He wasn’t even looking at her as he spoke, but flicking through his phone, checking photos of women, updates they’d experienced, how it had affected their bodies, holding up his screen occasionally to compare the image of a model to Harmony’s sprawled out, gown-clad body in bed, as if checking a portrait against a suspected fake.

“I’m . . . I don’t think I’m ready for this yet,” she blurted.

“Don’t be ridiculous – give me your phone.”

Her fingers tightened. “No.”

“Harmony.” A slow chide of irritation, the wiser man dismissing a child’s complaint, and it reminded her of something. What was that feeling?

(“Don’t you have upgrades?”)

“Clearly you’ve made bad choices in the past; that’s why you’re here. We need to be better, make better choices. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and I really think . . . ” He reached out to grab her phone, and she snatched it away.

“Don’t touch my fucking phone!”

Her voice rang out across the ward, loud enough for the nurse to glance up from her tablet, face twitching in disapproval and surprise. Jiannis rocked back, eyes flickering around the room to see if anyone else had noticed this shameful outburst. “Babe, you’re being . . . ”

“Don’t touch it,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch it!”

A moment of astonishment. No one has talked to him like this for years. He doesn’t know what to do about it. He hasn’t had to deal with such . . .

But it’s a hospital ward. Generally speaking, abusing patients is considered Not Cool, and will be bad for his kudos. “All right,” he hissed, soft and slow beneath his breath. Then again: “All right. You’re clearly not yet in your right state of mind. That’s fine. I’ll pick you up tomorrow and then we’ll talk about this properly when you get home, yes? Yes.” Standing up in a single movement, shoving his phone into his pocket. “Yes,” he concluded, argument settled, problem solved. “That’s what we’ll do. Fine.”

Without a word, he marched away, and Harmony changed the password on her phone the moment he was out of the room.

Chapter 22

It was the sound of someone playing the piano that drew Harmony’s attention.

Visiting hours were ending, but not many families made it to 8 p.m. through the ritual of dinner – school dinner sausages and rice pudding – or the flurry of nurses checking for sores, draining a swollen cyst, shaking heads at blood pressure. Visitors liked the quiet hours, the gentle moment on the ward where nothing much was happening and they could focus on clean, cordial emissions of care without the sticky biological stuff or reality of hospital life getting in the way of their compassion.

At first, after she regained consciousness, Harmony strictly obeyed all the nurses’ commands, stayed in bed, drank plenty of water and let someone know when she was going to the lav, reduced to a four-year-old again. Then she saw other patients sneaking out for a fag, or popping down to the shop on the ground floor to buy a naughty chocolate bar, and the nurses either didn’t notice or didn’t care, so when she got bored, she also started wandering. There was TV to entertain her, and internet for £15 a day, but it made her eyes hurt and the longer she spent on the ward, the louder it seemed to be. Beeping which had been hushed on Monday was, by Thursday, a deafening cacophony without end. The groaning of a woman whose nanos couldn’t take away the pain – “Perhaps it’s in her head?” a doctor whispered – made Harmony curl up, knees to chest, hands over her ears, begging for it to stop, for the woman to sleep, lapse into a coma, die.