I looked back down at the computer screen, at the columns of numbers I was doggedly inputting. I loved them then, or rather I appreciated that I loved them, loved the safety of the office, the boiling kettle and tinny radio that Darren turned off every time the DJ played a dance song. We went in Darren’s Beamer. They’d taken her to PMH in Swindon. The Chiseldon road was closed so we went over Hackpen, across the Downs. Darren had sent word to one of the sites and we’d barely been there five minutes before Marcus jogged in.

I was invited into a little room. Darren went to get tea and I was left sitting with Marcus, surrounded by misted glass, a choice of women’s mags and AutoTrader. A doctor came, a woman with streaks of gray in her hair and a no-nonsense expression. I had the sense she didn’t like me, but maybe she just didn’t like this part of her job.

My mother had been struck by a car and died in the ambulance. The driver said she had fallen into the road.

“How did she seem this morning?”

“I didn’t see her. I went to work.”

“In the last few days then? How was her speech?”

“I didn’t speak to her.”

The doctor squared her shoulders and tried again. “You live with your mother. When did you last speak to her?”

“I don’t know.” They thought it was shock.

Marcus at my side down the long hospital corridors. During the formal identification and the signing of papers, that night in his single bed at his mum’s house, at the funeral director’s, and later at the funeral, and for all that came after over the next three years. You have to love someone who stands by you like that, even if it isn’t in the right amount—not as much as they deserve, but too much to do what’s right by them. I was going under and I held on to him with a vice-like grip and he took it for love.

But even Marcus couldn’t be there all the time, and he wasn’t there on the morning the report from the coroner arrived, the report that showed a blood alcohol level of nil, signs of malnutrition, a tumor in the brain—significant in size, affecting speech, motor function, balance—and, in addition to the injuries that killed her, not relating to her cause of death but there nonetheless, old bone fractures, multiple historic bone fractures, fingers, wrist, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, dating back to childhood.