The first time the fire door failed, nobody called it failure.
They called it sticky.
They called it one of those things.
They called it the sort of problem you reported twice, maybe three times if you had the patience for the online portal and a password that had not expired while you were trying to remember whether you had used a capital letter or the name of the dead dog. They called it damp swelling the frame. They called it budget pressure. They called it contractor backlog. They called it historical underinvestment, which was the sort of phrase men in fleece gilets used when they wanted grief to sound like stationery.
Nora Kavanagh called it a bloody disgrace, but only after she had checked there were no children in earshot.
Then she wedged her shoulder against the door beside Block C's ground-floor stairwell and shoved.
It gave with a cough of rust and a shriek that made Mrs Dunne in 2B put her head out over the balcony with a tea towel in her hand.
"You'll have that off the hinges if you keep at it."
"That's the dream, Angela. Revolutionary violence before breakfast."
"I've biscuits if the revolution needs feeding."
"It always does."
The door slammed behind Nora with a boom too heavy for half past seven on a Tuesday. Somewhere above her, a baby started crying. Somewhere below, though there was nowhere below except the bin room and the old pram store, water ticked steadily into a plastic bucket. The estate had its own orchestra if you knew how to listen: pipes knocking, radiators hissing, the soft curse of lifts deciding against usefulness, children dragging schoolbags down concrete steps, gulls bullying the roofs as if they had paid rent.
Nora tucked the tenant association folder under one arm and lifted the crate of apples with the other. She had bought them herself because the youth club breakfast table had looked depressing on Monday: two bruised bananas, a packet of own-brand digestives, and a carton of orange juice so thin it seemed to have lost hope in the factory. The council would reimburse her in six to eight weeks if she kept the receipt, filled the right form, uploaded proof of purchase, and sacrificed a small goat under a full moon.
She had kept the receipt.
She was still considering the goat.
Outside, Saint Brigid's Court was waking in layers. The estate sat on the hard shoulder of the city, close enough to the good roads to hear other people leaving, far enough from anything polished to be spoken about as an issue. Four blocks of pebble-dash and tired brick formed a square around a courtyard that had once held flowerbeds and now held three benches, two smoking shelters nobody admitted were smoking shelters, and the graffiti saint.
The mural covered the gable end of the youth club. A woman in a blue tracksuit jacket and a gold halo made of spray-painted bottle caps looked down over the courtyard with one hand lifted in blessing and the other holding a shopping bag full of bread, nappies, and a hurley. Her face had been copied from three local women and one holy card. Nobody agreed which women. Everybody recognised someone.
Under her feet, in black letters outlined silver, were the words: WE KEEP US.
The council had tried to remove it once.
Three pensioners, two teenagers, a retired plasterer, and a priest who had not moved that quickly in years had stood in front of the wall until the cleaning crew gave up and went for breakfast rolls.
Nora looked at the saint every morning without meaning to. Some days it annoyed her. Some days it steadied her. Today, with the apples cutting a groove into her palm and the fire door still shuddering in her shoulder, she thought the saint looked like she had seen the maintenance records and was seconds from losing patience with the lot of them.
"Nora!"
She turned.
Jayden Reilly came across the courtyard with his tie in his hand, not around his neck, and his school jumper on inside out. At twelve, he had the exhausted dignity of a man with a mortgage and no faith in government. His little sister, Rosie, followed with her coat half-zipped and a piece of toast clamped between her teeth.
"The breakfast thing open?" Jayden asked.
"The youth club is open. The breakfast thing is a community initiative, not a hostage negotiation."
"So yes."
"So yes. And fix your jumper before Sister Patricia sees you and has a spiritual event."
He looked down as if surprised by his own torso. "It's dark in our hall. Bulb's gone again."
"I'll add it to the list."
"You always say that."
"Because I always add it to the list. Whether the list is read by human beings is a separate theological question."
Rosie grinned around her toast.
Nora shifted the apples and used her elbow to unlock the youth club door. The key stuck once, then turned. Another note for the list. The list was less a document than a second nervous system. Fire doors. Hall bulbs. Lift stutter. Damp patch outside 4D. Window restrictor in Block B. Broken radiator in the community room. Bin room lock. Missing minutes from the last tenant association meeting. The list lived in her folder, her phone, three emails, and the back of her mind at three in the morning when sensible people were asleep.
