After he’d said goodbye the night before, she’d had her phone ready beside her for hours afterwards, braced for a text or a call, some word that would tell her Dave’s response. But no word had come. Her phone remained resolutely silent. And then this morning she’d woken up and reached for it, only to realize in dismay that at some point it had gone stone dead, with no means of recharging. She couldn’t even text Dave a tentative hello, let alone anything more exploratory. Short of passing her brief message to him via Paula, she was just going to have to wait for him to make contact – if he even chose to, that was.

‘As for the peas, they were straight out of a tin. And ruddy disgusting they were, too!’ exploded Elsie from the left just then. ‘I said to the nurse: I’m not eating those. You’d have to pay me to eat those!’ (It was true, Bunny had heard her scathing refusal with her own ears. The entire ward had.)

‘Oh dear,’ said her visitor, who sounded practically comatose with boredom by now.

Elsie went on to describe the insult that had been the treacle sponge pudding (‘with the runniest custard – like water it was, and I’m not exaggerating!’) while Bunny’s thoughts turned to the possible whereabouts of her phone charger, which had last been seen in the boot of her car, stuffed into one of her bags. She wondered what had become of it, as well as the rest of her things, for that matter – not to mention what had happened to the car itself. One of the paramedics had brought her handbag in for her when they’d arrived in A&E, but that was the sole possession she had at the moment. If Dave was really angry with her, might he have destroyed the rest of her stuff? Dumped the lot of it in the nearest skip? How could she go creeping back for her clothes and make-up when he probably wanted nothing more to do with her? With her car a write-off and barely one hundred pounds in her account, she wouldn’t be able to get very far now. What was she going to do?

‘All right there, pet, let’s have a quick look at you,’ said a nurse just then, whisking through the curtain with a portable blood-pressure monitor. ‘How are you feeling this evening?’

Like my heart is breaking and I’ve got nowhere to turn. ‘Still a bit weird,’ Bunny confessed, shuffling up into a sitting position.

‘Don’t we all, my darling,’ replied the nurse. She was in her forties, broad-shouldered and freckly, her auburn ponytail swinging as she bent over Bunny to slide the blood-pressure cuff up her forearm. ‘But in your case, at least you’ve got an excuse, with that bumped head of yours. How are you managing with the pain?’