‘How’s the leg feeling?’

‘Bit itchy, not too bad, though. Dom said that was probably a good sign. How about you? How’d you go with that letter you were stuck on this morning?’

‘OK, I hope. I mean, it took me the whole day to come up with something worthwhile, but I think I got there in the end.’

I hadn’t noticed the exact moment it happened, but somewhere along the line seeing Lou had become easier, less jarring to my heart, which such a short time ago had felt like it might kamikaze out of my chest at the sight of her, let alone if I had to speak. But now I was able to come out with fully formed sentences without having to plan ahead, and I could even throw in a gentle question without my legs trying to pedal me backwards out of the room. A conversation with my sister seemed now, miraculously, to be merely conversation, and not a mountain that needed to be scaled.

It was disconcerting and weirdly comforting at the same time. I wondered if she felt it too – the weird sense that we were trying to fill up a space with something that didn’t quite fit, but that whatever it was, it was beginning to adjust around us.

I placed the big bowl of warm water I’d prepared in the kitchen on the floor, and emptied out my plastic bag of bandages, antiseptic and saline. I’d managed to streamline the process to a level I was secretly impressed with, and I felt quite medically proficient as I knelt on the floor in front of Lou and started unwrapping the gauze bandage from her leg. But then I accidentally brushed the wound with my thumb and I saw her flinch slightly.

‘Shit, sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’ Her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere out through the window.

‘Hey, Danny? Do you remember our old garden? It wouldn’t have been even a quarter of the size of Dom’s, but it always seemed so huge to me.’

I added some antiseptic to the water and tried to come up with a reply that wasn’t rude but that also wouldn’t encourage this kind of chat about the past. Why rock the boat? Even though we’d covered a vast distance, Lou and I, it was so much safer to pretend we were two entirely different people (for me, at least), completely unrelated to the ones all those years ago. But I was surprised to find myself smiling at the mention of our lovely old house, so could it really hurt?

‘Yeah, I do. I know what you mean.’

‘Mum always used to call it her garden, but it was actually Dad who did all the work, wasn’t it?’ I nodded and hoped it would be enough as I arranged her leg carefully on a towel spread over Dom’s Moroccan leather ottoman, which I’d worked out by trial and error was the perfect height for the job.