She was sure she was speaking aloud, but no one seemed to be able to hear what she was saying. Maybe she ought to stop speaking.

“Do you understand what I’ve just told you, love?” asked the policeman.

She turned her face towards the white wall of the ambulance. The policeman must have moved away, because the next voice she heard near to her head was the female paramedic.

“Do you have any pain at all? You took quite a tumble.”

Tumble, thought Lauren. You pinned me down on my front, strapped my arms to my sides, ground my head into the mud. I have pain. It’s mine. I’m keeping it. She shut her eyes as the ambulance started to move away.

*   *   *

After a while the vehicle stopped. The doors opened. They rolled her out of the ambulance and she felt a soft breeze and the sun on her face. She kept her eyes shut. She saw bright red, and the veins in her eyelids streaked blackly across her vision in the shape of lightning.

They wheeled her roughly up a ramp. The light dimmed and she smelled bleach and bad food. She heard babies crying and screwed her eyes tighter.

“Lauren?”

No.

Then, more gently, “Lauren? Are you awake?”

She turned her head towards the voice. She opened her eyes a crack and found herself looking into the face of a woman with kind, crinkly eyes and a mean, thin-lipped mouth. Whose enormous ears poked sideways through delicate curtains of extremely fine, carefully combed white hair. Lauren’s voice creaked as it came out. “Where am I?” she asked the woman. She remembered where the rawness in her throat came from, how she’d screamed her babies’ names into the storm.

“You’re at the Hope Park Estate, Lauren. It’s a mother and baby psychiatric unit.”

“Oh.” Her brain was treacly. The words seemed to gather into several separate concepts. Hope. Baby. Psychiatric. She couldn’t quite put it together.

“This is a place of safety. You’re safe.”

“Who are you?” asked Lauren.

“I’m Doctor Summer. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“I’m not mad,” said Lauren. “Someone took my babies.”

“I know. Don’t worry. Your husband will bring them along later. I spoke to him just now. He’s waiting for a doctor to check them over, but I don’t want you to worry. He says your boys are very calm, not at all distressed.”

They are not my boys. They are not my boys. They are not my boys. Will the doctor see what I saw, or will she be fooled, like Patrick, like everyone? Lauren cried softly, while the psychiatrist wrote on a clipboard.

“Do you have any pain, Lauren?”

Lauren nodded her head, yes.

There was another injection, and the heat of it took the treacliness away, replaced it with a feeling like candy-floss in her head. She slept, heavy, as if under a weighted blanket.

*   *   *