Usually she finds her work soothing, a temporary respite from anxiety, but today she’s jittery. Too much instant coffee. The sense of being kept out of the loop. People who won’t phone her back. And suddenly she’s cranky. Cranky with Ewan, bloody Ewan, who is too apathetic, too lazy, to help himself. Why is she bothering, when he isn’t? Her fingers dig into pink, healthy skin and she is chastened by a hurt whimper.

Sorry, Ewan, sorry. Roll over for me now, would you? Easy, that’s right, good.

She gives the scalene muscles her full attention, drawing deeply along the sinewy ridges either side of the neck. It can be uncomfortable, this pressure, prompting resistance, and she checks his tolerance. All right there, Ewan?

The nurses are always asking Coop questions like this. Comfortable there, Cooper? Everything OK, Cooper? Pointless.

A barely perceptible grunt from Ewan. Translation: Yeah, fine, I can take it.

Can you take it, Coop? Can you?

She is about to finish in the usual way, with a rolling stretch of the posterior neck muscles, when she notices Ewan’s closed eyes. A glimmer of tears at the outer edge, welling in the deep fold; a meniscus before the pool breaches.

Ewan? she says softly.

His silence tells her that the cause of the tears is not physical. And that he probably has no comprehension of where they have come from. He’s embarrassed.

The towel around the wheat pack is still warm, and she uses it to blot his face, his neck, the tender muscles of his shoulders and back. Soothing, and sparing.

It can happen—she’s seen it before—that working on the source of pain awakens something emotional, something embryonic and bewildering. The unruly return of a memory held down with the weight of a life; a beginning, or the beginning of an ending. Or perhaps it’s the distillation of something unasked for, leaking into consciousness from the amnion of the world. Shapeless and formless, blindingly intense, it gives no clue, for now, of the course it would have you follow; all you know is that something has been released, and you are full of it, you are different.

He is subdued as he buttons up the cotton shirt, hands over his debit card.

Glass of water?

He shakes his head.

From the door, he manages the usual farewell in one elongated breath: Right-then-Avvie-call-yer-Monday-when-I-know-me-roster-hope-yer-bloke’s-on-the-mend-eh.

~

A butterfly lands on the sill of the window by the washbasin. She recognises it’s a Monarch, the type Laura breeds in her shed and then releases into the world.

Are you sure that’s what she’s doing out there? she’d asked Coop once. A wry smile, but she’d been incredulous that his beautiful, smart mother, who lectured in Lit Studies and read politics and poetry and serious novels, spent her nights messing around with weeds and humidifiers.