We both started laughing. Fabien, who has a Vietnamese mother and a German father, was born and raised in Sydney and was from, of all places, Avalon, a beachside suburb on the way to the hospital where I now work. That’d be right, I thought, admiring his lean torso. I’d come all the way to the Swiss Alps only to meet a ski bum from Avalon.

Fabien did end up becoming my Toblerone Mountain boyfriend. It was the most successful relationship I’ve ever had. He took me skiing all over the mountain, and even when we went off-piste, and I would start freaking out thinking that my father’s warnings would come true and I would ski into a tree and die, he would just laugh at my worried expression, slap me on the arse and say, ‘Come on, sexy bum! Let’s see where we end up.’ Every day with Fabien was like a fresh adventure, which came with a lot of joy. I didn’t even know I’d lost the ability to feel that kind of joy until I finally let go and went with the flow.

Fabien’s favourite thing to do after a hard day’s skiing was to lie in bed and watch a clip from the movie Meet Joe Black on YouTube. Before Joe becomes Death, he meets the love of his life, a doctor, in a coffee shop next to the hospital. Joe says to the doctor that meeting her was like ‘lightning striking’.

‘That’s like us, sexy bum. You’re going to be a doctor, just like the girl in the movie,’ he would say, grinning at me. ‘This is when lightning strikes.’

I always had a good laugh whenever he told people how we found each other. Somehow, a drunken one-night stand at the seediest pub in Zermatt was translated into: ‘We met at a coffee shop.’

‘Kitty!’ Max startles me out of my daydreams, and I recalibrate to see that I’m not perched on a snow-covered peak with a gorgeous ski bum but instead standing at the entrance to an old corridor with a stethoscope around my neck, and the only man in sight is my gay best mate.

‘Snap out of it!’ he orders. ‘We’re on a mission.’

We make our way down the dingy corridor towards the admin office where our timesheets are kept. This building used to be the old hospital, which is now decaying; the hospital’s management haven’t decided what to do with it, so they’ve made it a temporary home to administration.

‘Fuck, it’s creepy down here,’ Max says, shuddering as we walk past an empty ward filled with old patient beds and random medical equipment from the 1950s. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just knock it down.’