My mother-in-law kept showing up with her whole family for free BBQ at our house — when they came empty-handed again on the 4th, I served them a lesson instead.

Tullamane, 2018–2025. With thanks to Hugh Bright, who bought it.

That’s all. No number. No explanation.

Twenty-one cards. Every adult at that table had one at their place.

At about twenty past seven, Nessa turned hers over.

Nessa is not a bad woman. She is careless and she is a bit spoiled and she has never in her life thought about where anything comes from, but she is not cruel and she genuinely did not know.

And she read it out loud, in a perfectly cheerful voice, across a table of twenty-one people:

“Oh — who’s Hugh Bright?”

And nobody answered.

Roisin looked at her plate.

Dermot put his glass down and did not pick it up again.

And Solange Halloran looked at me down the length of her own table.

And I said — and this is the only sentence I had planned in six weeks, and I had it word perfect, and I said it in a completely normal voice: