Kim-Ange was up and waiting for Lissa, after she’d pulled off her clothes, taken out her contacts, put on her thick, black-rimmed glasses, and gotten into her tracksuit bottoms. Lissa couldn’t deny being pleased to see her. Living in the nurses’ home, while hardly the lap of luxury—it was a grimy old sixties block near the hospital—was still much cheaper than trying to rent privately in London, or even getting the train in every day from where her parents lived in Hertfordshire, and it had the added benefit, even if it was noisy and the showers were peeling and the kitchens got very grim, of there always being someone to talk to if you’d had a bad day. A really, really, really bad day.

Kim-Ange had her hands up.

“I know,” she said, her face a mask of sadness. She was holding up a bottle of some mysterious plum-colored substance. That was the good thing and bad thing about nurses’ homes: word got around.

“It was Ezra’s . . .”

“I know that too.” Kim-Ange swallowed. “He’s been seeing Yazzie.”

“Ah,” said Lissa, even in her exhaustion and misery registering that Ezra had been spreading himself around the exact same place she actually lived.

She felt utterly hollow inside.

Kim-Ange waved the bottle. “Come try this.”

Ever since she’d found an old cocktail cabinet in a dumpster that she’d hoicked home single-handedly, Kim-Ange had been on a mission to invent something new, which meant experimenting with a lot of things that were disgusting. Lissa didn’t care that evening, though.

“So, how bad are you feeling about it?” said Kim-Ange, eyeing her shrewdly. “Tracksuit bottoms bad? I mean, you know other people can see you.”

Kim-Ange had extremely high sartorial standards. She herself was wearing a long pink-and-red nightdress, matching robe, marabou slippers, and a full face of makeup.

“Yes,” said Lissa. “It was a hit-and-run. Possibly deliberate. Fifteen years old.”

“It barely made the news,” said Kim-Ange.

Lissa sighed. “Give me the purple elixir of joy and/or misery then,” she said, holding out her mug, and Kim-Ange filled it up. “Oh my God, that’s revolting,” Lissa choked out, collapsing onto her bed. Then she took another sip. “Still bad.”

There was a pause and she tried again.

“Okay, now it’s not so bad.”

“There we are,” said Kim-Ange, pleased. “A three-sipper. One of my best yet!” She started absent-mindedly folding Lissa’s clothes.

“They’re going to call me in too,” said Lissa after a while. “Disciplinary, I think. I didn’t get out of the way of the doctors. I messed up with the transplant protocol.”

“You stopped a transplant?!”

“No, I made one happen.”

“Oh, that is terrible.” Kim-Ange snorted. “And don’t tell me, did you have a baby doctor who didn’t know his arse from his elbow and couldn’t tap a vein in either of them?”

“No, I crossed the line,” said Lissa.