I bet she was!!!! That’s brilliant! That’s just so fantastic! I can’t believe she’s sitting up! And talking of her own accord! Christ, they must be over the moon—thank you, THANK YOU for doing the house call and reporting back, I’ve been worried sick.

Amazing. Sometimes this job is really fricking amazing, don’t you think? Also, thank you for the dog warning, but if you feel like adding snake warnings at any point, that would also be appreciated.

And he attached a picture of Islay he had taken for her mother, when they thought it might be the very last time they saw her alive: a blue bag of skeletal bones, connected to every tube in the ICU department; a wraith; a frail whisper of an angel Death had already clapped its scaly wings around.

Comparing the two pictures side by side and reading again Cormac’s heartfelt joy and relief at the sickly girl back from the very foot of the grave, watching Pitch Perfect, eating ginger crunch biscuits, sitting up in her living room, being cheeky, Lissa understood. She stared at the picture for a long time and felt a little spark inside her.

She meant to put the file away. Then she found herself, on impulse, emailing back,

To: [email protected]

What’s wrong with a lovely boa constrictor?

To her total surprise, after a few moments she got back not an email but a photograph of a drawing, and she smiled.

Is that you?

Did you mean, oh look at you, you poor thing, being strangled by a boa constrictor?

That’s a terrible picture!

I’ll have you know that’s exactly what I look like.

You’re definitely more scary than the snake.

Thanks very much.

And shaking her head at the odd message, and hoping he hadn’t scared James’s pride and joy too much, she went to bed.

Chapter 32

The week continued. Even as they both started to get into the swing of things, Cormac peeled a layer of clothes off every day to stop being so hot, and Lissa added a layer every day to stop being so freezing.

Lissa absolutely didn’t realize people were gossiping furiously about her and thought she was standoffish, because she generally considered not making eye contact the most polite way of dealing with strangers. But she managed to cover the vast majority of her calls—diabetes management, as everywhere; some quite complex psychiatric treatment she’d called the hospital to talk her through step by step—and Joan seemed, if not exactly over the moon with her, particularly when it turned out she had absolutely no opinion on horse racing, not entirely displeased.

At 6:30 P.M. four days later, though, Lissa was back staring at the laptop.