This feels like a trick, like the time Magda invited us girls to drink cola and we woke in the dark room in the boat. The knock on my head has not totally knocked all memories, although they blur and wash indistinctly. My mind is restless, filled with a strong, angry word and with an image of Sammy and me shouting it, over and over, and this memory plays again and again so it’s more real than this moment I’m meant to be living, and no amount of pinching will scatter the ghosts: fuck, fuck, fuck, jumping up and down on the bed, and F-U-C-K, and the laughter.

I am told a week has passed and I still haven’t said anything, to anyone. After the group session, where the women gently ask questions and some of the girls cry, or hold each other’s hands, or sometimes hug each other, I’m asked by the woman with the bleached hair to go with her for a chat. She asks me do I want a drink. Is it all going to start up again? I shake my head so hard it hurts.

‘Now, Nicoleta, is that your real name?’ she asks.

I nod. I remember now telling this to the woman in the blue suit who came to visit me in hospital. Memories are slowly revisiting me, although I’m doing my best to fight them by counting backwards.

‘You’re from Romania, is that right?’

I nod, the lie so ingrained in me now it feels less dangerous than saying the truth. I cannot find my voice. I swallowed it that moment when Sammy sped away in the car, my last words spoken: ‘You have to find her’, and no one has, and my voice is lodged deep in my stomach, making it impossible to find. My tongue is as paralysed as my arm. I cross my legs and draw my good arm over my body, looking anywhere but at her.

‘Do you know what country you are in?’ the woman – who tells me her name is Lou – says.

Dub, Sammy had said.

‘You are in Dublin, Ireland,’ Lou says. She takes out a map and shows me. It is beside England, and it’s tiny. It is swimming in the sea. She shows me Romania too, and I notice my country is right beside it. No sea touches it.

‘Do you want to go back there?’ she asks. ‘Would it be safe for you to go back there?’ I think of the dog’s neck straining, and of Mama hitting the ground, and then sitting silently, emptied out, all fight gone in her at the end. I draw in breath and hold it, counting backwards. Sixty-six seconds. Am I impressing you?

The woman touches my hand lightly. ‘That’s ok, dear. No one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to. You do understand me, don’t you?’

I nod.