Inside, the youth club smelled of polish, old toast, damp coats, and the faint rubbery sadness of a pool table with one missing ball. Fluorescent lights flickered themselves awake. The main hall had been painted a cheerful yellow by volunteers in 2016 and had spent every winter since surrendering to grey. Posters about mental health, voter registration, and a drama workshop curled at the corners. A noticeboard displayed photographs from a summer scheme: children holding paper medals, a councillor holding scissors, Nora holding a tray of sandwiches and looking as if she would rather be prosecuted than photographed.
Jayden dumped his bag by a chair.
"Bag on the hook," Nora said.
"I'm eating."
"You are breathing near an apple. Bag on the hook."
He obeyed with theatrical suffering.
Rosie climbed onto a chair and placed her toast on a napkin with great care. "Mam said not to tell you."
Nora set the crate down slowly. "That's always a promising start."
"She said the man from the office rang again."
Jayden shot his sister a look sharp enough to slice bread.
Nora kept her hands busy with cups. "What office?"
"The housing one," Rosie said. "About arrears. But Mam said it's not arrears if they lost the form. She said that's maths for gobshites."
"Rosie."
"She did."
Nora found the good mugs behind the tea urn. Good was relative. One had a chip shaped like Kerry. "Your mam is not wrong in principle, but we'll improve the phrasing before school."
Jayden stared at the floor.
There it was, then. Tuesday's first private crisis, arriving before the kettle boiled.
Nora did not ask questions in front of children when adults had already failed them. She put apples into a bowl. She found cereal. She checked the milk date. She wrote Reilly, rent form, call after nine on the corner of a meeting agenda already so crowded it looked like a ransom note.
By eight fifteen, the youth club had filled with the ordinary small emergencies of ordinary families doing the work of survival without calling it heroic because heroic did not get PE kits dry. Children came in with wet cuffs, loose plaits, unsigned permission slips, and faces still soft with sleep. Adults leaned through the doorway to pass warnings, apologies, and gossip. The kettle worked. The toaster tripped the extension lead twice. Bad coffee spread through the room like a rumour.
Nora moved through it all with the contained briskness people mistook for calm. She found a plaster for a boy who had cut his finger on a cereal box. She listened to Mrs Okafor explain that the lift had stopped between floors again, this time with her shopping and her hip, and wrote it down. She told Shay Brennan he could not use the tenant association printer for missing-cat posters unless he stopped calling the cat a traitorous bastard in the copy. She signed for a delivery of donated footballs and counted them twice because the last donation had lost three between the van and the cupboard, which was apparently what happened when equipment passed through the enchanted forest of adult responsibility.
At eight forty, Councillor Helen Grady arrived wearing a cream coat unsuitable for any room where children ate jam.
The hall adjusted around her.
Not much. A slight tightening. A quicker wiping of mouths. A few backs turning. Helen Grady had grown up two streets away and spoke often about never forgetting where she came from, usually while standing somewhere carefully chosen by a photographer. She was fifty, neat, clever, and kind in ways that always seemed to know where the exits were. Her election posters had begun appearing on lampposts that morning, smiling down over potholes she had been promising to escalate since the last campaign.
"Nora," she said warmly.
"Helen. You're brave in that coat."
"I wanted to pop in before the school run rush ended."
"You missed the Weetabix incident. Devastating for your brand."
Helen laughed, as she was meant to. "How are things?"
It was a dangerous question in Saint Brigid's Court. Asked sincerely, it could take hours. Asked politically, it wanted one tidy sentence and no blood on the floor.
Nora smiled with no teeth. "We're grand, in the historic Irish sense."
Helen's gaze flicked to the damp patch near the skirting board, then away. "I saw your email about the doors. Maintenance have it logged."
"Maintenance have had it logged since January. The doors are becoming pen pals at this stage."
"There's a procurement issue."
"There's a smoke containment issue."
The warmth thinned. Only for a second. Helen was too experienced to let irritation sit where voters could see it.
"That's emotive language."
"Fire usually is."
A child snorted into his cereal. Nora did not look over. Encouraging disrespect in minors was wrong. Enjoying it privately was between herself and God.
Helen stepped closer, lowering her voice. "Can we not do this in front of everyone?"
"The door is in front of everyone."
"Nora."
There were many ways to say her name. Helen used the one that meant be useful, not difficult.
