‘… but this is on me, not being neurotypical,’ Meghan was still talking, and Sal had the unpleasant sensation of having missed an important step in the chat. Her voice was steadier, at least, Sal thought. The river ran peaceably along the right-hand window, boats like sleek fish cutting their way through the stillness, coxes yelling through little loud-hailers. Kids were kicking orange footballs back and forth. ‘This is, when you’re autistic,’ said Meghan, ‘you just literally don’t know if you’re being weird or normal, sometimes, and …’

Did Sal know about the autism? Yes, probably. At least: she’d been told about it. It must have been something Meghan had mentioned, and Sal had failed to really respond to. She wondered now how many things like that there were. How much she’d tended to trample over, to get to the things she needed.

‘I’ll see you back in the office, OK?’ She tried to make it sound kindly, not chastening. Maybe I don’t have a kind mode, she thought; maybe I’m a bitch, pure and simple.

‘Just to flag up, the woman’s name actually was Nancy,’ said Meghan. Sal tried to smile. She dropped the phone back into her lap and felt her hands as cold as stone.

‘Everything OK there in the back?’ asked the driver. ‘We’ll be there ten, fifteen.’ Mind your own business, thought Sal once more. Three stars. On your way to two. But even that was bitchy, wasn’t it. What was wrong with her? She swatted aside, angrily, another attempted-hot text from Dec. This wasn’t the time to hear what he would be thinking of doing to her while she was at the lectern. She didn’t even want him to be watching her tonight. She didn’t even want to do the speech, not at all. These thoughts landed like paintball bullets, one at a time, across the crowded vista of her brain.

Breathe. Come on. List.

3. Make this list.

4. Get back, talk to Meghan about …

No. She still had to sort out James. She still had to save James.

5. Make this …

The joke didn’t seem funny any more. It didn’t work as a joke when the stakes were this high. All the times she thought she was good at ‘troubleshooting’, she just didn’t know what real trouble was. And all the times she’d been called a control freak, they were right, but they didn’t understand why: because what she couldn’t control was terrifying. Because what we couldn’t control was death and that was too much for her brain, that was what sometimes made her so frightened that she could not make a mental connection with anything else, made her stop in the street and want to buckle over.

6. Stop James from dying.

7. Stop James from dying.

8. Stop everyone from dying.