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She hasn’t been the same since Rosie came back.’
    Pius had nodded, picking up a pike lure in his left hand and turning it over. ‘I’d say she’d be stressed about it all right.’
    ‘Stressed doesn’t cover it. I keep trying to tell her that it’s all water under the bridge at this stage and, sure, don’t we all change in ten years, but she keeps going on about how she’s going to stir it all up again, whatever that means.’ He’d scratched his head and looked at Pius hopefully, as if he’d provide PJ with the answers, but Pius had just shrugged. He didn’t have any answers.
    ‘Anyway, they’re all off to Dublin next week, for the fitting. Mary-Pat’s already up to ninety about it. I told her not to bother if it upset her that much, but she nearly ate me.’
    ‘The fitting?’ Pius hadn’t understood.
    ‘Ah, Pi, the dress fitting, you eejit. That’s what all the women do now – they all go into the shop while the bride’s having her dress fitted – you know, like on
Bridesmaids
.’ Here, he’d rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘And they all drink champagne and then complain that they have sore heads for a week after.’
    God, no wonder Mary-Pat was keyed up about it. She hadn’t managed to be in the same room as Rosie for more than five minutes since she’d come back, so the idea of her spending a whole day with her – how on earth would she cope?
    PJ had continued, ‘Why don’t you come up and watch
Match Fishing
with me while they’re all gone? We can have a few beers and put the world to rights.’ PJ was always asking Pius up to the house, to watch football on the telly or to listen to a Gaelic match on the radio – and Pius was flattered, because he knew that PJ wanted him to be an ally, a friend, but he just wasn’t very good at it. He couldn’t really manage the banter and the slagging that you needed to be able to do, the Man-chat, as John-Patrick put it.
    ‘That sounds good,’ he’d said noncommittally, ignoring the slight look of disappointment on PJ’s face. ‘I’ll text you.’
    ‘Grand so,’ PJ said, for all the world as if his brother-in-law was actually going to come around to watch men on carp lakes hauling them in.
    ‘I’ll take this,’ Pius had said and put the pike lure on the counter and PJ’s face had brightened – ‘Pike? Aim high, Pi, that’s what I always say.’
    Aim high. It had been quite some time since he’d done that.
    Pius poured hot milk now onto the coffee in the three white cups. Always cups, never mugs. You couldn’t drink cappuccino out of a mug. That waiter in Rimini had told him that, on the one and only holiday Pius had ever taken. Katy had organised it, the way she’d organised everything in his life back then. The waiter had invited him behind the café counter to watch how it was done – the coffee tamped down just so, the black, treacly liquid coming out of the spouts into the white cups, the hissing of the milk frother in the metal jug. ‘See?’ the waiter had told him. ‘
Assolutamente perfetto
.’ Sometimes, he wished he lived in Italy, imagining himself at some little bar at eight o’clock in the morning, knocking back an espresso on his way to work. He’d talk himself into it on his long walks down the canal to Porterstown, wondering what, exactly, was holding him back. But then he’d reason that, sure, he couldn’t speak a word of Italian, and, anyway, it was way too expensive. No, it was better to keep things the way they were. That way, nothing would ever surprise him. He didn’t like surprises, Pius. They tended to be nasty ones.
    He leaned his head against the cool pane of glass in the kitchen window and let out a low groan.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    Pius turned around to see a young woman standing at the door. She was wearing a vivid green dress with a denim jacket slung over it and a pair of battered trainers, but what really struck him was her hair – a long sweep of bright red – not pale red, like