Nora had been useful since she was seven years old and her mother first asked her to watch the younger ones while she went to a meeting about rent increases. Useful got you keys. Useful got you trusted with alarm codes, spare nappies, bank cards, grief, and other people's shame. Useful made people say, Ask Nora, she'll sort it, with the fondness of those handing you another stone for your pockets.
Difficult, on the other hand, was what they called useful when it stopped smiling.
The youth club door opened again before Nora could answer.
A man stepped in carrying a black satchel and a cardboard tray of coffees. He paused just inside, letting the door close behind him properly, which was the first thing Nora noticed and disliked. People who noticed doors noticed systems. People who noticed systems usually wanted something.
He was tall, maybe late thirties, with dark hair cropped close enough to show a small scar above his left temple. His coat was plain navy, good wool, not new. He had the stillness of a person who had learned not to waste movement in rooms where every gesture might be counted. His eyes went first to the children, then to the exits, then to the damp wall, then to Helen Grady, where they stayed with a recognition too precise to be social.
Helen's face changed.
There it was. Not guilt. Not yet. More like the private annoyance of a drawer opening when you thought you had locked it.
"Tadhg," she said.
Nora's hand tightened around the cereal packet.
Tadhg O'Shea.
The name moved through her before memory did. O'Shea from the old east block before demolition. O'Shea whose father had chaired the tenant association when Nora was a child. O'Shea who had left for college and then law, or inspection, or one of those jobs where people learned to say compliance without laughing. O'Shea whose mother had once made soup for half the estate during the bus strike. O'Shea whose family story had been edited over the years until only the safe parts were told.
He looked at Nora, and for one unsettling second she had the feeling he knew exactly which stories had been kept from her and which ones she had helped keep from herself.
"Councillor," he said.
No first name. Interesting.
Helen recovered. "I didn't know you were back."
"That seems to be going around."
His voice was quiet, Dublin-edged but softened by years elsewhere. Not posh. Not trying not to be. The kind of voice that made volume unnecessary.
He lifted the cardboard tray slightly. "Coffee. Though having smelled what's in the urn, I'm aware this may be classed as intervention."
"We don't accept pity coffee," Nora said.
His eyes moved to her. "It's not pity. It's defensive. I may have to drink one."
Jayden whispered, "Take it, Nora. The urn tastes like battery."
"Thank you, Jayden, for your expert testimony."
Tadhg's mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. Worse, somehow. A man careful with amusement was harder to dismiss than a charmer.
He set the tray on the serving table and held out a hand. "Tadhg O'Shea."
"I know."
"Efficient."
"Nora Kavanagh."
"I know."
"Nosy."
This time he did smile, small and brief. "Prepared."
Helen cleared her throat. "Tadhg is consulting on some safety and governance reviews."
"Am I?" he asked.
The room went quieter than Nora liked.
Helen's smile remained fixed. "I understood the council had engaged your firm."
"They asked. I declined the council contract. Conflict concerns."
Nora watched Helen's fingers tighten around the strap of her handbag.
Tadhg opened his satchel and removed a folder. Not a glossy folder. Not one of the council's branded paper shields. A plain cardboard thing with a red elastic band around it and small white labels on the tabs.
Records, Nora thought.
Her pulse gave one hard knock.
"I agreed to advise the tenant association directly," he said, "if the association wants that. Pro bono. For now."
Helen's eyes moved to Nora. There were warnings that did not need language.
Nora looked back at Tadhg. "We have a tenant association meeting Thursday."
"I know."
"You know a lot for someone who just arrived with coffee."
"Coffee lowers resistance to paperwork."
"Only if it's good."
"Then I'm optimistic."
A child laughed. Helen did not.
Nora took one coffee from the tray because pride was one thing and the urn truly was an argument for despair. The cup was warm against her fingers. Practical bribery. She respected it against her will.
"What exactly are you advising on?" she asked.
Tadhg placed the folder on the table but did not open it. "Fire doors. Maintenance logs. Meeting minutes. Contractor records. Any discrepancy between what tenants reported and what was recorded as resolved."
The word resolved landed badly.
Mrs Dunne, who had come in at some point and was pretending to wipe a table, stopped moving.
Helen said, "Those documents go through proper channels."
"They should," Tadhg said.
"You can't just walk into a youth club and start alarming people."
"I'm not starting it."
No one spoke.
Outside, someone shouted for a child to hurry up or they'd miss the bus. A chair scraped. The fluorescent lights hummed with institutional indifference.
