‘Yes, but here, let me give you my number.’ Alastair fumbles in his jacket for his phone and I dig in my bag for my own. He recites the digits and I type them onto my contacts. A few weeks ago, I had no more than a handful of names in there. But now I have two more than I did. I call him, briefly, so that he has mine too.

‘Thank you for coming to tell me,’ he says. ‘Honestly, thank you.’

Alastair has just enough time to walk me back to the hospital exit before he has to return to the children’s ward. We don’t talk as we make our way out, but strangely, silence doesn’t hurt. There are clues, I know it, in what he has told me. I can’t join the dots yet, but I feel I’ve caught a glimmer of something, and now I have one more person willing to help me.

At the exit to the hospital, the sliding doors open back out into the cold. Stray leaves have blown in at the edges. Alastair and I shake hands to say goodbye. It could have felt too formal, but it doesn’t. His palm is so warm and he grips my hand in both of his. ‘You’ll keep in touch?’ he says. ‘You promise?’

I manage to nod. I can’t help thinking of how it echoes Sarah’s words.

He lets go and I slip my hands into my coat pockets, ready to face the cold outside. Over his shoulder, I glimpse again the family of five that I saw in the canteen and watch as the mum curves an arm around the shoulder of her daughter.

‘Okay, than,’ says Alastair, ‘I’d better go.’

He gives me a wave as I head out of the doors. I know it’s time to leave, but at the last moment, I turn back, words crowding up at my throat.

‘Alastair!’

He hesitates in the atrium of the hospital, lit up by the strip-lights. Gusts of cold wind tug at my hair. I don’t want to keep him, I’ve already taken up so much of his time, disrupted so much of his day, his life. But I can’t seem to leave without asking him this one last question. ‘The children on your ward,’ I call to him, ‘they all have people who visit them, don’t they? Family who come to see them? And the families, the parents – if they need it, they can have help, can’t they? Support if they need it, say? And no one would blame them, would they, no one would judge?’

But the sliding doors close shut between us before he can answer, and then someone approaches him, rushing him away, and so I never get to know what this kind and forgiving man might have said.

Chapter 18