‘He’ll be, like, forty minutes,’ she says. The snow will melt, the houses will sell – one house, or the other – and Evie will grow or be otherwise lost to me. Not that I ever had her, really. But whether her father stays with me or goes, I will lose this girl.
I say, ‘I know it’s hard about your parents, Evie.’ She does not reply.
‘I just think, it was going to happen one way or another. I mean it could have been anyone, you know?’ She slides on; one scraping step after the other. ‘But it wasn’t,’ she says. I can’t quite see her face. ‘It was you.’
Acknowledgements
MANY THANKS TO Geraldine Dunne of Brainwave, the Irish Epilepsy Association, and to my old friend, Aideen Tarpey, now with the NHS, for chat and information about epilepsy in children: all errors of fact or emphasis are, of course, my own.
Thanks to Lia Mills for reading early chapters and cheering me on.
Thanks to everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White, to the people at Random House and, as ever, to my agent Gill Coleridge and to Robin Robertson, my editor these many years.
Anne Enright
