‘Your next-door neighbours are really upset. Katie says if there’s anything she can do to let her know. Will is getting the neighbourhood watch group to put up CCTV. They seemed pretty shaken up. They were the ones that found you.’

Helga nods. She’s usually so strong and strident, but she seems crushed. Seeing her so vulnerable is horrible. ‘What about Linus?’ Dominica asks.

‘They took my book,’ Helga says, with a sad shrug. ‘I put it in my bag, remember? Before I got out of the car.’

‘Oh God. Oh, Helga. I’m so sorry. I’ll try and find him,’ Dominica reassures her.

‘I don’t know how you will, though. That’s just the problem,’ Helga says. ‘And maybe it’s for the best that you don’t.’

Dominica tries to be cheerful and tells Helga about their full moon swim, but all too soon their time is up and she has to leave. She promises to come back and explains that the others are going to visit too. Helga smiles weakly at this, but Dominica can tell she’s exhausted.

She asks Dominica to message Mette, her niece. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if she finds out I’ve been in hospital and she didn’t know,’ Helga says as Dominica writes notes in her phone. She hopes she’s got the spelling right and she’ll be able to find Mette’s company.

She gets up to leave. Her overwhelming urge is to kiss Helga’s forehead, but she’s wearing a mask. It breaks her heart to leave her.

She walks to the end of the ward of beds and sees the nurse.

‘I’m so glad I got to see her,’ Dominica says to her. ‘I didn’t think I’d be able to.’

‘You’re lucky. It’s been so hard on this ward,’ the nurse says. She has beautiful eyes above her mask. ‘But we’re muddling through. Just bracing ourselves for another wave. I was in the Covid ward just before the first lockdown. It was so grim not knowing the scale of what we were facing. We were all terrified.’

‘My partner, Chris, he was in that ward,’ Dominica says. ‘You weren’t with him? Chris? Chris Barratt?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so.’

‘He was a paramedic.’

She sees the nurse’s eyebrows draw together. She stops.

‘Oh, hang on … the paramedic guy? That Chris? I think I know … hang on.’

She walks back towards the nurse’s station, leans over the desk and picks up a phone. ‘Is Alison there?’ Dominica hears her say.

She waits for a moment and then turns away and Dominica can’t hear what she’s saying.

Then she’s coming back. ‘My colleague, Alison. She’s coming now. She wants to have a chat with you.’

Dominica waits by the door to the ward, watching the busy comings and goings of the staff, the clanking trolleys and the incessant beeping of machines. What can Alison tell her? Does she remember Chris?

It’s been so hard to imagine him alone at the end. At night, when she can’t sleep, she thinks of him in his hospital bed, alone and abandoned. She can’t get past the guilt of it. But now she’s here, she realises that Chris wouldn’t have been thinking about home. When you’re here, it’s hard to imagine anywhere apart from these hospital walls.