A Family Matter

by Claire Lynch

“There’s a woman—two women, I mean—here in the village,” Dawn says. “They have a baby. I see them walking together, pushing the pram. Nobody says a word. People smile at them.” It had been the work of a lifetime, learning to live with what she had lost. Watching what other people had gained. The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.

While the characters in this novel are all works of fiction, the words spoken by the lawyers and judge in the court scenes and repeated in the legal documents are not. Their words are included here as a reminder of how far away the recent past is. And how close.