‘Hello,’ says the nurse. ‘Are you here to visit Susan?’

And now I’m uncertain, as if I crossed a line she chalked without my knowing. ‘Yes… If that’s okay with you, Susan?’

She swallows. Then reaches for her empty cup, passing it to me, like the first time I came. It’s a sign. A signal for me to stay. ‘I’m Rhys,’ I tell the nurse, taking Susan’s cup and duly filling it.

‘Of course you are.’ She smiles. ‘You’re just how Kat described you. Go steady with our patient, please. Don’t stay too long – the physio she’s been having is quite intensive, she’ll be tired.’

‘Of course.’

The nurse leaves and I pull up a chair. Susan stares at me, and the child in me wants to offer an explanation. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around for a few days,’ I begin, leaning my hand on the patient table and tapping it slightly. ‘Did Kat tell you I had stuff on? I asked her to. It’s great to see you doing so well.’ Our eyes meet and I can just about make out the tiny pinpricks of her pupils as they retract each time she blinks. The curtains around her bed are open. The juice I brought is almost empty. The book is on the table at the bottom of her bed.

The book.

‘Kat told me you were doing well.’

Susan looks towards the book, then back to me.

‘Has it… helped?’ I ask, reaching out to pick it up, but she gets to it before me. The pages fall open to the start of a new story and she begins to read, I think.

Uncomfortable silence is interrupted only by the turn of each page, the sound magnified in my frazzled brain as if she’s ripping it right beside my ear. Noises in the ward seem louder. Exaggerated. I feel small and out of place. I fidget, picking at my fingers, biting the cuticle on my thumb. I find a speck of paint to scratch off my jeans. She continues reading and the silence forces me back into her home, and the reason she’s here.

‘You didn’t plan to go home, did you?’ I say suddenly. Susan lets go of a page she was about to turn, resting the palm of her hand on the book. Eyes down.

‘Your house. It was like you were gone, Susan.’ I pause. ‘Maybe like you’d never been there in the first place.’ She closes her eyes and I wait a beat. When she reopens them, she starts reading again. But this time each page turns faster, as if she isn’t reading at all, just flicking through the book as distraction. Scanning it. Is the cutting still trapped within the pages? ‘Why would you do that?’ I ask. ‘What could have happened in life to make you do that?’ I stop short of making a suggestion.

The suggestion.

Is she my mother? Would I recognise her if she was? Is? How would I ask, how would she answer? Does she even know herself?