‘Sorry, Zac.’ I quietly put a fresh stack of patient folders in front of him. ‘These need discharge summaries too.’

He smiled at me, then turned that beam on two nurses who were walking by. Scarlett and Joanne witnessed his display of courtesy-despite-being-sorely-tried. ‘Thank you very much, Holly. I appreciate your keeping me on top of things.’

Joanne flipped her hair and sucked in her stomach and smiled at him. ‘I wish all doctors were as nice as you.’

‘I aim to please.’ Zac watched her walk away as I answered the phone for the twentieth time in ten minutes.

‘Cardiac unit. Ward clerk speaking.’

‘Hello, Holly.’ There was no mistaking Maxine’s voice when she wanted you to. ‘I wondered if you’d had any further thoughts about the task we discussed.’

‘I’m sorry, but I think you have the wrong ward. I am unable to help with that request, but I will put you back to the switchboard, who can assist you.’ I redirected the call, then concentrated on my computer screen as if I were working on the most important task in the world.

When Zac finished the second batch of discharge summaries, he turned to me. ‘Anything else?’ He expected me to say no. Instead, I held out a list of the patients who needed risk assessments for venous thromboembolisms.

His bleeper went off. He didn’t take the VTE list. ‘Those will have to wait.’ He reached beneath a pile of stationery that someone had dumped on the far side of the desk. He pulled out a journal. The cover design was a series of thin vertical lines. They were every shade of orange in the colour spectrum, bleeding from lightest to brightest. He slipped it into my hand. ‘I found this in front of the house.’

My face went red. I felt myself trembling, my body vibrating like hummingbird wings.

I’d filled that journal with notes about some of the cases I’d encountered in the hospital. I could be fired, maybe even prosecuted, if anybody at the hospital were to discover that I’d been compiling stories based on the patients’ histories. But the worst thing of all was the exposure and the humiliation. The journal was where I practised my observations and information gathering. It was also where I secretly wrote fiction, which I’d been doing since I faked that letter from an admirer when I was four years old.

Thinking about it, I saw that writers really were spies. That, in truth, was why I took the ward clerk job. Because what place could be better than a hospital for finding stories of people at extremity?