Rosie slapped the parking ticket onto her windscreen and collected her rucksack from the back seat. At Jem’s insistence, she had gone home for the night, but although she felt better for having had a bath, a meal cooked from scratch, and eight hours in her own bed, she had spent half the evening texting Jem and the other half of it wondering how Jem was getting on. She stumbled on the kerb that marked the car park boundary, flummoxed by a relationship that had sneaked under her defences and blossomed into something that was making her trip over her own feet. It had never been like this with Steph, who clicked her fingers to see how fast Rosie would come running and left her with a bitter taste in her mouth. In all honesty, it had never been like this with anyone.

Re-shouldering the bag, Rosie took an exaggerated step onto the pavement and walked toward the hospital entrance. With outpatient appointments and elective surgeries on hold for the weekend, the main corridors were quiet, allowing her to steer well clear of the night shift workers dead set on getting home and willing to take out anyone who got in their way.

She found Jem sitting on the edge of the bed. Her hair was still wet from the shower, and she’d cobbled together an outfit comprising a pair of overlong pyjama bottoms and a pink scrubs top. Someone had already stripped her bedding, and a wad of gauze had replaced the cannula on her wrist. She smiled at Rosie, but she seemed tired and distracted, her reddened eyes meeting but unable to hold Rosie’s gaze.

“Everything okay?” Rosie asked.

“Fine,” Jem said. “Harriet’s just gone to get my prescription. She shouldn’t be long.”

“No worries. We’re not in a rush, are we?” Rosie dropped the rucksack on the bed and began to unpack it. Not wanting to bother her dad, Jem had given Rosie a house key and sent her on a mission to retrieve clean clothes. “I think I found everything. And I binned a piece of cheddar that had gone a very strange shade of green.”

Jem collected the clothes in one hand and hitched up her trousers with the other. “Thanks. I’ll go and get changed. They’ll have someone else in this room before the bed goes cold.”

Rosie nodded, although she wasn’t sure that was true. Harriet had wanted to keep Jem in the hospital over the weekend, and she’d only relented when Jem had agreed to let Rosie stay with her.

Rosie waited until the bathroom door clicked shut, and then sagged into the closest chair. She had fairly bounced out of bed that morning, eager to get Jem home and spoil her rotten. She had assumed Jem would share her enthusiasm, never considering Jem might be trying to come to terms with everything that had happened over the last few days.