‘I assumed it was a general invitation, but when I said I’d ask the others, I could swear he looked disappointed.’

Mike laughs. ‘Oh, Tilly. I thought it was us guys who were supposed to miss the non-verbal cues.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m out of practice. Anyway, everyone else had other stuff going on, so it was just the two of us in the end.’

His expression turns thoughtful. ‘If he was genuinely inviting you on your own, that’s a bit predatory, isn’t it? Especially on his first day. Calm down, horndog.’

‘Says the man who’s slept with half the nurses in the hospital? Bit rich, Mike.’

‘I wouldn’t say half. A few. A handful. Some.’

Technically, there are three of us that share this flat. There’s me, Mike and Lena, who owns it. We found it because Lena was advertising for tenants on the hospital SharePoint site that staff use for all their wanted and for sale posts. The odd thing is that, as far as we could work out, Lena didn’t actually have any connection to the hospital. She certainly doesn’t work there, so how she got the advert up on an internal website was a mystery.

The second oddity where Lena is concerned is that, although she owns the flat and has a bedroom that she keeps securely padlocked, she’s pretty much never here. We met her when she interviewed us, and we’ve probably seen her no more than a handful of times in the years since. She pays her share of the bills and everything as if she were here, so we don’t really mind, but we came up with various theories about her in the early days, from extended stays in rehab to her being an undercover agent. As it turned out, the truth was both more mundane and more impressive: she’s a doctor with an NGO, and spends most of her time in disaster zones.

Unlike Lena, Mike does work at the hospital, as a discharge manager. That’s not his proper job title, but it’s what I call him because it amuses me and winds him up. His role is to coordinate patients who are leaving the hospital, getting them moved to the discharge lounge (its actual name), and notifying admissions of the beds that will be vacant. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, as he frequently reminds me when I’m teasing him, but that’s the gist of it. The joy, for him, is that he gets to work reasonably regular hours.