I’m exhausted as I get changed, and it feels as if the tiredness goes even deeper than usual after a run of nights. The idea of being back here at the weekend, and for days, weeks, months, years after that makes me feel almost faint.

But after a decent sleep, I am ready for my flight. Inland, the sky is grey but as I take off, the coastline has a luminescence that draws me. I steer that way.

The numbness I’ve experienced since I learned of Zoë’s death has been different to the usual detachment we were trained to adopt, to protect ourselves from distress at our patients’ prognoses.

Right now, I feel as though I’ve been anaesthetized. My hand on the yoke seems to belong to someone else.

I’ve been flying solo since last year, as often as I can afford it. That’s been one positive about living at home – I have more spare cash for flying hours. It’s the beauty and the peace I usually seek up here, but today I am not soothed by either. The hum of the engine and the rush of the air outside fade away and instead I hear the echo of voices: Zoë’s and Joel’s and my own. Up here, all the infinitesimal outcomes of other decisions I might have made rush past like clouds.

Joel’s resuscitation replays vividly in my head, the feeling of his body, the violence of it. For all these years, I’ve remembered it as a triumph.

Now I can only remember the fear.

I try to put that out of my mind, but now other patients come back to me, all the people I didn’t think I remembered. The countless times I’d congratulated myself on locking the bad stuff away, when really they were waiting for their moment to ambush me with the feelings I should have processed at the time.

I even see Elaine and everything she went through . . .

A bank of nimbostratus obstructs my view and I’m discombobulated. I want to cry but I have to keep it together because I am flying a fucking plane.

A break in the cloud lets through a blinding flash of sunlight. It grows and glows, like water bursting through a dam.

I can’t hold back anymore.

‘Shoreham Control, Piper PA28 Dougal requesting clearance to land.’

‘Piper PA28 Dougal, Shoreham Control, is there a problem?’

Nothing is wrong with the plane, everything is wrong with me.

‘Shoreham control, Piper PA28 Dougal, negative, but requesting clearance.’

As they give me permission, I can’t hold back the tears or the terror that I am disintegrating, piece by tiny piece.

I manage to land before I fall apart completely. I taxi back to the hardstanding in tears, knowing it’s going to take someone else to put me back together.