Not all of it. He told her that he had to go so that Oona could keep everybody together, and that she was not to tell me, ever, because if I knew I would go and find him and it would come undone.
And my daughter, who was eleven years old, kept that for thirty years.
She kept it through the hearing in 1998. She kept it through her own wedding in 2007. She kept it through nineteen years of Sunday lunches at a table with me at the end of it.
She has told me since that she nearly broke about four times, and that the worst was in 2011 when I had the operation and she sat in a hospital corridor and got as far as the first word.
There is a post office box in a town about eighty miles from here.
From 1999 until last year, twice a year, Maud Breen sent photographs to it.