Nora looked at the folder. She thought of Jayden's dark hallway. Mrs Okafor in the lift. Rosie repeating her mother's shame because children were the estate's most reliable record-keepers. She thought of the fire door giving only when she put her body into it.
Then she thought, with a weariness so old it felt inherited, of what would happen if they opened the wrong drawer.
People talked about truth as if it arrived clean. It did not. Truth came through kitchens and school gates. It sat beside you at funerals. It changed how neighbours looked at one another in the queue for the pharmacy. It made some people safer and others homeless. It turned family stories into evidence. It asked who had signed what, who had known when, and who had decided silence was cheaper.
Nora had no patience for cowards.
She had great sympathy for frightened people.
That was the trouble.
"Thursday," she said.
Helen's head turned. "Nora."
"Tenant association meeting. If Mr O'Shea has something relevant, he can bring it there."
"This needs context."
"Most things do. That's why God invented meetings and bad biscuits."
"You don't want to create panic."
"No," Nora said. "I want the doors fixed. Panic would be extra."
Tadhg watched her over the lid of his coffee. She had the unpleasant sense that he understood both what she had said and what it had cost not to say more.
Helen leaned in, voice polished low. "Be careful. You have a lot of people depending on you."
It was not a threat. Not exactly. It was too well-dressed for that. But it had weight. It carried the youth club keys, the breakfast funding, the pending grant for new heaters, the application Nora had helped draft for summer places, the quiet phone calls that made small problems disappear before they became official refusals.
Useful, the sentence said.
Stay useful.
Nora looked at the children finishing cereal at the plastic tables. She looked at the saint through the rain-streaked window, her bottle-cap halo catching the pale morning light. WE KEEP US, said the wall, as if keeping was simple. As if keeping did not sometimes mean standing in front of your own neighbours with a file in your hand and asking who had lied to them.
"People depend on the doors too," Nora said.
Helen's expression did not change. That was how Nora knew the sentence had landed.
The councillor left three minutes later with promises to follow up, which was council language for placing a concern into a padded room until it stopped making noise. The room exhaled when she was gone.
Jayden approached the coffee tray with the solemnity of a priest nearing an altar.
"Absolutely not," Nora said.
"I was only looking."
"Look at an apple."
"Apples don't understand me."
"Neither does caffeine. Go to school."
He took an apple and gave Tadhg the frank stare children reserved for new adults. "Are you a solicitor?"
"Sometimes."
"That's not a job. That's a warning."
"Fair."
"Are we in trouble?"
Nora opened her mouth.
Tadhg answered first, gently and without the adult insult of false brightness. "No. People who should have listened sooner may be in trouble. That's different."
Jayden considered this. "Good."
He left with Rosie, both of them dragging their bags, both of them looking smaller once they crossed the threshold into the courtyard. Nora watched until they passed the mural.
"You shouldn't promise children clean outcomes," she said. "They remember."
"I didn't promise clean."
"You implied fair."
"No. I implied accountable. Fair is rarer."
She looked at him then.
The hall was nearly empty. Mrs Dunne had finally surrendered the pretence of cleaning and gone to spread the news with surgical precision. Shay Brennan was arguing with the printer. The kettle clicked off. Rain worried at the windows, not dramatic, just persistent, the way Dublin rain made itself part of the furniture.
"Why are you here?" Nora asked.
Tadhg picked up his folder. "Because your association requested a review."
"I requested advice on grant language and maintenance escalation. I did not request a man with labelled tabs making Helen Grady look like she'd swallowed a wasp."
"That's usually billed separately."
"Mr O'Shea."
"Tadhg."
"Don't get familiar to dodge the question."
He absorbed that with an incline of his head, as if she had corrected a document. "The fire door failures are not isolated. The logs show repeated closures marked complete without tenant sign-off. Some invoices reference work that appears not to match the reported defects. There are missing minutes from two association meetings last year. A contractor connected to the retrofit scheme donated to Councillor Grady's campaign through a business network. That last part may be legal. It may not be clean."
Nora felt the day narrow.
A person could know something in fragments for years: the smell of damp, the unanswered emails, the way repairs happened faster before election photographs, the old men who said it had always been like that, the mothers who stopped reporting because reporting took time they did not have. Knowing in fragments was survivable. It let you get dinner on. It let you sleep.
A folder made fragments into a shape.
Shapes demanded action.
"Why bring it to me?" she asked.
"Because people trust you."
