The noise continues, so close it might be just outside the window. I turn my head toward the streetlight that shines through the gap in the curtains. Streetlight? How can it be nighttime already? Then I recognize the noise. It isn’t the hiss of rain or the rustle of leaves. It’s whispering. The whispering that’s haunted me all my life. My parents whispering behind closed doors. Police officers whispering in corridors. Schoolfriends whispering behind my back.

It’s coming from beyond the curtains, which now I realize aren’t my bedroom curtains at all, but curtains around my bed. A hospital bed. The vestiges of a dream hover at the back of my mind. A nightmare about Ross and Catherine.

I struggle to sit up, but I’m so groggy I can barely move. It feels as though I’m shrouded in gauze. Every muscle in my body aches. Every sinew. Every bone.

I run my hands over my stomach, pressing ever so gently, and am, at last, rewarded with a faint sensation of movement. I exhale in relief, but the feeling is short-lived. My temples throb with the worst headache I’ve had in ages. There’s no saliva in my mouth and my tongue feels swollen and sore.

I sink back onto the pillows, defeated. A feeling of despondency settles like sediment in the pit of my stomach. The thing I most dread must have happened again. Another seizure.

Hands pull the curtains aside and Ross appears, his eyes tired and dull, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a worried, tense expression that turns into a smile when he sees me.

“Hello, sleepyhead. How are you feeling?”

He perches on the side of my bed and strokes my cheek and, as he does so, the dream comes flooding back. Pulling my rucksack down from the top of the wardrobe. Flinging things inside. The old, familiar anxiety dream, but a particularly nasty one. The discovery that he didn’t love me, after all. That he and Catherine were laughing at me behind my back. Conspiring against me. I hate those bloody dreams.

I squeeze his wrist and kiss his fingers, tears brimming at the sight of him, so solid and loving, so absolutely here and on my side. The man I love. The father of my unborn child.

“I came home and found you slumped on the floor by the bedroom door,” he says. “Oh, Lizzie. Lizzie, darling.”

Something about his voice unsettles me. It’s that awful dream. For some reason, I can’t stop thinking about it. Nasty snippets keep arriving in my head. His baseball cap in Catherine’s drawer. His aunt living on Riley Road. It’s still so vivid and painful. So random and bizarre.