The cute little social worker looked more intimidating and official than she had at the house. Suit jacket, gold hoop earrings, ramrod straight behind an enormous desk in an overcrowded office. Still cute, though. She reminded him of the girls he hung out with at college. If things were different he might even ask her out. If there wasn’t an ongoing family crisis under her supervision. If his body wasn’t yearning for Mercy and his heart for the kids. If eighty-eight per cent of his attention wasn’t taken up by the excruciating pain in his mouth. If that percentage wasn’t going up by the minute.

‘We knew there was a risk that making the home physically safe for Nicole would cause distress,’ Ada said.

‘Yeah,’ Will agreed. ‘I think my sister might have gone overboard. She does that. Sorry.’

‘Your sister has done her best to deal with a very challenging situation. Hoarding disorder is tough. The danger of not intervening can be high, but the fallout of intervening is, well …’ She gestured down the hall where his aunty was, presumably, having bandages put over her bandages, stitches over her stitches.

Ada told him that she’d referred Aunty Nic to a service which ran group cognitive behaviour therapy sessions. The success rate was, she said, very good ‘for this condition’.

His phone pinged in his pocket. Could be Mercy. Or Nic, of course. Lena. He apologised for the interruption, pulled it out and saw Anton, which meant nothing to him. He slid it back into his pocket, picked up the thread with Ada: ‘What’s “very good” for this condition?’

She smiled, pretty and sad and sorry. ‘Traditionally we see under fifteen per cent of people treated for hoarding disorder make any substantial change in behaviour. This group has been reporting over thirty per cent.’

‘So even with the best treatment, chances are it’s not going to be fixed.’ Creepy to hear himself saying such similar words to those he’d said before, in a hospital across the city, his mum and sister with him then, his dad rather than aunty down the hallway. On that day, he’d wondered if it was all just a scam, medical science. These big buildings and well-dressed, expensively trained staff and million-dollar equipment, and still they couldn’t do fuck-all to save the life of a father of two in his mid-thirties. Now he thought: psychology, psychiatry, all that’s bullshit, too. Nobody knows how to fix anything. It’s all just bandaging up and calming down, pills and action plans to make you feel in control of the random and unfixable horror. And for him, not even that. Not even some decent fucking drugs to make him forget his mouth was rotting from the inside out.