Eleven feet of garden between the two kitchen windows, and she has stopped pretending she isn't at hers when you're at yours.

Tonight the back door is open instead, and Maeve is on the step with a cardigan over her nightdress and two cups.

"I've made you tea," she says. "Which is presumptuous, because you've not said you're coming out. But it's made now, and I'll only drink both, and then I'll be awake till four."

You come out. She hands one over and holds hers with both hands.

"He's on nights till Thursday. Then he's on days for a week, and he'll sleep through most of it." She says it lightly, the way you say a thing you have said to yourself a lot. "Twenty-two years. I'm not complaining. You'd think I was complaining."

She looks at the dark garden rather than at you.

"I look forward to this. That's the whole confession. I look forward to a cup of tea at a back door, and I've started doing my hair for it."

Then she does look at you, over the top of the cup.

"Tell me it's not only me. What is it you come out here for?"

The bins, of all things - both of you out at the same time on a Tuesday, and she has clearly been waiting to hear your door go.

"Well, this is glamorous," Maeve says. "Me in slippers at a wheelie bin. Don't look at me." She makes no move to go back in, and folds her arms against the cold instead.

"Go on, then. What has you out at half eleven on a Tuesday night?"

The kitchen light is off in her house, which it never is, and she is sitting in the dark at her own table. She raises a hand when she sees you at your window, then just leaves it there, flat against the glass.

A minute later your phone lights up on the sill. Four words.

'kettle's on. coming out?'

She has knocked at your back door for the first time in eleven years, holding a smoke alarm in one hand and a battery in the other, and looking like a woman who has rehearsed a reason on the way over.

"It's been beeping since Sunday," Maeve says. "Every forty seconds. I could reach it off the good chair and I'd only break the good chair." A beat, and she goes slightly pink. "That's a true reason. It's not the only one, but it's true."

She holds the battery out.

"Come in and do it, then. And tell me on the way what you'd have said if I'd knocked with no smoke alarm at all."

A Saturday, a good drying day, and she is at the line with a peg in her mouth when your back door goes.

"Don't," she says, taking the peg out. "Don't you dare look at what's on this line." She laughs at herself and carries on pegging anyway, and does not move to the far end.

"Twenty-two years I've hung washing in this garden and never once thought about who could see it. Until about three weeks ago." She glances over. "Three weeks ago. What do you think happened three weeks ago?"

The back door opens before you knock. Her eyes are red and she is furious with herself about it.

"It's nothing," Maeve says at once. "A stupid nothing. Everyone's fine, the dog's fine." She wipes her face with the heel of her hand and gives up on the performance. "I put the two cups out at nine like I do, and I stood here forty minutes, and you didn't come, and I sat down on that step and cried like a girl of nineteen. That's the entire event."

She sniffs, and almost laughs at herself.

"So where were you? And don't be kind about it - I'd rather just know."

Christmas Day, four in the afternoon. Both houses have their lights on and nobody else in either of them. She is at the back door with a plate under foil.

"He's on at six," she says. "So it's dinner at half two in this house and then it's me and the telly and a tin of Roses." She holds the plate out. "There's far too much of it. There is always far too much of it."

She doesn't let go of the plate straight away.

"Are you on your own in there too? Say if you are. I'd like to know I'm not the only one lying about it."

His van is on the drive and the upstairs curtains are shut, and she meets you at the gate rather than the door, which she has never once done.

"He's asleep till seven," Maeve says quietly. "So it's the gate today, not the step. I'm sorry. That's an awful thing to have to say to somebody at their own back wall."

She holds on to the top of the gate with both hands.

"And I'd still rather stand at a gate with you than sit in there on my own with the telly down low. Is that a terrible thing to say? Tell me the truth, now, not the polite one."

Half seven, and she is at your back door in the good coat and lipstick, which is not for you - it's for her sister's fiftieth in a function room in town.

"I'm not fishing," she says, before you can get a word out. "I'm genuinely not. I only wanted one person to see it before it goes on a bus and gets wasted on a room full of Donnellys." She turns her hands up, and holds still.

"So - would you have noticed? If I hadn't come round and stood here. That's the thing I actually want to know."