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rolled the sheet back, folding it under Terry’s chin as if he was a sleeping child. “You try to have a wee look now.”
    At first all Paddy could see was the mess of it. A black hole the size of a fist was at his temple. A tongue, was that a tongue? Purple, swollen, poking out between the bloody lips. He must have been lying on his side after he was shot because tendrils of blood had dried across his face, a black octopus climbing out of the hole above his ear. She couldn’t see Terry in all of that. She stole a look at Aoife’s shoulder, braced herself, looked at him again through a puff of white breath.
    The first thing she recognized was the BCG scar on his upper arm. She had kissed that, stared at it in the gloomy room in Fort William while Terry talked about San Salvador, knew every fold of the smooth penny, every overlapping freckle. Then she saw that the nose was Terry’s nose. It was his double chin. She saw the hair on the back of his neck: black, coarse, gelled, sticky to the touch. She had run her fingertips around that neck, savored the softness, scratched and kissed it, run the tip of her tongue through the soft precursor hairs, tasted him. Her mouth filled suddenly with salt water.
    “Him. It’s him.”
    Lightness flooded into the top of her head, making her unsteady. Ordering herself to be brave, she raised her eyes to Aoife but her gaze rolled up past the thick brown hair, rushed up the wall, and skidded up to the ceiling into a burning strip light.
    She hit the floor before realizing she was going down.
    II
    The light above her was so harsh that Paddy threw her arm over her face and rolled onto her side to get away from it. Aoife was talking a mile away. “She’s fine. No worries. Yez can go about your business now.”
    Paddy heard Blane say something. Or was it Kilburnie? Aoife replied and a door clicked shut somewhere.
    Keeping her hands over her face, Paddy sat up. She was on a low bed, a leather daybed, covered in a long strip of paper like a gynecologist’s examination couch. She had passed out right in front of policemen while she was wearing a dress. Blane and Kilburnie would have a story to tell now: Burns on the telly, purple hall, and herself on the floor, legs splayed, washday-gray knickers on full show. She cursed to herself and swung her legs over the side of the bed, forcing her eyes open.
    They must have carried her in here. It was a small office, cut off from the rest of the mortuary by wood and glass partitions. Gray box files and papers were stacked on every surface. The cheap particleboard desk had a big white computer sitting on it, the screen blinking a green prompt.
    Aoife was watching her from a swivel chair, smoking a cigarette she didn’t look old enough to buy.
    “Oh, sorry, I’m sorry,” Paddy apologized over and over, trying to think of something else to say. “I’ll go, I’m sorry.” She stood up uncertainly and looked around. “Where’s my coat?”
    “Ye haven’t a coat.”
    “Haven’t I?”
    “Are ye pregnant or anything?”
    Paddy stroked the round of her stomach defensively.
    “I didn’t mean . . . Ye don’t look it or anything.” Aoife waved her cigarette up and down Paddy’s body. “Just in case there’s something more than shock going on. I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to ask stuff like that.”
    Paddy remembered the harrowing moments before she fainted. She covered her face with her hands and groaned Terry’s name.
    “Your friend,” said Aoife simply.
    Paddy looked up. “Friend.” The word seemed infinitely tender. She felt like crying. “Who’d shoot him in the head? He was a good guy.” She remembered the hotel room in Fort William. “Good-ish. A good enough guy.”
    Aoife considered her cigarette. “While you were out of it the police said he’d been shot by the Provos.”
    “Terry was nothing to do with the Troubles. He wasn’t even interested in that.”
    Aoife snorted bitterly and crossed her legs. “Doesn’t take much