‘She’s given us all a bit of a scare,’ he said.

There was quiet.

Beep. Thea’s fault.

Beep. Thea’s fault.

‘I …’ Her voice caught. ‘I thought she was—’

Head lolling to one side, blood-matted hair, pulpy flesh.

Rory nodded.

Rosie’s chest rose and fell. The woman who had been constantly fidgeting, moving, smiling and gesticulating was gone and in her place was a quiet mechanical automaton. Near her undamaged eye, Thea could still see the heart she’d drawn around one of the discs on her temple.

‘The doctor tells me she is stable, but they will have to wait and see if there has been any internal bleeding on the brain.’

Thea imagined blood like sticky cherry jam, spreading itself slowly across the crevices of Rosie’s brain and oozing into the cracks.

‘Her eye?’

‘There’s a lot of swelling. Hard to tell. They’re optimistic she won’t lose the sight.’

‘If she wakes up.’

One of Rosie’s hands lay above the covers, the nails neatly filed and rainbow-coloured. Thea willed a finger to twitch.

‘She’s young, healthy – she’s got an excellent chance of recovery.’

Thea swivelled to fix him with a hard stare. She remembered the way Rosie’s face had looked when she first got to her: squashed fruit with shards of bone poking through.

‘Did the doctor actually tell you that?’

‘Uh … no.’

Weirdly, it looked like Rory was the one out of the two of them who had had the least sleep. There was hardly any white left in his eyes, just angry red webs.

‘I’ve brought some of Rosie’s things. Just in case she needs them.’ He put a plastic bag at her feet. It immediately sagged and toppled over.

She felt like the bag, the things she wanted to say just spilling out of her, even as she tried to hold her plastic handles together.

‘There’s someone in the monastery.’ Thea instinctively lowered her voice, watching the bag slide once more.

‘Huh?’

‘There’s someone in the monastery. They cracked Rosie’s head into the wall. I saw it.’

Rory scratched at his beard again, his brow furrowing.

‘But … Rosie slipped and fell.’

Thea gripped the arm of his chair.

‘What? No, that’s not true. I saw it. There’s someone in the monastery and they hurt Rosie.’

Behind them, a throat was very deliberately cleared.

‘That will be all for now, Mr Thirwood,’ said Delores.

Thea turned around. Delores was standing in the doorway, her red hair a shock of colour against the white of the wall next to her. She clasped her hands in front of her, an oddly demure pose, like a saint about to pray.