When I turn up to the council pitch, I expect it to be me and Steve kicking a ball between the two of us for an hour. But instead, half of the cardiac rehab group shows up, enough for two six-a-side teams.

I’ve researched walking football, which seems a safe option, but after about twenty minutes of a surreal, slow-mo game, everyone demands we switch to the full-speed kind.

I try to stay on the sidelines, coaching them with tough love and affectionate abuse, channelling my old coach, Coley.

But Steve won’t have it.

‘Come on, Greenaway. We wanna see what you’re made of.’

For the first few minutes, playing feels wrong, even frightening.

But when I take a corner and the ball goes exactly where I wanted it to, I realize how much I’ve missed this . . .

I lose myself in the game, caring about nothing but how my body and the ball connect. I even forget about the social workers and the paperwork and bureaucracy and the suspicion that it could all still be for nothing.

But when Steve blows the whistle, Leo is the first thing I think about: his face whenever I show up and he recognizes me.

For the first time, I let myself really believe he’s going to live with me, and I picture myself teaching him how to play.

Chapter 42: Tim

9 July 2005

I keep wondering what the last few months would have been like if I hadn’t been a doctor.

As Mum’s illness has progressed, fast and slow at once, I have pushed for her when she’s needed me to, but also fought for respite when the treatment threatens to do more damage than the disease.

Not that there’s anything much more damaging than cancer of the pancreas, an organ so tricky it even gets its own punchline in advice to new surgeons: eat when you can, sleep when you can and don’t fuck with the pancreas . . .

‘This really is a lovely space,’ Kerry says as she steps into the room where my mother is going to die. I wheel her in behind.

We’ve seen the hospice already but not this particular room, because until yesterday, it was someone else’s haven. I don’t know if they died, or went home. I don’t want to know. Nothing matters except Mum; even the headlines about the terrorist bombings in London barely registered. We are in a bubble.

Despite all the medical equipment surrounding it, the bed has been made with a sunshine-yellow duvet cover. There’s a big window with a view of the garden, lush and full of ostentatious summer flowers. Yes, there’s a high-backed hospital chair but cushions disguise the wipeable surface. And instead of a standard issue laminate locker at the bedside, the nightstand is made of honey pine, old-fashioned but reassuring.