Hormones. Pregnancy hormones, already? Everything is out of control.

‘Oh, Mrs Palmer—’

‘My name’s Kerry and you don’t need to mollycoddle me – I’m in the ambulance service, I know there’s no way you’d give an F1 leave unless it was serious.’

He nods and sits down next to me. ‘You’re right. It’s serious, though we’ve . . . contained things. The patient involved is showing some early signs of a recovery. I don’t want to pre-empt the process, but every junior doctor makes mistakes and with the right training and attitude, it doesn’t have to mean the end for Tim.’

‘Does he know that?’ I shake my head. ‘Sorry. Stupid. You can’t know the answer to that without being a mind-reader, and even if you were, Tim’s mind would be very difficult to read.’

‘The thing is—’ His bleep goes off and as he stands up, I almost expect him to bang his head on the ceiling. ‘Is there a family member or friend he might have gone to see? To talk it through, lick his wounds?’

He doesn’t have time to wait for an answer, but there isn’t one anyway.

Now Elaine has gone, Tim only has me.

I call him again as I walk towards his digs. It goes straight to voicemail, like before.

‘Where the hell are you, Tim? Whatever happens, we can fix it.’

My bloody mantra: let’s fix this, let’s put things right. My mending mania, the compulsion that means I am always there when I am needed, so I can get that buzz when it all works out . . .

His landlady tells me she hasn’t seen him face-to-face since last Wednesday. ‘But he woke me up this morning, because he slammed the door behind him, like he was in a temper or a rush?’

I search his room methodically, revolted at myself but also hating him for turning me into a paranoid, snooping wife who is searching for . . .

What? Infidelity? Not the Tim I know. But this brings back memories of when I had to do this two years ago, turning the bungalow upside down to find out why he really failed his exams.

Saint Kerry swung into action then. Rescuing him wasn’t enough: while I was at it, I had Joel locked up above Ant’s cafe, ‘fixing’ him too. I never doubted my own magic. After all, I’d brought someone back to life. Everything else is easy compared to that . . .

My head and shoulders throb and my belly churns, as though the tiny life inside me is already reminding me it has a heartbeat too.

For the first time, I let myself consider that Tim might have taken his own life.

No. He couldn’t do that to me.

Unless he felt there was no other way to escape.