‘Don’t answer the door or the phone. I’ll be fifteen minutes.’

Nothing can go wrong in fifteen minutes, can it?

My edginess returns the minute I step outside of the front door. I go to a different supermarket to the Tesco my car was keyed in. Hurry into the safety of bright lights and garish Halloween pumpkins grinning their toothless grin at me, knowing that soon they’ll be replaced by tubs of Quality Street. Their eyes seem to follow me as I stalk away from their orange faces but although I round the corner I still have the sense I’m being watched. I throw a glance over my shoulder and realize that I am being watched.

‘Agnes?’ I step towards her. She looks smaller. Frailer. A sheet of A4 paper clutched to her chest.

‘Lucy, I…’ She looks embarrassed. ‘I’ve just picked up an application form.’

‘You’re applying for a job? Here?’

‘I… I’ve been…’ Her eyes dart left to right before settling on mine. ‘Struck off.’

I don’t know what to say. She’s been a nurse for twenty-five years. Conscientious, she rarely took a day off until she fell pregnant in her forties after years of trying. Tragically, her little boy was stillborn and although she took months off work to grieve she was never the same again.

I envelop her in a hug, remembering with clarity those first seconds when you meet your baby who is fragile and precious and utterly dependent on you. The fierce desire to protect them. The ache in your chest as you realize, even then, that the world is sometimes too big. Too cruel for the innocent. The new and the helpless. How you wonder what they’ll grow up to be. Who they’ll grow up to be. And it happens in the beat of a heart, the blink of an eye. I think of my favourite mug, those tiny imprinted hands and feet. Sometimes when I see it I am back in that day, singing ‘Hush little baby’ while I counted tiny fingers and toes, eyes, ears, nose. I wonder whether Agnes has any visual reminder of her baby who will never grow and I wonder if it would bring her any comfort, even if she had.

‘Sorry’ is such a small word. Insignificant and often misused but it is all I have to offer as I step back and meet her red-rimmed eyes.

‘I made a mistake, many mistakes actually, but the last mix-up with medication could have been fatal. I’m lucky nobody died. I… I just can’t focus on anything. This…’ She flaps her application form. ‘Even this is too much. Too soon. But… we’re so behind on the mortgage, the building society are threatening eviction.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’