Dom O'Leary, a Belfast barman from the Falls Road, is hiding a dirty secret. Only he knows that his wife's brain has started to malfunction. As Dom attends his brother Gerald's funeral, with his wife Loretta, relatives cautiously approach his two married daughters, inquiring after their mother's health. It isn't long before the girls realize, that these mourners aren't discussing poor Gerald, but poor Loretta. Hannah and Catherine feel a rush of guilt, for not noticing something wrong with their own mother. So after discussing the issue with their older brother Paul, from Dom's first marriage, the sisters come to the decision to tackle their father. Tackling Dom O'Leary on any subject was no light- hearted matter, but tackling him on the subject of illness or death, was somewhere no-one would've volunteered to go. He'd spent his life running as far from it as he could, only to find it was running in the same direction, not to destroy him, but to create the man he longed to be.Dom was born in the late nineteen twenties, residing all his life on the Springfield Road and the Falls Road in poverty stricken Belfast.He was to expect nothing from life other than to make it to the end; but Dom O'Leary had different ideas. This life was given to him to fill, and that's exactly what he intended to do. From a young impressionable age, Dom had watched the American black and white heroes and heroines adorn those cinema screens, fueling him full of passion to someday be admired and remembered like them. Dom intended to cram every day, trying to make himself a better man. He would work until there would be no more hours in the day, self educate himself, and dress as though he were about to perform a new lead role. Daily he walked with those tightly clenched fists, dare the fear of not making it seep through, and daily he prayed to Our Lady of Lourdes and St Therese of Lisieux, to keep that demon drink at bay, dare it destroy him. Both the girls and their father on this initial visit find it easy to make excuses for Loretta's health. She was a woman who was wrongly perceived as a bit on the light headed side, having fallen down more high street store stairs, than the girls called to remember; and she'd never touched a drop of alcoholic drink in her life, unlike their father. It was a world they allowed themselves to live in for a further few weeks.When Dom telephones his daughters to take their mother to the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Falls Road, (a journey he can't undertake just yet) with what appears to be simply a swollen ankle, the truth is soon to be led bare.As Dom sits alone, reflecting on life, on that unfulfilled dream, he asks himself, what had it all been about; All his dressing up, the wanting to be different, his dream that someday he'd make himself a better man. He wanders had the reading material of Joyce, the Brontes and Victor Hugo been in vain? Should he have stuck to reading the Sun Newspaper like some of the other schmucks that lived round him? As he sits a little longer, he looks towards the clock, to see what's keeping his daughters with news on his Loretta, and as he does, he spots the little prayer to St Therese. There she was again, like always, reminding him she was still with him, just as she was when he buried his first wife and child, and when the demon drink had threatened to finish him. She was there that day, letting him know, that life wasn't over yet, that there was still time.When Dom gets the the diagnosis of Alzheimer's for his wife, he's set to take on this invisible, repulsive destruction. Loretta had been there for him over the years and now he would be there for her.Mentally Dom is ready to take on this challenge, albeit his way, but physically he knows he will have to pace himself after suffering a heart attack a few years prior. Throughout this book, it is pure honest love for life and each other, that gives this man and woman their desired end.