Of course. She is aching for a cigarette. I’ll be downstairs.

In the pressurised chamber between the ICU and the nurses’ entry, she sheds the gown and mask, the layers of cotton that protect his extraordinary vulnerability from everything that is ordinary about her. She pulls off the mittens, avoiding looking down at her hands, cracked from continual scrubbing that cannot keep them clean enough. On the other side of the glass, two nurses yank the curtain across, ready to begin the task of unwrapping Cooper’s medicated dressings.

The glass is cold against her forehead. What to want? What to hope for? Come back, Coop? Patients with burns as bad as his are put into a coma, to spare them for a while, but Cooper’s hasn’t been medically induced. She wants him to wake from it, of course she does, and they say it’s critical it happens soon. But how could you want him conscious while all of this is happening? The only blessing here is that he can’t feel the pain.

Her forehead leaves a slick on the glass as she pulls away abruptly.

She’s been here long enough to know. When Cooper is conscious, the screaming will begin.

~

She walks a few paces up the rise, away from the ambulance bay, and tries to flick her lighter but a nannying wind gusts at the flame, put it out, put it out, you don’t want that. Her fingers shake. I do. Just one and then she will let the wind ransack her hair to the roots, scour the nicotine smell from her clothes before she returns to the ICU.

First one since Sunday, she says aloud, as if the wind cares. The flame lengthens lovingly, turns gassy green.

She draws on the cigarette, pulling smoke into her lungs, withholding until the last minute. Eddies drift about her face, hazing the moon. Smoke. For god’s sake, look at her, choosing to let smoke in to her lungs. Disgusting. But still she does it, cannot stop herself; not even the thought of Cooper, not even that.

If the investigators have got to the bottom of what happened, they are not telling her. She’ll phone again during the day. Yes, I’ll wait. No, I’ll wait. Can you ask someone to call me? No-one ever does.

Ben says they can’t complete the investigation until they speak to Coop. (Until, he says. Not unless.) But she knows there would have been a debriefing weeks ago. She knows there’s something he’s not saying. And now he’s avoiding her.