‘This is the tricky one,’ she said. No kidding. ‘Very important to make sure there’s no sign of infection,’ she said. Got it. ‘Needs the sterile silicone membrane dressing changed every day, and no touching the wound without gloves,’ she said. Wouldn’t dream of it, and bloody hell that looks painful.

I watched and listened as Wolfie explained each step of the procedure to me. She was a completely different girl from the one I’d seen up to then as she showed me how to flush the wound with warm water and peroxide, check for signs of swelling and pus, re-dress it and then clean up and dispose of the old bandages. I was sweating with the effort of everything I had to remember, and it made me wish I’d paid more attention to all those hours of Holby City reruns I’d watched last year, waiting for the phone to ring at the twenty-four-hour minicab company where I’d worked for two torturous months.

I like to think I did OK though, as, under the watchful eyes of Dom and Wolfie (George lost interest once he realised the exploding head situation was a bust), I bathed and dried the wound. I only fumbled slightly as I pressed the sticky silicone patch tentatively on to Lou’s skin and smoothed the edges so they wouldn’t curl up and let any air in. And we all agreed it was a not-half-bad attempt at a herringbone technique when I wound the bright white gauze bandage around my sister’s calf, over the lightning railroad, across the volcano of darkness, and fastened it at the ankle with a stretchy clip.

When I was finished, I managed a double thumbs up and insisted it had been no problem at all, and of course I was totally fine to take over from now on, as if I was a cheery healthcare worker who did this kind of thing all the time. But in truth I was thinking about that raw, open wound on my sister’s leg and barely keeping my almost-exploding head together.

I didn’t go to the pub that evening either. I went to bed in the daylight with the bundle of letters and a cup of tea. But both stayed untouched, as for the first time in the very longest of times I let my mind go where it wanted. And because I didn’t shout it down with a joke or drown it with a beer, I found it drifting closer to home than I’d allowed it to go in years. And I followed.

Of course I’d thought about Lou over the past sixteen years, how could I not? But I’d become so adept at making the story more palatable for myself, it had become even easier to give other people the verbal slip. If the topic of family came up, I was a champion at flipping the attention back on whoever was asking. What about your family? Show me a picture of your kids, your wife, your house. It had worked, mostly, but there was always a part of me that knew it was precisely because I’d loved Lou so fiercely that it was so painful when I did think about how it had gone so wrong. And even though the years had blunted the force of the physical feelings, I still knew that something else existed once, too.