Four years is a long time for a body to be only a vehicle. I am Niamh. I am forty. I live in a flat in Stoneybatter where the light is good and the bed has been a place for sleep and occasionally for crying, not for the other thing. After the illness, after the long quiet that followed it, I got well in all the ways a doctor can measure. Wanting didn't come back on the same schedule. I had started to think of it as a room in the flat I had locked and lost the key to.

Ciarán brought a key without calling it that. Forty-two. An old friend who had never been a lover, who started coming by on Sundays with bread and no agenda. On this Sunday the rain was serious and he stayed for tea and then for the hour after tea, and at some point his hand was on the table near mine and the nearness…