Your reviews mean so much; the crop on the last few chapters especially warmed my heart. Thank you! Thanks also once more for your patience. And yes, there'll be a P&A emphasis on this chapter and the next, but others will still be getting their moments in the limelight. Lots left to sort out and lord knows how long that'll take; maybe I should have called this one "Series Seven - Ballykea Apocrypha."

Peter capped the now-empty flask, the vodka burning its way through him. It had been a long time since he took so much drink on so empty a stomach. He felt the numbness seeping in, then the glow, then the looseness, and finally the nostalgia.

"You want to know something funny?"

Assumpta turned, looking horrified.

"Every year at St. Luke's, the choir sings a Requiem for All Souls' Day. We have the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed. The secretary collects names, hundreds of names every year for the necrology. We read them. I give names. My mother. My father. My grandparents. One unlucky mate from the seminary." He fixed her eyes as best the darkness allowed. "I've never given yours."

"Fair play to you. I wasn't entitled to it."

"No. Because I knew you wouldn't want it. I never did forgive myself for those last rites. They pressed me so much to do it. Niamh, Father Mac, everyone...d'you remember?"

She nodded, pushing down a guilty sob. "I was all full of downers. Felt like I was made of lead. Couldn't feel anything, inside or out, didn't think I could move. Never forgave myself either, quite." She swallowed. "But I thought...for you..."

"You thought losing you wouldn't be so bad?" He was shaking. Laughing. Crying. "This flask of yours...there was a time I'd have drained it twice every waking hour. I was no priest, I was a one-man Def Leppard." He was at it again, making rotten jokes to whitewash the ache.

She didn't laugh, but she didn't flinch. "You got better."

Peter tried to come up with a response to this, but another flash interrupted him. This time it wasn't the storm; it was a pair of approaching headlamps in the sideview mirror. A lorry, maybe - anyway, something much larger than the car before - passed by them.

For a moment Peter was ready to call it a wash.

Then it pulled over. The ignition shut off, and the driver hopped out. Peter gingerly tested his door mechanism with a fingertip, then opened it. Rain and cold blew in. "Stay here a minute," he told Assumpta.

Out of their foggy Faraday cage, he could make out the shape of a wrecker, and the form of a man approaching him. "Someone said they drove by, saw a disabled car," the man called out.

Peter nodded into the continuing drizzle. "We were hit by lightning!"

"Well, c'mon. Let's get you hitched up."

Donal seemed on a quest to consume his last-orders packet of crisps as noisily and inefficiently as possible, with a strange orchestral duet between his rustling of the bag and his loud chewing.

Vincent reminded himself to be patient.

"These...dead people you've seen about," Vincent began, gently, "are they people you knew when they were alive?"

Donal nodded, punctuating it with a crunch.

Paul looked knowingly down the bar at them. Vincent nodded back. "Donal, would you tell me who they were?"

Donal shuddered and shook his head, killing another crisp. "I can't do that!" a few crumbs tumbled out. "They'll hear it. Dead people always know when you're talking about them."

Vincent bent his forehead into his palm. Paul refilled his Coke.

It had been an awkward ride in the breakdown lorry, with just enough room for three people and a dog stretched over their laps. Assumpta's stomach was a work of macrame as she pondered the fate of her little rented coupe. She had no idea whether it was salvageable at any cost. She doubted if such damage was covered by the excess insurance she'd let the agent talk her into. She hadn't thought to skim the papers for "acts of God."

If any, she thought, as the men jumped out their doors and the setter got up, freeing her from the cramped middle seat. She retrieved her earlier purchases from the car once they'd plunked it down in front of the former O'Kelly's Garage. Leaving her keys in the drop box, she made a mental note to ring one Edso Dowling first thing in the morning.

She tried to pay the tow man, but he waved her off. "Your husband already took care of it," he smiled, climbing back into his cab.

He drove away, revealing Peter on the other side.

She persuaded Fionn to heel as she made her way over. Silent again, they walked in the direction of the pub - not quite together, not quite apart.

Peter watched Assumpta bound up the pub stairs with Fionn in tow, then turned back to face the reception desk. He doubted if he would get anything to eat tonight, but he could be sure the pub would be locking up any minute. He had to check in before he did anything else. At least if he had to be sick, he could do it without an audience.

Being in the pub again was a surreal feeling. Here was where he stood the night Jenny Clark commandeered his house - the night he spent at the pub instead. There was the spot he'd stood gulping Heineken with Assumpta as Niamh and Ambrose danced in celebration of a pregnancy. There was the bar where he'd told her he loved her, and the path the stretcher had taken into the street not an hour later.

A dark-haired woman, perhaps about Brendan's age, appeared at the desk. "Glad you made it, Father."

Peter gave a weary smile and reached for his wallet. His stomach rumbled again, and an acidic taste rose up from it, a note of vodka on top.

Turning to look in on the bar, he almost swore he saw Donal Docherty, gawping and removing his knit cap. The man next to him - looked like a priest, actually - turned over his shoulder to see.

Peter chalked it up to his own intoxication and went up to his room.