Lena, though, she was a different kind of kid altogether. Centre of attention from day dot. Couldn’t even wait to get to the birthing suite if it meant missing out on a party. She heard music and laughing and hurled herself into the middle of it all, immediately became the focus, the purpose of everything.

The tea lady had been in earlier. ‘Shall I leave a couple of extra bickies for your daughter?’ she’d asked, and Nic had shaken her head to say no, because Lena didn’t eat sugar or wheat or anything processed, and because, no, she wasn’t coming back in today, and, no, she wasn’t her daughter.

‘Well, I’ll leave them in case you want them yourself then, love.’

Love, which is what people called the elderly and infirm. Love, coming from someone fifty if she was a day.

At least she’d guessed Lena as Nic’s daughter rather than granddaughter, like one of the nurses’ aides did the other night. Not that a woman her age couldn’t be a grandmother; she knew plenty who were. But their grandkids were in nappies, their strollers pushed by kids of Lena’s age or younger. Either Nic looked sixty or she looked like the type to have had a baby in her early teens and raised that baby to herself pop one out soon after her body was able. She’d prefer the latter. Women who’d had their kids while kids themselves tended to be both fun and practical (except her sister who was un-fun and practical). Mostly they were the kinds of women who would get smashed and sing karaoke with you at 4 a.m. but who also knew how to change a tyre, fight a parking fine and hem a pair of dress pants. So, yeah, not so bad to be in their gang, but Nic knows it isn’t what the young aide had been thinking. She hadn’t been thinking at all; just looked at the crumpled old lady in the bed compared with the fresh-faced kid on the chair by her side and leapt to the obvious.