Fast and hard, he shoved the chair at the man nearest him who tried to defend himself by holding out an arm as protection. Thea was pretty certain she saw that arm bend in a very unnatural way. And then it was chaos for a few seconds. Richard reared and bucked as the others tried to hold him, while in a corner another man looked as if he was preparing a syringe.

Just before the syringe punctured his arm and the rest of the men pinned him down, Richard turned his head again, looking at Thea, and this time he was Richard once more, the one she’d sat in a therapy room with and watched nod off in a lecture hall.

For a second she saw the horror dawn in his eyes.

An arm shot out of the nearby door as Thea hurried past on her way back to Rosie and, without giving her any time to react, pulled her into the room. She yelped.

It was dark.

‘Shh!’

‘Rory?’

‘Shh!’

Thea lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘What are you doing?’

Outside the closed door, voices floated past them. Thea felt like a small fish in the coral as the sharks swam past. She could feel her heart thudding in her throat and all she could think about was Richard and his crazed eyes.

The voices receded. She was getting used to the dark now though and could make out shelving to one side of the room. There were the shapes of mops, brooms and buckets in the corner, but what she was most aware of was just how close she was to Rory. Their noses were nearly touching. He smelled of coffee and something woody, his aftershave maybe, or the soap he used.

‘What’s happened to Richard?’ she asked.

‘Huh?’

‘Richard? I just saw him. He was … I guess he was struggling, or … or really angry, maybe? And there were some guys holding him down and then they sedated him.’

‘What? Look, I don’t know anything about that and we don’t have much time – I like you, right? And I feel kinda responsible for you being here because I approved your form.’

Her brain had snagged on him saying he liked her. In school, when she’d been a teenager, you went to the boiler room to make out, appearing ten minutes later looking a bit flushed, adjusting your jumper. She was suddenly fifteen again, too close in the dark with a boy, feeling like her hands and feet and lips and, well, everything about her was just too big, too clumsy, too awkward.

She moved her foot and it hit something in the dark, a something that clattered noisily to the floor.

They both froze.

Rory put his hand on her shoulder and she could just about see that he had put his finger to his lips.

They waited.