‘Life,’ I heard Joanne saying to him, ‘is about dancing, and eating, and making love.’ She bounced up and down and threw her arms around while speaking, as if she was so filled with joy she couldn’t contain it.

Her back was to me, but Zac saw that I had returned to the desk. I was sorting patient files in order to straighten out the notes trolley.

He was bristling with the worst form of the cocky arrogance that I first found so attractive but had come to find acutely distressing. He did his usual thing of raising an ironic brow. He said something I couldn’t hear, and Joanne tossed her head to demonstrate that she was laughing in complete abandonment. The implication was that she did other things in complete abandonment too.

Milly was standing nearby, a hand on her hip, rolling her eyes and glaring at Joanne, and wanting Joanne to see that she was on the verge of getting a slap right across her ecstatic face.

A few days later, when the ward was quiet and I was about to leave, I heard voices in an unoccupied side room. I was careful not to pass the observation window in the centre of the door, where I might have been glimpsed. It was impossible to pick up more than the odd word without literally putting my ear to the door, but I could tell that one voice was Milly’s. The other was Scarlett’s, a nurse friend of hers. I caught my name, and Zac’s. What I did next happened as a kind of reflex.

I went to the metal filing cabinet we kept in the nurses’ station, behind the reception desk. The cabinet was a relic, as we transitioned from paper to electronic systems. Hidden inside was an unidentifiable burner phone that I had stashed. To find and extract the phone, I had to rummage through the mess of blank request forms for blood tests and MRIs and X-rays and imaging and CT scans and echocardiograms. There was a second phone in the drawer beneath, as a fallback, buried beneath out-of-date guidelines and thick British National Formulary books.

I was still moving as I opened the professional voice recording app I’d installed. It had an extra-sensitive microphone. Standing to the side of the door jamb, I held the phone as close to it as I dared with my fully extended arm.

My heart was pounding in my ears out of fear that I would be caught. My stomach felt as if a butterfly was flying inside it. The din of machines on the ward was like a motorbike revving in my head.