‘It was just hard when you were all young,’ Maria says, and Joe guesses it was. A career woman in the eighties, married to a career man too.

‘I bet you look back on it fondly,’ he says, trying to invite it into the room. But what, exactly? Rosie, definitely, but also just Maria as she once was. The boy that lives in him is always looking for that, for that glimpse. He can see how badly damaged Cathy was by Rosie’s death, and he supposes he worries he might be similarly affected too.

His mother looks away from him. ‘Don’t you?’ he presses. Rosie would have been thirty next week. He knows what will happen in a few days’ time: his mother and father won’t answer their phones, will emerge a week later pleading busyness, stomach bugs, a tough DIY project. It’s the same every year. Her birthday goes both unmarked and marked in equal measure.

When she looks up at him, her eyes are wet. ‘I look back on a lot of things fondly,’ she says, and then she leaves, as though that sentence was a goodbye.

Joe looks down at some cat prescriptions, trying not to cry himself. God, he wants his mother. That smiling slide mother, as she once was, her arms open to him and all of his hopes and fears and problems.

The prescriptions. He was only co-signing them to occupy himself, but they’re wrong. He huffs.

‘These have the wrong dose on,’ he says, walking into the reception and waving them at Cathy. ‘You signed them yesterday?’

‘Do they?’ she says, but she isn’t looking at him.

‘Yeah – they’re ten times the dose. Cath?’

‘Oh – sorry,’ she says. ‘I must have – I don’t know. Lost my head a bit.’ She flashes a smile at him, just for a split-second. Blink and you’d miss it. Cathy’s way. What is going on with her? She never makes mistakes. And she seems pretty sanguine about it.

She’s told somebody. The paranoia arrives like a truth in Joe’s brain, the way anxiety always does. His chest constricts. His hands begin sweating.

‘Tough on all of us, isn’t it?’ he says, trying to dispel the panic and to open her up.

‘It’s fine,’ she says.

‘Right, nought point one mill, not one mill,’ Joe says, scribbling out the dose and signing it himself. ‘Okay?’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

It’s dusk. Frannie left for the day at four, working one of her short days, so it’s just the two of them. The television is tuned to the news, as it always is, but is now, of course, rendered sinister for all of them.

Evan’s out the back, somewhere, reluctantly finishing the stitching. They need to be better with Evan, he is thinking, somewhere in the back of his mind, and stop giving him the shitty post-op tasks to do. Joe saw a coupon on his desk the other day: £2 off in Tesco, carefully clipped and folded. Maria would hate a non-Plant joining the partnership, but maybe Joe could do something for him … something magnanimous. Something good.