Summer 1991
My daughter is suspicious. She sits beside me in the taxi, squinting at the mist of rain as we wind our way through the straggled outskirts of Cork City. ‘Who are we visiting?’ she asks again, but my heart is beating, leaping – I’m surprised not to see it bucking through my shirt – and my voice is caught up in my throat. The driver answers for me by turning in beside a sign: CONVENT OF THE SACRED HEART.
‘Not far now.’ He starts along the humped slope of the drive and I stare out through the window at hedgerows, saplings overshot, cows, legs folded, fields green with wet. Fence posts flash past white; there’s a curve, a mesh of wire, and there it is: the home. ‘Here we are, right enough.’ The man gets out, and he lifts our bag from the boot…







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