But then I saw a discreet little sign that said Hospital. We piled out of the car and wandered through an immaculately kept garden, where the flower beds were bursting with blossoms. Hummingbirds buzzed all around, and I spotted some more of those palm trees I’d been sure I’d never see so far north of the equator.

At the information desk, I asked for Bryce Martinson’s room. I wasn’t sure he’d been admitted actually, but I knew from experience – unfortunately firsthand – that any accident in which a head wound might have occurred generally required an overnight stay for observation – and I was right. Bryce was there, and so was Father Dominic, conveniently situated right across the hall from one another.

We weren’t the only people visiting these particular patients – not by a long shot. Bryce’s room was packed. There wasn’t, apparently, any limit on just how many people could crowd into a patient’s room, and Bryce’s looked as if it contained most of the Junipero Serra Mission Academy’s senior class. In the middle of the sunny, cheerful room – where on every flat surface rested vases filled with flowers – lay Bryce in a shoulder cast, his right arm hanging from a pulley over his bed. He looked a lot better than he had that morning, mostly, I suppose, because he was pumped full of painkillers. When he saw me in the doorway, this big goofy smile broke out over his face, and he went, ‘Suze!’

Only he pronounced it ‘Soo-oo-ooze’, so it sounded like it had more than one syllable.

‘Uh, hi, Bryce,’ I said, suddenly shy. Everybody in the room had turned around to see who Bryce was talking to. Most of them were girls. They all did that thing a lot of girls do – they looked me over from the top of my head – I hadn’t showered that morning because I’d been running so late, so I was not exactly having a good hair day – to the soles of my feet.

Then they smirked.

Not so Bryce would have noticed. But they did.

And even though I could not have cared less what a bunch of girls I had never met before, and would probably never meet again, thought of me, I blushed.

‘Everybody,’ Bryce said. He sounded drunk, but pleasantly so. ‘This is Suze. Suze, this is everybody.’

‘Uh,’ I said. ‘Hi.’

One of the girls, who was sitting on the end of Bryce’s bed in a very white, wrinkle-free linen dress, went, ‘Oh, you’re that girl who saved his life yesterday. Jake’s new stepsister.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’ There was no way – no way – I was going to be able to ask Bryce what I needed to ask him with all these people in the room. Cee Cee had steered Adam off into Father Dom’s room in order to give me some time alone with Bryce, but it looked as if she’d done so in vain. There was no way I was going to get a minute with this guy alone. Not unless . . .