and as still, and appropriate as always.

‘Only the important ones,’ I said. ‘I will never give up my God-given right to drink with nine men in a barn.’

Life’s phone beeped.

He read it, smiled and texted back immediately.

‘I’m nervous about tomorrow,’ I revealed.

His phone chirped again and he went straight to it, ignoring my big revelation. He smiled again, texted back immediately.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked, feeling oddly jealous that I didn’t have his full attention for once.

‘Don,’ he said, concentrating on texting.

‘Don? My Don?’

‘If you want to be psychotically possessive about another human being, then yes. Your Don.’

‘That’s not psychotic, I met him first,’ I huffed. ‘Anyway, what is he saying?’ I tried to look at his phone, but he moved it away from me.

‘None of your business.’

‘Why are you texting him?’

‘Because we get along and I’ve a lot of time for him. We’re going for a drink tomorrow night.’

‘Tomorrow night? You can’t, we’ll still be away and anyway, what are you thinking? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?’

‘If you’re referring to Blake, I have no interest in him, so no, there’s no conflict.’

I studied him. His body language had changed; he’d stiffened his spine and turned himself away from me.

‘You really don’t like him, do you?’

He shrugged.

‘What happens if me and him, you know, get back together?’ The very thought made my stomach churn and sent butterflies flying everywhere. I thought of his perfect lips kissing me all over. ‘How would you feel about it?’

He screwed his mouth up and thought about it. ‘If you were happy, it wouldn’t bother me, I suppose.’

‘You would have to be happy then, wouldn’t you? Because when I’m happy, you’re happy? But if I was with him and you weren’t happy, well then, that would mean I don’t really love him, wouldn’t it?’

‘It wouldn’t mean you don’t love him. It would mean that in some way, it’s not right and not meant to be.’

‘I’m nervous. First I was nervous about seeing him again. I mean, it’s been so long and apart from the TV shows I haven’t been anywhere near him. I’ve never passed him in the street, never bumped into him in a bar. I’ve never heard his voice or, oh my God, what if he doesn’t want me here? What if he takes one look at me and is happy he walked away? What if he really loves this girl and wants to spend the rest of his life with her?’ I looked at Life, appalled and terrified by all the new thoughts. ‘What if after all this time, I’m still not good enough?’ My eyes filled up and I quickly blinked them away again.

‘Lucy,’ Life said gently, ‘if it doesn’t work out it’s not because you’re not good enough.’

I had a hard time believing that.