Which he probably has, given what Nellie’s just told me. The words she’d uttered creep through me like a kind of cold death.

She still lives in the same house she and Hank bought back in the early 2000s, when they both knew the future held nothing but joyful opportunity, a place where nothing bad would ever happen. It’s a floating structure, purpose-built and tethered to a quay at IJburg, part of a range of artificial islands constructed to ease pressure on Amsterdam’s ever-expanding housing crisis. We’re in the large downstairs, an open-plan area with views out over the water, sitting at the table where Hank and Nellie had eaten for years, where now she eats alone.

On the kitchen surface behind her is an empty bottle of wine. If you stare through it, the tiles beyond become curved, magnified. I suddenly know that in the bin there are going to be many more bottles. Some inspector I am, I think to myself, not having spotted that earlier. I’d always thought she had the kind of fragility only the truly strong allow themselves to show the world. Now I’m not so sure.

‘When?’ is all I can manage, the word catching in my throat, the cold creeping further through me.

‘They said it will be put before the committee and I’ll have an answer the next day. If it’s approved, then it has to take place within four days or another application will have to be made.’

Jesus. I’ve lost people; it feels like more than most. But their deaths all happened. I’ve never had to face the decision Nellie’s been wrestling with for months now. I wonder about the first time the idea popped into her head. Did she hate herself for even thinking it? How did she gradually come to decide it was time?

Nellie’s a paediatric neurologist, working with the worst cases of childhood epilepsy, including two of the most devastating, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome. We’re talking kids who have twenty to thirty fits a day, kids for who the standard medications simply don’t work. Frustrated, she researched heavily and has for the past three years been treating with a phenomenal success rate. The prescription is cannabis, small doses of which reduce the frequency of episodes down to a couple a month, sometimes less. Say you have the choice of watching your child fit upwards of thirty times a day, or a couple of times a month, what are you going to do? Unsurprisingly her waiting list is over a year long now, with desperate parents bringing their children from countries all over Europe.