The message invited me to bring a fellow employee to the meeting. An ‘investigatory meeting’, the message said. It would have been more accurate to call it a preliminary step in a disciplinary process that could end in my dismissal. I leant against the kitchen worktop. Now that it had come, I was surprised by how unafraid I felt.

‘Let them try,’ I said aloud.

I would go alone to the meeting. I would make an excuse about not being able to get anyone at the last minute or, even better, wanting to keep things confidential. But with me there alone, Dermot would be forced to make an effort to be polite and maintain a veneer of fairness. Otherwise I might be forced to walk out in protest. Or start crying, and then walk.

There was another email. From Alice Chambers. I hoped that it might be a response to the olive branch I had sent. But there was no personal message. Alice was forwarding a letter from the festival chairperson, asking me to a meeting to explain my behaviour during the recent Film Festival and, in particular, my interest in the festival’s ‘honoured guest’. It was never a good idea to fight a war on two fronts. I composed a two-line letter of resignation from the board and emailed it to the chairperson, cc’ing Alice. I sent a second email to Alice saying I hoped that, in time, we would be able to meet to talk about what had happened. I wouldn’t push it. I would wait for her to contact me.

Next, I sent a text to Tina: ‘any news on med recs?’ and found the number of Setanta Labs. I was about to phone them when Tina’s reply came through.

‘Got FOI acknowledgement, asked them to expedite. But!!! Lab say DNA tests ready! They’re doing report. Heart in mouth here waiting for email. Will forward when thru. ETA 4pm.’

All I had to do was wait an hour. One twenty-fourth of a day. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds.

I ran downstairs to the bathroom and tried to distract myself by brushing my teeth. When that failed, I took the Cif from under the sink and started to scrub the bath. Only fifteen minutes gone. I got an old toothbrush from under the sink, doused it with Flash liquid and started to work my way along the grout around the tiles in the shower. By the time I had finished rinsing off the tiles, shower head in hand, I had almost convinced myself that I could live with a negative result. That a negative result was, in any case, inevitable. And that I had been foolish to think otherwise.