"Yes, really."

"Bloody good souffle," Niall said, scraping the last of it up.

"Not bad for a first attempt," Kat purred, pulling his arm round her neck.

"I think I need to lie down," said Emmy.

"Not before you tell us about your business," Kat said. "I took a look in your sewing room today. You've got a load of material in there."

"Oh, that reminds me, was there any post today?" Emmy asked quickly. "I've been waiting a whole week for some patterns I ordered."

"The post here is verging on bloody carrier pigeon, isn't it?" said Niall. "I saw the plumber, Roy Mundy, at the pub earlier and he said he sent his bill to us days ago. I'm sure we haven't had it. I reckon that chirpy little postie nicks stuff and hides it in the bushes somewhere. He's not right, is he? If he asks me to put a feckin' letterbox in the back door one more time I'll-"

"Language!" Asha shouted from the end of the table.

And then Jonathan remembered.

"Oh God, it's my fault," he said, the blood draining from his face. "I bet it's all over at the chapel. I intercepted the post the other day when I had Lila with me. I shoved it in her bucket seat. I was so keen to get away from him that I just took it and ... I'll go and get it."

"Don't worry about it now, Jon. It can wait another day," said Emmy. "Anyway, it's pouring down out there."

"No, no, I'll go and get it now, while I remember. It's no problem. It won't take me two minutes."

"Don't be daft, Jonathan," Sita said, but he was already doing up his boots. She put her hand to her ear to mime a phone but he missed it.

"You're mad," Emmy told him.

"Completely bloody barking," said Niall.

"Probably," he said, and on the walk over there, he realized there was no probably about it.

The rain was coming right at him, but if he kept his head down he couldn't see where he was going, because the lights of the farmhouse were his only pointer. The driving wetness found its way inside the collar of his coat and through the stitching of his boots within seconds, and the warmth from the kitchen flew out the top of his thinning hair and left him chilled to the bone. He would probably be cold all night now.

Not that he cared. The chapel door gave him its familiar greeting as he pushed it open and flicked on the light. A single unshaded lightbulb hung from a central beam and he made two mental notes. One, to have a proper think about the ultimate necessity for electricity over here; two, to get a doorstop.

The mail was still on the floor by the radio. It was covered in a film of grit, and the top envelope had a coffee ring on it. Two dirty cups were next to it. A slender bone-china mug that was far too good to be out here had marks of lipstick round its rim. In slow motion, he brought it up to his mouth and pressed it against his lips. Then he rolled it against his cheek and held it there. It wasn't the chapel he wanted to see again tonight, it was Tamsin.

When he got back to the house, a game of Chinese whispers was under way. What had started out as "Peas in a pod are good for the bod" had ended up as "Piss in a pot is good for Herbert," and he walked into the kitchen to hear his nine-year-old daughter deliver the final sentence with all the finesse of a navvy. Sita had gone to bed.

"Tenpence for the swear box, Asha," Niall shouted.

"Pot calling, I think," Jonathan told him, letting two envelopes fall into Emmy's lap. He put the mugs on the table but the lipstick mark was gone, wiped off on the inside of his pocket.

"Are you making a patchwork quilt or something?" Niall asked as Emmy undid the parcel and pulled out five different-colored squares of satin. He tilted a bottle toward her empty glass but missed-a splash of red wine hit the newly revealed slate floor with a wet slap. His attention had been caught by something else. The second letter she picked up had a familiar green stamp with a harp on it-the equivalent of a flashing neon arrow to an Irishman.

"Who's writing to you from Ireland?"

"I've no idea," Emmy said looking at the printed address, but her brain had finished sifting through the possibilities before the words came out of her mouth.

"Can I have the stamp?" Maya asked.

But her mother didn't hear. She had already started to pull the contents out and it was too late to stop. There was nothing to do but read it.

Emmy, I would very much like to talk to you. My work, home and mobile numbers are below. Please call me if you can. Cathal.

Her world receded like the shrinking crisp packet Jay had just set alight with a candle in the ashtray.

11.

Maya did sometimes ask about her father, but only in private on good days. She had learned to choose the right time from the experience of once choosing the wrong time, when Emmy had unwittingly made her feel, with just one look, as if she were the most ungrateful, insensitive selfish child in the whole world.

She knew the warning signs. Cigarettes in the house again, long telephone conversations in her bedroom with the door shut, canceled babysitters. Cigarettes were probably the most reliable pointer. Most of the time, Emmy only smoked Niall's. If she bought a packet herself, Maya knew things were bad. Mum had bought a packet a day for weeks and weeks after Niall met Kat.

On the other hand, the more obvious clues like crying didn't mean much at all. Mum cried over silly things like bumping her head on the door frame, or the car not starting, or being hopelessly late for school. As far as Maya knew, she hadn't cried once since they'd moved to Cornwall, but Maya suspected that was just because the doors were higher, there was always another car available, and here no one minded if you were late for school. Also, obviously, Niall was always around.

