“That’s not how health care works!” said Lissa, glancing at her watch. She was due in Peckham in twenty minutes. Driving in London was an absolute fool’s errand, but she didn’t have any choice; she couldn’t carry drugs on the tube.

Lissa was an NPL: a nurse practitioner liaison. She followed up on hospital discharges who had trouble attending outpatient departments in the hopes that they didn’t become readmissions. Or, she said in her more cynical moments, did half of what community nurses did when they still had the budget and half of what GPs used to do when they could still be asked to leave the office. Originally trained as an accident and emergency nurse, she loved her current job, which involved rather fewer drunks spewing up on her than A&E did—particularly the bits of it when she got chocolate.

Her hopes, though, in Mrs. Marks’s case, were not at their highest.

“You’re not exactly a sylph yourself,” said Mrs. Marks.

“You sound like my mum,” complained Lissa, who had her mother’s curvy frame, to her mother’s occasionally vocal and occasionally silent disappointment.

“You take it then,” said Mrs. Marks grudgingly.

Lissa made a face. “I hate dark chocolate,” she said. But she took it anyway. “Please,” she said again. “Please. I’d hate them to admit you again. Next time you might lose your foot. Seriously.”

In response, Mrs. Marks sighed and indicated the entire old brown three-piece suite. Lissa put her hands down the backs of the cushions and found chocolate bars behind every one.

“I’m donating them to the food bank,” she said. “Do you want me to buy them off you?”

Mrs. Marks waved her away. “No,” she said. “But if I do end up back in that place again, I’ll blame you.”

“Deal,” said Lissa.

IT WAS CHILLY for mid-March as she left the tall building, but the sun was shining behind a faint cloud of smog in the air, and Lissa could sense spring coming, somewhere on the horizon. She prayed, as she always did, that nobody had seen the medical personnel sticker on her car and attempted to break into it in case she’d left any drugs in there, and contemplated the new Korean barbecue place she was due to meet some friends in later. It looked good on Instagram, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing and sometimes quite the opposite if it was just full of people photographing cold food.