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helped Shane get comfortable and gave him a bowl in case he needed to vomit again. When he spoke his voice was croaky with a dry rasp.
    A little while later, his mother came in with a police officer. The police officer asked him if he remembered what happened…
     
     
    July 2006
     
    Shane arrived at ‘La Rana Azul’ twenty-five minutes late and drenched in sweat. He spotted his dinner guest immediately across the virtually empty restaurant. He smiled briefly at the woman and sat down. A waiter quickly approached him and asked if he would like something to drink. With a flourish of his hand, Shane pointed to a bottle on the wine list and concentrated on his guest. A woman three years his senior, she had dark, greying hair that was scraped back into a ponytail. She barely nodded a greeting. Shane thought she looked tired and sad, like she hadn’t slept for a few weeks.
    “How are you Catherine?” Shane asked trying his best to appear to be warm. “I’m sorry I’m late; there was a hold up in the bank.”
    Catherine wrung her hands and slowly looked up at him. She had known him longer than any other man in her life but he was a total stranger to her. Who was this man wearing a business suit worth more than two months of her wages?
    “Hello Shane, it’s nice to see you,” She did her best to smile, to show her pristine white teeth and more importantly, to not give away the anguish beneath. Taking in his expensive suit, she hugged her arms to herself for fear that he may look patronisingly at her ‘best clothes’. She did not want to be in a restaurant this expensive, let alone one that served Spanish food.
    He knew she was lying about it being nice to see him. There was no love lost between him and his sister. She represented everything he hated about country folk; their ignorance and bitterness towards the outside world, their intolerance and inability to accept new and different things and their refusal to travel outside their own county, but he knew that where Catherine was concerned there was more to it than that. The locals disliked all the things he stood for as the local country lad who made a name for himself and deserted his village for better things, but Catherine’s resentment ran deeper than that. She was jealous of his achievements and power, which gave him a way to help others. She looked down on his exciting exploits because he was leading the kind of life she had been so unfortunate to lose.
    “How have John and the girls taken it?” he asked as the waiter poured some wine from the bottle in to his glass.
    “Water only for me please,” Catherine addressed the waiter as she placed a delicate hand over her glass. She turned to Shane, “Who’s ‘John’ Shane?”
    Shane put a hand over his face and sighed heavily. There is no John, John’s gone. Johnny’s dead.
    “I’m sorry Catherine, I meant Jack. How’s Jack?”
    She snorted with an ounce of triumph.
    “He’s fine, you know the summer’s only just started picking up so the crops aren’t as good as we hoped for but we are getting by okay…” She paused and ran a fingertip round the rim of her glass, lost in thought for a few seconds, “I miss her–”
    Her voice cracked. She looked away resolutely and wrapped her arms back around herself.
    “How did it happen?”
    “The doctor said it was a stroke, she was sleeping at the time.”
    “She died peacefully then.”
    “I suppose.”
    “I can’t believe it.”
    “Well, she was getting on.”
    “Yeah, I guess” Shane sipped his wine and quickly did the maths in his head, “She was sixty eight right?”
    “Seventy one,” Catherine disagreed.
    “How are the funeral arrangements?”
    “Hard. We spent all of yesterday afternoon at the bank.”
    “I never thought of that,” For a moment Shane thought she was going to snap at him for not being there.
    “Is there anything I can do…” he hesitated, feeling awkward, “To help out, I mean?”
    “I don’t know – there are