When Maya did want a sense of her own genetic provenance, it was easier to ask about Iona, her dead grandmother, even though she had heard it all before. Everyone was always happy to talk about Iona-about her being caught sitting on Grandpa's bed at Ledbury when they weren't even engaged, about her dressing up as a man to get in to a club in London, about her letting Emmy light one of her cocktail cigarettes and not minding when Emmy burned a hole in the curtain with it.

Because Iona had been dead for centuries, she didn't have the family taboo that Maya's father had. No one ever ever spoke about her father. They all behaved as if she had popped out of nowhere, like the product of a virgin birth or something.

At times, Maya thought she would prefer never to meet her dad, just invent him. That way, he could be whoever she chose him to be. He could be Niall, or he could be someone even better than Niall. He could be someone who was prepared to live with her mum, for example. Live as in live, involving beds and baths and things. And then at other times, she thought she probably would like to meet him, to see what he looked like and if she liked him.

She couldn't help being eternally intrigued by the fact that she was made up of bits of people she didn't know. Asha's mouth was exactly the same as Jonathan's-the lips went up in the middle under the nose like a little skateboard ramp-but Jay's was thinner, more like Sita's. She had to stop herself staring sometimes, because little details like that could change your entire face. If you blocked off their mouths, Jay and Asha were actually quite alike.

Maya knew she didn't have Mum's mouth. Mum's lips were full and bouncy and she could suck in her cheeks and do a really good fish impression, but her own lips weren't big enough for that. When she sucked in her cheeks, she looked more like an old woman with no teeth. So whose mouth was it?

"Can you do a fish?" she would ask her mother's boyfriends. And they'd have a go, thinking it was some sort of bonding ritual.

Often, when she was having her shoulder-length hair dried by Emmy in front of the mirror, she would try and surreptitiously work out which bits of them matched. On a really good day, she could persuade Emmy to put her face right next to hers and they would stare at their reflections together.

"Okay, how about chin?" asked Emmy once.

"Mine looks like a little bottom."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yours doesn't."

"Eyes?"

"No. Mine go like that and yours go like this."

"They're the same color, though."

"Do you think we look like each other at all?"

"People are always telling me we do," Emmy lied. But she didn't think so at all. She knew who she thought Maya looked like.

"Just describe him," Maya said.

"Oh, well, he had three heads, and eyes on stalks."

"Yeah yeah, and he was covered in purple fur."

"Pink, darling, get it right."

Emmy didn't understand that Maya needed it to be purple, even if it was a joke, so she could imagine she had inherited at least something.

"Pink, then. But..."

"Hey, look, our chins are the same shape."

"Why didn't you marry him?"

"Would you marry someone with three heads?"

"No, Mum, seriously."

"He didn't ask me."

"Would you have married him if he had?"

"Oh, Maya, you know I'm not up for all this."

Emmy's resistance didn't matter to Maya as much as the textbooks Emmy tried to avoid but couldn't help reading said it should.

Anyway, Maya had a distant plan which she told no one. She was going to find out about her father when she was older, when Emmy was less dependent on her, when she could meet him without anyone knowing, perhaps without even her father knowing. Out of curiosity, that was all. Just to check he didn't have three heads.

"What do I call him?"

"Why don't we just call him 'your dad?'" her mum had suggested once.

"No," Maya had replied, repulsed at the idea. "I don't want to."

So they called him nothing. He had been nothing for ten years and now it was three o'clock in the morning and Emmy was lying in her bed during the longest night of her life, trying to accept that life as they all knew it was about to change.

Would he still be Cathal? Or would he, God forbid, become Dad? She was seething with an ill-defined anger, not just against Cathal but against Niall, too. How could he be so bloody thick? Why had he never worked out the identity of Maya's father? Why had he always been so patient, so stupidly content to accept her refusal to discuss it? He should have pushed her, as he pushed her on other stuff.

"Who's it from?" Niall had asked when he spotted the green stamp. "Come on, what business have you got with my homeland? I demand to know."

"It's a fabric wholesaler," she'd said pathetically. "They've written to tell me they can't help me."

"Is that right?" he'd said. There was no suspicion in his voice. He genuinely hadn't got the foggiest.

The letter was in the drawer next to her bed, emanating a sort of evil. She knew its every detail already. The date of the postmark, the color of Cathal's ink, the number of lines. It was too frightening even to imagine it in there, and yet she kept checking, hoping to find it gone, or somehow rewritten as something harmless.

Her head ached with the effort of trying to believe that Jonathan had in fact not brought it back to the house but lost it forever somewhere en route from the chapel, that it had been taken by the wind, impaled on a high twig, made sodden and illegible by the rain. The fantasy kept madness at bay for a few precious intermittent minutes, until she imagined Niall climbing the tree and plucking it off. "Look," he'd say to Maya. "This is what your mother has refused to tell you all these years. This is what she has kept from me."

