Joe finishes his crisps, then goes back to his blood-spinning.

As he’s working late, he receives a text from Frannie. His bottle of wine – a Yellow Tail merlot – is sitting there on the checkout next to – he snorts – a packet of cigarettes and a huge cheesecake.

‘Perfect,’ he replies to her, and she sends a smile.

Joe thinks, now, as he works, of all the animals he’s ever treated, and saved. The happiness they bring to their owners. The care and attention he treats them with. Wonders if that will ever outweigh it.

34.

Cathy

Cathy is in a consultation with a woman whose Dobermann is off his food.

‘Try the paste for two days,’ Cathy says, her hand on the Dobermann’s head. He’s fine. Eyes bright. Tail wagging. Stomach feels relaxed and non-tender. ‘Stick to the bland diet, hand-feed him chicken and rice rolled into balls if you need to. Little and often. Come back if that doesn’t work, but he should be fine.’ She meets the owner’s eyes – a woman in her sixties. ‘I’m not worried,’ she says. She always says this, if it’s true. She would want to be told it herself, if it was Macca who was sick.

The woman blinks at her, smiling, a hand going unconsciously to gesture to the dog. People’s pets mean so much to them. Cathy sees the Dobermann and his owner out into the reception. Frannie – a pen holding up her hair, Facebook open on the work computer, her desk littered with chocolate bar and crisp wrappers – quickly task-switches and sorts out the bill. She glances at Cathy. ‘Got time for a quick fashion parade?’

Cathy raises her eyebrows.

‘Look – I shop when I’m stressed,’ Frannie says, getting an ASOS parcel with its distinctive black-and-white packaging out of the top drawer. ‘What do you make of this?’ she says, opening it and pulling out the clothes. She holds up a top to Cathy. It’s blood-red.

‘Too much,’ Cathy says quietly. ‘Red doesn’t suit you.’

Frannie keeps rooting in the bag, oblivious. Cathy doesn’t say, How can you think of shopping right now? It wouldn’t be fair. They all cope in different ways. Frannie drags Cathy into the prep room, the room with the best lights, where she tries on a floor-length patterned dress which swamps her. As she pulls it off, Cathy can see her ribs.

‘Maybe,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s a possible.’ It’s a phrase she used to say to Frannie all the time when the clothes came to the practice, but she doesn’t mean it this time. Everything’s changed.

‘I’ll ask Deb,’ Frannie says, balling up the dress and putting it back into the clear plastic wrap.

Back in the consultation room, Cathy cleans the table with antiseptic spray and blue roll.

She hears her mother arrive in the foyer. Cathy has always been tolerant of her mother’s inability to completely relinquish control of the business to her three children, but she can’t see her today. She’ll know.