‘Can you believe we hit a deer?’ Nora asked Anouk, because Anouk loved stories, and here was a whopper. ‘Can you believe we have his antler in the back of our truck?’

‘Is this supposed to be helping?’ Red’s voice from the end of the bed, a thousand miles away.

Dr Atulewa busied himself with tubes and a wide-gauge needle, filled a small plastic dish with saline, and flushed out a tube and catheter. He screwed bits together, removed caps, pulled fluid with a fat syringe from a glass bottle. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘What deer?’

‘Anouk, tell him,’ said Nora. She put her hand on Anouk’s cheek, to say: I’m here.

‘I’m going to hold your arm now, Anouk,’ said Dr Atulewa, gently gripping her stick-thin arm, pulling the blue vein taut with his thumb. ‘I’m going to insert the needle. Small scratch.’ He slid the needle into her arm, not far from the wrist, guiding it with the same thumb he used to hold the vein. ‘Now. Tell me about the deer.’

Anouk, breath held, eyes shut tight against the pain, refused to give up the story.

Dr Atulewa removed the tourniquet and pulled the needle out of her arm, leaving the catheter inside and a plastic port dangling. He screwed more tubes together, flushed and primed, fastened the port and tubing to her arm with a transparent, skin-like tape. He removed his gloves and tossed them with a hook shot into the garbage. ‘I’m dying of suspense,’ he said. ‘Tell me the story of the deer.’

‘It’s not pretty,’ Red said.

‘We hit it,’ said Anouk, her eyes moving between Nora and Red, and in them some kind of fear or recognition. Clearly unsure how to present this story, which version would please or harm one of her parents or both.

‘How awful.’

‘My mom had to rip its antler off.’

‘You don’t hear that every day.’

‘That’s enough now,’ said Red. He looked at Nora with eyes empty and sad.

At the very least? Nora took comfort in the night hospital. She left Red sleeping with his jacket over his shoulders, on the couch in the family room, and walked the darkened corridors to the elevator. Rode it to the ground floor where there was a cafe and stationery store, a pharmacy, a coffee and sandwich counter. There was also a flower shop that sold long-lasting carnations and metallic helium balloons, which, in the middle of the night, were pressed like faces against the shopfront glass. The hospital at night. A sleeping village, a film set. Everything closed and she was drawn to the hum of a vending machine, brightly lit in the semi-darkness. She slotted in a few coins and waited for the paper cup to drop. Night coffee. Skeleton-crew coffee. Anouk safe, for now.

These hours between shifts, with their red EXIT glow, these hours were exclusive in the hospital. A carnival after closing time. Carrying her tepid, third-rate coffee, she passed through the lobby, which was an atrium, lofty and echoey and dissected by elongated, geometric shadows. At the back end of the atrium she strode, stretching her legs, up a wheelchair ramp and turned a corner to another wing, walked down a corridor that was very dark, and came up against a locked door.