Jem spat mouthwash down the plughole and slumped on the toilet seat. “No.” She hid her face in a towel. “I’m a monster.”

Rosie came in regardless and sat on the clinical waste bin. She tugged the towel away. “Don’t be a daft ha’p’orth. You’ve been ill, Jem.” She tapped the IV line in Jem’s wrist. “You’re still ill. You’re allowed to look like death warmed over.” She scrutinised herself in the mirror and wiped sleep from her eye. “I, on the other hand, have no such excuse.”

“I think you look gorgeous,” Jem said. “But then I’m biased, because I fancy you.” She laughed at Rosie’s stunned reaction and double-checked her O2 cylinder, wondering if she was hypoxic. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

Rosie fake-swooned, almost upending the bin. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and in this”—she gestured expansively at the pile of incontinence pads, the boxes of examination gloves, and the shower cubicle with its emergency alarm—“most idyllic of settings.” Within seconds, she’d fashioned a couple of pieces of loo roll into a flower. “Jemima Pardon, I fancy the pants off you as well.”

Jem took the flower, though she stopped short of sniffing it. “Is it sleep deprivation?” she asked, linking Rosie’s arm and walking with her to the door. “Making us act like twerps?”

“It’s sheer joie de vivre, Jem!” Rosie said, and then paused to reconsider. “And possibly sleep deprivation and PTSD as well.”

She sat Jem in the closest chair and propped the door open in readiness. A social worker in his mid-forties came in first, taking an unobtrusive seat in the corner as Ava steered Chloe’s wheelchair straight into the bathroom wall.

“These things are fucking shite,” she said over Chloe’s yelp, and caused further ructions by attempting a three-sixty. Outrage and effort made her face as pink as her hair, giving her the look of a pissed-off imp, albeit one wearing slipper socks and Minion pyjamas.

“Sit your arse down,” Rosie told her, no stranger to dealing with moody teens. “There are cans of pop and all kinds of crap on Jem’s bed. Help yourself.”

Placated by the vending machine stash, Ava sat cross-legged on the chair next to Jem. She opened a packet of crisps but then scrunched the bag closed again and placed a careful finger on the dressing securing Jem’s cannula.

“Don’t worry,” she said in a confidential undertone. “It doesn’t hurt when they take ’em out.” She displayed the bandage on her own wrist and offered Jem a Quaver.

“Thank you,” Jem said, crunching a crisp so she wouldn’t start sniffling.

“We brought these for you, Jem!” Finally facing forward, Chloe held up a bag of Haribo. “We got two, but Fat Face ate one for breakfast.”