Page 88 of All Our Missing Pieces

But even when I work on the portrait alone, my charcoal and my brushes seem to capture her as if she were there in front of me: the smooth curve of her cheeks, the gleaming curtain of her hair, her delicate hands. How beautiful she is. Any mother would swell with pride at having produced such a girl, with all her flaws and complexities. A young woman who, despite her privilege, has been dealt a difficult hand and is playing it as best she can. I find myself admiring her – her energy, her spirit, her courage in coming here to seek the truth about who she is.

I am full of wonder now that I know she is my daughter. I have never felt the connection I felt with Livvie – that meeting of minds, like falling in love. But I cherish her – I want to protect her, to be here for her, to keep her safe from harm.

Perhaps, then, this is what mothers feel, and what I felt for Livvie was something quite different.

I don’t know. I have never been a mother before. I am working it out as I go along.

I wonder how different she would have been if she had grown up with me, in the house in Clonmara, learning to ride a pony and running wild in the fields before being ordered inside to wash and change for tea and hold her knife and fork like a lady.

I wonder what would have happened if I had told Declan about her. Sometimes I used to imagine that he would leave his wife and be with me. God, how stupid I was! As if he would have done that. Declan was no fool – I was the fool and I know in hindsight that I was not the first of his students with whom he’d had such a dalliance.

He would never have left her – that pretty woman in the photograph on his desk, taken on their wedding day, her dark hair crowned with flowers. All that would have happened is I would have been kicked out of college in disgrace instead of choosing to leave with my head held more or less high.

Is it all worth it? The pain, the shame, the years of hiding and running away?

To hear my daughter singing in the mornings like a lark – yes. To know that even if I couldn’t hear her, even if I had never met her, she would be alive and singing?

Yes, it is.

FIFTY-FOUR

I descended the stairs slowly, my bag over my shoulder. It was eight in the morning – a cold December day. The high-ceilinged, airy rooms on the ground floor of the house were almost as bright as outdoors, their huge windows reflected in bright rectangles on the glossy polished floors.

I glanced through to the kitchen, where I’d spent so many evenings at the rickety pine table, chatting to Orla. Soon it would be gone – the shabby 1960s units stripped out, the chipped freestanding cooker consigned to a skip, replaced with fresh new cupboards and counters where Orla and Beatrice would sit.

Outside, the trees in the square were bare, the black metal railings rimed with frost. In a couple of months, snowdrops would appear in the grass, followed by crocuses and, later, daffodils would herald the proper start of spring. I knew that when I saw them it would be with a start of surprise, rather than the gradual, almost imperceptible transition I’d observed from summer to autumn and autumn to winter.

I paused and looked back at the house – the tall, elegant facade that had welcomed me so many times, the high-up window that had been mine now in darkness. I felt the need to find some way of saying goodbye to it, fixing it in my memory forever, only I couldn’t think what that might be.

The sound of footsteps and voices disturbed me and I looked around. Three people were approaching the house: a young man carrying a briefcase and a couple a few years older than me, who were holding hands. She was wearing a long red coat that flew out behind her in the sharp morning breeze; he had blond hair that shone almost golden as they passed beneath a lamp post.

Then I recognised the man with the briefcase. He was the estate agent who’d come to the door in summer, interrupting me and Luke in the garden, insistent on seeing Orla. Surely he wasn’t coming to her house now, not coming to show this couple round and persuade Orla to sell it to them?

But it was the house three doors away that they were approaching: number eight.

‘Now I’ll be straight with you,’ the estate agent said. ‘It’s not pretty in there. It’s an ambitious project.’

‘We’re ambitious people,’ the blond man said.

‘Speak for yourself,’ the woman teased. ‘I just want a place to live.’

‘Then let’s take a look.’

I watched as the estate agent fumbled a key into the lock, turned it and opened the door, but I couldn’t see what lay inside. It didn’t really matter, because whatever it was would soon change. That young couple would move in and set to work as Luke had done, ripping out plasterboard, sanding floors, evicting spiders. Before long the rooms would fill with the clink of their wine glasses at dinner, the voices of their friends, the laughter of their children.

I took a last look at the closed door of number five, but I didn’t feel the need for a farewell any more.

I felt as if I had been released from a spell.

Slowly, I began my usual walk to the bus stop, my shoulders hunched beneath my coat and my eyes watering from the cold.

With the same inexorable progress as the changing seasons, my life would move on – I knew that. Emily had talked about a girls’ holiday to Ibiza in the summer. I’d been awarded a Christmas bonus that I planned to spend on some new clothes, the knowledge and skills I’d gleaned from Orla allowing me to pick out pieces that suited me and adjust them so they fitted perfectly.

I wondered if I’d ever thread a needle or pin a dart without thinking of her, remembering the quizzical tilt of her head as she assessed the drape of a fabric, the scent of her skin as she leaned in towards me to pull up a zip, the touch of her cool fingers on my skin.

At first, I thought the hand I felt on my shoulder was my imagination, my mind playing tricks on me as I thought of Orla.

But then I heard a voice say my name.