‘Of course. Wise move. Do you want me to dispose of it for you?’

‘Could you? That’d be great,’ said Judy. ‘I didn’t want to pour it down the sink in case it got into the water supply and sent all the fish off their faces. That’s if fish even have faces.’

After Judy left, Paula picked up the bottle, which still contained at least two hundred millilitres of hydromorphone, a synthetic opiate. It had always struck her as an anomaly that prescribing Schedule 8 drugs was so regulated, with a strict paper trail, but then situations like this would often arise—a patient died or was admitted to hospital, leaving their unused medications sitting in bathroom cabinets, no longer controlled or traceable. For now, Paula stowed the bottle in a lockable cupboard in her consulting room.

The plan to nurse Judy’s dying mother at home had collapsed after a hip fracture landed her in an emergency department. That was how it played out for so many people. Paula’s father had died in a hospital ICU because her mother had insisted on all possible measures being taken to extend his life. By the end, his crumbly body had been barricaded behind so much equipment, it was difficult to embrace him. Two years later, her mother fell onto her kitchen floor, toppled by a stroke that most likely took a further few hours to kill her, with no one around to offer any human touch in those final moments. Neither parent had experienced the kind of death Paula would recommend to a patient.

She was grateful that during Remy’s last week of life she was able to stay close, lying in the bed with him for pretty much twenty-four hours a day. Visitors would come and go, perching on the edge of the mattress to chat or play music or just sit quietly.

From time to time, she would jump up to make food or to help the palliative nurse, but otherwise, she lay beside Remy, feeling the warmth of his body next to her, wanting to bank up the feeling, lock it in.

Afterwards, she had found it hard to sleep alone in their bed and the insomnia persisted, like a stubborn injury, for months after he died. She tried temazepam, which helped her drift off for a few hours, but she would usually wake up at three or four a.m. and that would be the end of sleep for the night. In desperation, she had experimented with opioids. Not every night. Only occasionally, only when her eyeballs were scraping inside their sockets and her bones felt abrasive under her skin. Only when she needed seven or eight hours of unconsciousness so she could be rested and functional for her patients. An occasional short-term fix.