"That's not an answer. That's a liability."
"Both can be true."
"Try again."
He looked toward the window, where the saint's halo blurred behind rain. "Because when my father tried to raise similar issues twenty-one years ago, the association minutes disappeared, the committee split, and my family became the problem everyone agreed not to discuss."
Nora said nothing.
There were moments when speech was an intrusion. She knew that. For all people claimed she was good with words, most of her life had been built around knowing when to shut up and put the kettle on.
Tadhg's thumb moved once along the folder's edge.
"I was sixteen," he said. "Old enough to understand more than adults wanted. Too young to be useful."
Useful again. That old curse wearing a clean shirt.
Nora set her coffee down. "And now?"
"Now I can read a procurement trail."
"That's grimly attractive on a dating profile, I'm sure."
His eyes came back to her. For a second the room warmed by half a degree. "I leave it under hobbies."
She should not have smiled.
She did not, quite.
"I'm sorry," she said, because there was no cleverer sentence that would not make her worse.
He accepted it without display. "Most people were managing what they could."
"That's generous."
"No. It's accurate. Generosity is easier."
Nora hated how cleanly that landed.
The printer spat out one page, then jammed with a sound like a small animal giving up. Shay Brennan swore in the office. Life, offended by sincerity, resumed.
Nora went to the hatch and pulled the plug on the toaster before it could attempt murder. "If you're here to settle an old score, say so now."
"I'm here because the doors don't close."
"And the old score?"
"Is why I know where to look."
That was not comforting. It was, unfortunately, honest.
Nora had built her reputation on refusing nonsense, but honesty was more complicated. Honest people could still wreck a room. Honest people could carry matches into dry places and call the fire necessary. She believed in records. She believed in doors that shut, minutes that existed, children who could sleep in flats without smoke moving up stairwells like a rumour. She also knew the estate had survived by making bargains no policy officer would ever see.
A repaired door could save a life.
An opened file could ruin several.
"Thursday," she said again. "You bring what you have. No ambush. No hero routine. No using people's pain to prove you're right."
"Agreed."
"And you don't speak over the women who've been reporting this for years."
"I wouldn't."
"Men say that with great confidence shortly before discovering they would."
He gave the smallest nod. "Then stop me if I do."
"I will. Publicly."
"I assumed."
There it was again, that almost-smile. It should have irritated her more than it did.
The office door opened and Shay Brennan emerged holding a sheet of paper in triumph. "Printer's grand if you threaten it with a screwdriver. Nora, where do you want the cat posters?"
"Not above the voter registration forms. Democracy has suffered enough."
"Fair. Who's he?"
"Trouble with tabs."
"Right. Welcome. Don't leave valuables near the under-tens."
Tadhg looked solemn. "Noted."
Nora gathered the breakfast cups and carried them to the tiny kitchen. The sink had two settings: reluctant trickle and biblical accusation. She chose the trickle. Tadhg followed with the coffee tray, because of course he did. Men who wanted to be liked made speeches. Men who wanted to be trusted learned where the bins were.
"Cups there," she said.
He placed them there.
"Recycling under the sink. Compost doesn't exist no matter what the council leaflet says. Tea towels in the drawer, but only the blue ones are clean. The red ones are decorative lies."
He opened the drawer, found a blue tea towel, and began drying without comment.
That annoyed her as well.
Competence was a low bar. It was still surprising how many people brought a shovel.
For several minutes they worked in a silence made of crockery, running water, and the muffled thud of a football being kicked in the hall by someone pretending not to kick it. Nora rinsed. Tadhg dried. Outside, the school rush thinned. The estate settled into its daytime face: older residents at windows, workers gone, young mothers with prams under hoods, men in vans idling too long, the courtyard briefly empty enough to show the cracks.
"Your father," Nora said. "Was he the one who kept the old ledger?"
Tadhg's hands stilled on a mug. "You remember that?"
"I remember a brown book in the community room. My mam said it had everyone's business in it and none of mine. Naturally I was obsessed."
"That was him. Repairs, hardship loans, who needed lifts, who had spare furniture. He said if it wasn't written down, people could pretend it hadn't happened."
Nora looked at the water clouding with milk and cereal dust. "Sensible man."
"Inconvenient man."
"Same thing, if you're doing it properly."
He dried the mug carefully and set it on the shelf. "The ledger vanished after the committee split."