Emmy contemplated taking the letter downstairs and setting fire to it, sending it in black flakes up the chimney, but she knew that to destroy it would be to make the same mistake Toby had. Tidying his papers in the walnut bureau only a few days ago, she had found out that a Plymouth hospital had started calling him for X rays for a whole year before he kept the appointment. Tumor or truth, denial just made things bigger.

The option of sleep was no longer available. She stared at the ceiling, waiting for the answers to fall in her face, for something to guide her through the moral maze. Did Cathal have a right to do this? Did he really have a right? What would a reasonable, intelligent stranger think? Who was in the wrong here? Should she ring him now and get it over with?

She sat up and ran her hands through her hair, grabbing a bunch in her fist and pulling it gently as she thought. She was dehydrated, nauseous, dizzy. She must have drunk at least another bottle of red once they had moved into the sitting room. Her mouth felt sticky and her head was beginning to grow the mother of all headaches.

Now's not the time to make any plans, she told herself. I'm in shock. I must let it sink in. I must do and say nothing. I'm in shock. I'm in shock. I'm in shock. But Niall's voice came to taunt her, pulling her up as he so often did, forcing her to be more truthful.

"That's not right, though, Em, is it?"

"It is."

"No, it's not."

"Why?"

"Well, for a start, we both know you must have been expecting this to happen for years. Don't tell me you haven't. Be rational. Be honest."

But she had never been rational in her life. Even when a train she hadn't set foot on had crashed. She and Maya had escaped death. Not broken bones, not whiplash, not posttraumatic stress disorder, but death. Life was a drama. It was the way she was.

She crossed to her bathroom and stuck her mouth under the tap, taking great gulps of water. No one else would drink straight from the tap. They all messed around with filters and kettles, so terrified were they by the novelty of a private supply. But Emmy had been weaned on it, and the way she felt now she would have been pleased to catch some vile bug and nearly die. No one would dare to challenge a dying woman. Except she couldn't die, could she? She had responsibilities.

The house was quiet and dark, full of sleeping people. Untroubled people with uncomplicated lives. Why was that never her natural state? She walked barefoot past the door to Niall and Kat's room, imagining their naked bodies wrapped round each other. How dare he carry on as if nothing was wrong? He had used her. Played with her like a cat with a half-dead mouse, tossed her around with his paw just because he knew he could.

No, that wasn't true, she mustn't do that to herself. Or him. Cathal can't take everything away.

The cold water splashed against the lining of her stomach. A stab of intense loneliness stung the back of her eyes and she had to close them, for a moment.

Across the corridor, she could hear Lila beginning to cry, and the soft movements of one of her parents shifting in the bed to comfort her. I wish I was a baby, she thought. I wish someone always came to me when I started crying.

It occurred to her that if she was still in London, she wouldn't think twice about phoning one of them now. Even at three in the morning. The equivalent of barging into their rooms with a handbell shouting, "Talk to me!" What else did she think was reasonable from one angle but, from another, clearly wasn't?

With each stair, she saw herself in a different light. A trooper. A cow. Misunderstood. Frightened. Sorry for herself. Protective. Hopeless. Selfish. A liar. How did other people see her? How would the courts see her? What would Maya think? She so wanted to do the right thing, and yet how could she, when she had already done the wrong?

Cathal, Cathal, Cathal. Her mind was rusty when it came to thinking about their sexual history. From the moment of the pregnancy test, possibly even before that, she had blocked him out. It wasn't that the memory was bad particularly; it was simply irrelevant.

By the time Maya had been born, the conception was verging on the immaculate. So it was easy, on the occasions she had bumped into him since, to treat him as just Niall's brother, or like the friend of a friend. It was impossible to pencil the other details back in, because they had been rubbed out so long ago that there wasn't even the slightest pressure mark on the page. There was simply no trace.

Even Sita didn't know the circumstances. That's how big and distant a secret Maya's father was. She and Sita had been remote during that awful time. It was a mix of things-different universities, Jonathan, a parting of interests, a silly standoff which friendships sometimes go through. Sita seemed to have found it all so quickly, so easily. And it all coincided with the time that Niall had been lost to her, too.

Emmy had been all at sea on her solitary raft and she had slept with Cathal out of a basic need for companionship. In his compliance, he had unwittingly thrown her a lifeline, given her a seed. "Given" was the correct word. You don't lend these things, do you? And he wouldn't have cared about it so much if his sperm had perished in the condom as he intended it to. Maya was hers. Cathal clearly had no claim on her.

True, he was the only possible father, with a year's margin of error either side. But he didn't know that, did he? No one did. He'd have to go all the way to prove it.