Looking back, Adele wonders who that person was, the one who overcame shyness and stress to knock on doors, handing flyers to strangers and trying to engage them in conversation. The one who drove back to her home town to host a ‘listening party’ coffee morning attended only by her mum and three of her cronies, who tried in vain to assuage their fears about their pensions. The one who stood on street corners under banners in the weeks running up to the referendum. That person who fitted it all in around her work, around walking the ward, around the deaths of four long-term patients. Where once she would have gone to the canal and cried in silence at the end of a shift, now she channelled the emotional impact into her fight. She’d been fond of saying, as she knocked on the doors, handing out flyers, that she’d never really been one for politics, but that this campaign had changed her mind. People listened to her; they did. She spoke quietly but confidently to them, channelling all those years of difficult conversations with patients and their families to get her messages across softly but well. The first time she changed someone’s mind from No to Yes in a ten-minute doorstep conversation she texted Ash in delight and the two of them scampered off down the pub to celebrate.

Dougie would have none of it. The harder into it Adele got, the harder he stood his ground, knuckled down, declared his loyalty to his football club and the Union Jack. Jamie stopped talking to him completely after a huge and heated argument over Sunday lunch; Adele just stopped talking to him about it. She would come in late, pat him on the shoulder as he sat watching television, go to her computer in the boys’ old room to check in, tell his warm body ‘night night, love’, as they faced their separate ways in the bed.

A large group of them had headed through to Glasgow on the day of the referendum, after casting their votes. Ash and Big Meg had walked up and down their carriage on the train painting tiny glittery blue Saltires on all the women’s cheeks so they felt like a team; they sang songs, grinned and waved at everyone else they saw wearing a Yes badge; all of them waved back. An old man at the station bent low on one knee and kissed Adele’s hand. The atmosphere in George Square – ‘Freedom Square! We’re crying it Freedom Square now!’ roared Ash – was like nothing Adele had ever seen before. Banners waving, more smiling faces than she’d ever seen in one space in Scotland, some earnest boys onstage playing guitar and a beautiful girl, surely no more than twenty, moving through the crowd handing out flowers. Adele put hers behind her ear, a fat pink daisy, felt young again.