‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to be with anyone again, love. I think this is it for me. You need to be with someone with a brain that works right. You’re too nice a man for all this.’ Get out, get out, get out. Eventually she had had to physically shove him out of the door, both of them in tears. And she sat down on her sofa, no longer anybody’s love, anybody’s body, just a mother, a daughter, a woman on her own. Debbie came downstairs, sleepy in her big T-shirt.

‘He’s gone then?’

‘He’s gone, baby.’

‘He was good, Mum. A good man.’

‘He’ll still be a good man, my love. And a good daddy to your little brother and a good stepdaddy to you if you want him. But I couldn’t ask him to stay. Not with this old broken thing your mum. It wasn’t fair. You see?’

Debbie curled herself into her mother’s side. They didn’t touch often any more, and Debbie was a lithe giraffe of a girl, towering over Sam by a good head and a half. Sam marvelled at how small her grown daughter could make herself, how their soft selves still slotted together.

‘You ain’t that old, Mum. Not really.’

She grinned, her lovely face nobody’s but her own in that second.

ADELE

Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, 2015

Something about the way the lights flickered in the foyer of the building always seemed to activate a switch in Adele’s head. She’d noticed it over the years, a different way of existing and responding to things when on the ward, as though she processed emotion through a thick protective suit, a layer of blubber or something. The fact was, you needed to keep all the normal, instinctive human reactions at bay to be any good at this job. They had to be superseded by practicality, by logic, by process and knowledge. Years ago, when she was still new to this, a boy with the exact same date of birth as her Jamie had come in. Seventeen. Smashed up. Motorcycle crash. Never regained consciousness. She’d tried to blank out the older nurses muttering that he never would, but couldn’t quite hold the tears in, ended up shouting at Pat the charge nurse in the tea-break room. Pat had sat her down and calmly, kindly told her that they couldn’t afford to think this way.

‘Take ten minutes, my dear. It’s all I can give you, I’m afraid. Come back out ready to give that boy the care he needs till he breathes his last, or decide that you can’t do it, and look for another job.’

Adele had shuddered, everything crashing over her, and Pat had reached for her shoulders.