‘Listen. Every single nurse who comes to ICU has one of these moments. Every single one. All of them out there, and a few who decided they couldn’t. I don’t judge them that can’t, you know. Better to find it out early. Not everyone can do this job. I think you can, though.’

Adele had, in the end, been in the room when the consultant had broken it to the boy’s mother, had held her hand tight, tight as they switched the life support off. She’d pushed through three night shifts in a row, making the drive home with the radio on in the dim morning light, poured herself cereal then climbed into bed beside Dougie’s warm form, eye mask to block out the sun, wax earplugs to block out the noise of Dougie getting the boys up for school, woken at three, showered, prepared a lasagne for them all, eaten, taken five minutes to curl up with the cat in the silence of the living room before turning the car back on to the motorway, walked swiftly back through that foyer with the change of light on her eyes. Only after the third shift, when she awoke into a free space where nothing was expected of her for two whole days, did she allow it to come out. She took herself out of the house, walked down by the canal, past the bit of the path popular with joggers, and cried, for that boy and her boy and both of their mothers.

‘Nobody’s asking you to be a robot,’ Pat had said. ‘It’s just a matter of compartmentalizing, isn’t it? We just have to work through the things later. I’m not going to say it gets easier, just that you get better at it.’

Eight years on, and she would say that yes, it probably had. And she had. To an extent. Three hours into her shift that day, and they got word of a new patient coming in from A&E.

‘Female, probably late forties/early fifties. Suicide attempt. As yet unidentified but they’re working on it.’

‘Yours, Adele,’ the charge nurse had said.

2013–14

Dougie had had on his politics show when she got home. She usually snapped at him to shut it off; her jangled nerves couldn’t take the shouting they all did, not after a twelve-hour shift. This time, though, there was a voice, one she hadn’t heard for decades, and the voice was in her living room.