I sigh. Not this again. “My health is good now, Ross. It’s the best it’s ever been. I haven’t had a major seizure in almost two years.”

I don’t usually say that out loud because I don’t want to tempt fate, especially now that I’m finally getting a life. Not that I believe in fate. Not really. Even so, I tap the wooden countertop just to be on the safe side.

I still get partials from time to time—brief absence seizures. Fleeting moments of absence that don’t really bother me, to be honest. It’s other people who tend to notice them, not me. My eyelids flutter and I zone out for a few seconds. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.

“It’s the best it’s ever been because you’re relaxed and looking after yourself properly,” Ross says. “You mustn’t overdo things.”

I scrub the eggy plates with the brush, just a little too hard. He’s right. Of course he is. That last job I did was a mistake. I was still at home with Mum and Dad then and commuting into the city every day. I should have listened to them. It was too much for me—I was exhausted. But now that I’m living in London with Ross it’ll be so much easier. I’m on exactly the right combination of drugs, too, just enough to stop the really big seizures, the ones where I fall down and make a spectacle of myself, but not so much that my brain is continually foggy.

“I’m just sick of everything always being about my epilepsy. I’m not an invalid!”

Ross spins me round by the shoulders and looks deep into my eyes. “Quite true. You are a gorgeous, sexy woman, who’s also as stubborn as a mule.”

We kiss for so long, by the time we’ve finished we’ve forgotten what we were arguing about. Or rather, we’ve pretended to forget.

We met in a café, in the small seaside town of Dovercourt, near Harwich, where my parents and I moved after Alice’s death. He bumped into me and slopped his coffee on my suede boots, apologized about five times, and ended up buying me a Coke and a flapjack, which I regretted as soon as I picked it up because crumbs spattered all over the table and made him laugh. I’d thought he was the same age as me, so when he turned out to be in his thirties, and about to become a fully qualified GP, I was gobsmacked.