‘How was the break?’ Maria says, poking her head around the door.

‘Good,’ Cathy says.

‘You look tired. You all do.’

‘We’re fine,’ Cathy says.

‘You eating enough?’

‘Mum,’ Cathy says, a warning signal in her voice. She’s thirty-five. She doesn’t need to be parented. And, if she does, it isn’t this – this anxiety her mother demonstrates. If Maria wants to parent her, then they could at the very least discuss the elephant in the room.

‘I’m just asking,’ Maria says.

‘Are you consulting?’ Cathy says. ‘Today?’

‘No. But Frannie told me there’s a Rottweiler with epistaxis?’

‘Yeah – he’s in the back,’ Cathy says, wondering if, when she’s sixty-five, she won’t be able to resist coming in. God, she hopes not. ‘Joe’s going to CT him.’

‘Really? Already?’

‘It’s not just a bit of sneezing,’ Cathy says, sighing with frustration at having to explain their reasoning, at having to reiterate a conversation they’ve already had. If only their mother would either work full time or not at all …

Maria is already heading out. ‘We’ve got it under control,’ Cathy calls after her.

She checks her phone before her next patient, sitting on the floor next to Macca, her rescue bulldog, brought in three years ago with a broken toe and an owner who didn’t want to pay to have it fixed. ‘To be honest, I wish I’d never got him,’ the man said, and, right that second, Macca’s brown eyes met Cathy’s, and it was love.

‘Sure there’s somebody here who could rescue him,’ she said lightly.

‘Oh, yeah – God. I’d love that. He’s just got too much energy.’

Cathy stared at him, wide-eyed, thinking, How could you? Macca went home with her the week after, heaved himself up on the sofa. His toe hadn’t even needed any treatment except rest.

She browses her phone but there is no news. Her blood turns fizzy in the checking of it. She sits there alone in the backroom, her face flushed, in the premises that she used to be so proud of part-owning but that now feel like a prison. It is no better, being in the UK. It is worse, actually, because they are so far from the body. Cathy has no idea if they’ve found it. At this very moment, as she looks at her holiday manicure resting against Macca’s fur, somebody could be unearthing Will. The stench of him, his rotting skin. What they have done is so wrong, so manifestly wrong. They are monsters. What would their mother think? Their mother would … what? Cathy cannot imagine it. She’d fall apart. That’s what would happen. That is what has already happened once.

She gathers Macca to her. He grunts, and she releases him. Usually, she would work. She would see patient after patient, letting the aftercare stack up and up, she’d order prescription dog food and new oxygen cylinders out back, each task breeding others. She’d get home at ten o’clock, too tired to think. But she doesn’t do that today.