“Are you going to pick up your mother?”

“Swear you’ll stay here ’til I get back.”

...and perhaps it is too much for me to ask; that you understand my choice, but I hope you do because your opinion is important to me and...

My father looks at me with curiosity as if he’s trying to work out who I am, and perhaps he is. It is sometimes difficult to tell what he knows for sure and what he pretends to remember.

I bend towards him, put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be back soon, okay?”

He smiles a gappy smile, which means he’s taken out his dentures again. Last time I found them inside one of Anna’s old trainers in the boot.

“You’ll be back soon,” he says, and I tell him I will, and close the door and lock him into the car.

...practical arrangements have been taken care of with the clinic in Switzerland and are enclosed for your...

If the car catches fire, he won’t be able to get out. He’ll be burned alive. Or suffocated with the smoke. But the car has never caught fire, so why would it today? Of all days? I hesitate. Brendan would call it dithering.

...only a matter of time before that happens, which is why it needs to be now, before I am no longer able to...

I run through the car park, towards the terminal building. I try not to think about anything. Instead, I concentrate on the sound of my soles thumping against the ground, the sound of my breath, hot and strained, the sound of my heart, thumping in my chest like a fist.

My dearest Terry,

The first thing you should know is...

I spot Iris immediately. She’s easy to spot even though she’s not all that tall. She seems taller than she is.

The relief is palpable. Solid as a wall. She’s in a queue, doing her best to wait her turn. She does not look like a woman who is planning to end her life in a clinic in Switzerland. She looks like her usual self. Her steel-gray hair cropped close to her scalp, no makeup, no jewelry, no nonsense. It’s only when the queue shuffles forward, you notice the crutches, and still, after all this time, they seem so peculiar in her big, capable hands. So unnecessary.

I stand for a moment and stare at her. My first thought is that Iris was wrong. There is something I can do. What that something is, I haven’t worked out yet. But the fact that I’m here. That’s she’s still here. I haven’t missed her. It’s a Sign, isn’t it?

The relief is so huge, so insistent, there’s no room for any other feeling in my head. I’m full to the brim with it. I’m choking on it. My voice sounds strange when I call her name.

“Iris.” She can’t hear me over the crowd. I walk nearer. “Iris? IRIS!”

Heads turn towards me, and I can feel my face flooding with heat. I concentrate on Iris, who turns her face towards me, her wide, green eyes fastening on me.