Power ten, she told herself. Change could be a good thing. She needed a kick in the pants, and if the kick came from Danny, then so be it. Well, she could do what needed doing. She believed in the power of transformation; she wasn’t the sort of person who said a leopard couldn’t change its spots. Actually, lots of species went through transformations in order to survive. There was the pepper moth, which originally had very pale, mottled wings that camouflaged with tree trunks and whitewashed cottage walls. When the country turned black with soot during the Industrial Revolution, darker pepper moths prevailed, thanks to natural selection. Later, with the clean-air laws, the pale moths came back.

She loved this story, loved its message, or what she took to be its message. It said that damage could be reversed, the world could be made clean again. It was downright redemptive. The idea gave her a spurt of hope.

At home that evening, she sat down with a glass of wine and a notepad and began building the case for her defence. Doodling at the margins, she drew a building, a door, a lock, then hastily scrubbed them out, black ink effacing ink. She had a message from Liz asking about her birthday plans. You’re not dodging this one, I hope you know.

Preoccupied, she did not reply. She had a job to keep. When she’d roughed out the main points, she decided she was ready to speak to Danny. She would issue an invitation.

She went to bed excited rather than despondent. She had done it before, remaking herself from the ground up, becoming the good student, butter wouldn’t melt, et cetera. No one had sniffed her out; no one had held her to her past. If she had managed to do it then, why shouldn’t she do it now?

It falls to researchers to ask: what does Rose Dawson know? What does she experience?

Certainly it is possible to believe that there are facts which humans will never possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend.

Rose did not know certain facts when she asked Danny to visit. She did not know that her colleagues David and Ravi had distributed their photocopied bundles of papers overnight, sliding them under doors and leaving them nestled in in-trays. Everyone was meant to get a copy at more or less the same time on Monday morning. They hadn’t counted on Danny going in to work on Saturday morning and discovering the papers sooner, by himself.

Rose had one thing in mind when she asked Danny to stop by: to persuade him to see things as she saw them, especially as to why she should stay on at the centre and keep doing the work she loved. She would show him she could contribute to the ‘farm to fork’ welfare vision.