She doesn’t even turn around. I haven’t seen her for over three weeks and now here she is, fully herself. Alanna, the whole package: big blue eyes, black eyelashes and that killer smile. Alanna always wraps her shapely little legs in tiny leggings. How she finds them is a mystery; she’s only a size six and they’re far too small. She must shop in the kids’ section. Leggings are suitable work bottoms, but the added stretch thins out the fabric until they are practically transparent. Alanna leans in over the Goldfish Bowl counter when a male relative comes to visit, so that if he’s tall enough he can glimpse where her thong slithers up her bum, disappearing under the hem of her smock.

Melissa thinks Alanna is delightful. ‘I love her energy,’ she says. ‘So sprightly!’ She runs the care home like it’s a nativity play.

‘That’s it!’ Alanna opens her arms, showgirly. ‘I could’ve been an architect!’

Yes, I’m thinking, you could have, but for some reason you chose to be a fucking nurse in my care home instead.

‘So what are these?’ I say.

‘I was wondering when you’d ask!’ she says. ‘You’re literally the one person who doesn’t know! But I wanted to tell you myself! Well, have a guess! What do you think!’

Alanna’s sentences all end with an exclamation mark. It makes me feel like a toddler being quizzed by a nursery teacher. Which is another thing she could’ve done, but she chose not to do, so that she could plague my workplace instead. I look at the board and realize we’re both on shift for the bedpans today.

‘You’re getting married!’ I joke.

Turns out she really is.

Last night in my dream I was right here at work, at the care home. There was a birthday party being set up out on the back lawn. The bunting swung in the breeze. I wrote names on plastic cups, so that people could reuse them and none would go to waste. I knew that we only had just enough cups. I handed them to the guests: Mona, Alanna, those girls she hangs out with, Miss Phyllis, Don, Margaret and Comfort from the canteen, Call-Me-Melissa, Mr Chacko, Mrs O’Toole. Even gross Mr Hancock was wheeled out in his chair; he looked small and harmless out on the lawn. I handed him the last cup and he clutched it in his fist, the purple veins trembling.

I was all out of cups and my daughter was nowhere to be seen. I went round the group of gathered guests, increasingly frantic, tapping people on the shoulder and saying, ‘I can’t find my daughter, have you seen my daughter? Please, please, have you seen my daughter?’