Nora knew before he said more. She felt it in the room, a small door opening inside the day.
"What?"
"I found a scan last month. Partial. Bad quality. My mother had kept photocopies."
"Of the ledger?"
"Some pages. Enough to show patterns. Enough to name people who reported door faults before the 2007 fire."
The water ran over Nora's fingers.
Everyone knew about the 2007 fire in the way estates knew things: all at once and never directly. A kitchen blaze in the old east block. Smoke in the stairwell. Three hospitalised. One man dead six months later from lungs that never recovered, though the official record did not connect it neatly. Nora had been seventeen. Old enough to remember the smell. Young enough that adults still turned conversations away when she entered.
"That was wiring," she said.
"That was the finding."
"Tadhg."
"I'm not saying the door caused the fire. I'm saying the door failed during it. I'm saying tenants had reported it. I'm saying records later described the relevant maintenance as completed."
The sink seemed suddenly too loud.
Nora turned off the tap.
Through the small kitchen hatch, the graffiti saint watched from the far wall, blurred by glass and rain and years of people deciding what not to say.
"Who knows you have this?" she asked.
"My sister. My mother. One retired fire officer who agreed to look at the scan off the record. Now you."
"Lucky me."
"I can leave."
It was not defensive. That was the problem. He meant it. He would take the folder and walk out, and the room would become easier, and the door would still stick, and Rosie Reilly would keep learning which adult failures were safe to repeat.
Nora dried her hands on a blue towel.
"No," she said.
The word frightened her more than it should have.
Tadhg waited.
"You don't leave," she said. "But you don't run either. We do it properly or not at all. We protect tenants first. Not reputations. Not revenge. Tenants. That includes the ones who made bad calls because they were scared."
"Agreed."
"And if this touches families, we don't throw names around like confetti."
"Agreed."
"Stop agreeing so quickly. It makes me feel like I'm missing a trap."
"Would you prefer mild resistance?"
"I'd prefer a working fire door and a week in Majorca. We all endure disappointment."
This time his smile arrived properly, quiet and unwilling, and Nora had the irritating thought that it changed his face from handsome in the distant, administrative sense to handsome in a way that could become a practical problem if fed after midnight.
Absolutely not, she told herself.
The estate did not need romance. It needed hinges, minutes, grant money, and at least one adult prepared to read the small print without developing a migraine. Nora did not need a man with a tragic ledger and good coffee stepping into her already overcrowded life like a plot twist with shoes.
She had people depending on her.
She had keys.
She had lists.
She had learned early that wanting things for herself made the whole structure wobble.
A shout came from the hall.
"Nora! The wall's leaking again!"
Of course it was.
She pushed past Tadhg, grabbed the bucket from under the sink, and went out.
Water had begun to bead along the far wall beneath the old noticeboard. Not a flood. Not yet. Just a steady, patient seep that darkened the paint and gathered at the skirting. Above it hung Helen Grady's newest campaign leaflet, pinned beside the youth club timetable.
STRONGER HOMES. SAFER COMMUNITIES.
Nora stared at it.
Then she started laughing.
Not because it was funny. It was not. It was so far beyond funny it had circled back wearing a false moustache.
Shay looked alarmed. "Have you finally gone?"
"Possibly. Get the mop."
Tadhg came to stand beside her, folder still in one hand, blue tea towel in the other.
"That's unfortunate placement," he said.
"No," Nora said, setting the bucket under the drip. "That's the estate reviewing the campaign material."
Shay barked a laugh. Even Tadhg made a sound that might have been one.
For a moment, the three of them stood watching water fall into the bucket beneath the smiling promise of safety. Drip. Drip. Drip. Each small sound plain as evidence.
Outside, the rain eased. A blade of winter sun slid between the blocks and caught the graffiti saint's halo. Bottle caps flashed gold against the wet wall. The saint looked down with her shopping bag and her raised hand, blessing nothing, witnessing everything.
Nora thought of the Thursday meeting. The missing minutes. The old fire. The children eating cereal under fluorescent lights. Helen's warning. Tadhg's folder. Her own name in everyone's mouth when things needed doing.
Ordinary neighbours become infrastructure, someone clever might say if they were writing a report.
Nora would have put it differently.
Someone had to hold the bloody roof up.
She looked at Tadhg. "Thursday. Seven. Bring copies."
"How many?"
Nora watched the bucket receive another drop.
"Enough for everyone who was told there was nothing to see."