It had only been a few weeks, but her absence seemed like months to her, or a whole lifetime, her other life a kind of dream. On that first morning, she was horribly anxious that she would no longer remember how to be a doctor, that her colleagues would watch her and whisper behind her back, or that she would suddenly start crying. She felt obscurely disgraced and also shockingly vulnerable. As she limped through the revolving doors and into the foyer, she tried to appear professional and confident. Dr. Jude Winter, reporting for business.

Within minutes, she was back in the thick flow of hospital life, marked by the bleep of the pager, the ward round, the hurried consultations. She had forgotten how comforting the sense of purpose was, every moment measured out, the minute hand on the large clocks in the dementia wards sweeping round.

By Wednesday, it was the violent hiatus of her time away that seemed unreal, a hallucination. Jude knew that tomorrow afternoon, when she had a day off before a string of nights, she had to go to the police station and give her full statement to Leila Fox—but that was just a bureaucratic necessity. The sense of dread was ebbing away. Mostly she was exhausted, and it was the kind of exhaustion best cured by daily routine.

So when she left the hospital in the early evening, stepping out into the biting cold, and looked at the messages on her mobile, she was startled to see she had three missed calls from Tara Birch, as well as a text, saying: Call me!

She didn’t want to call Tara. She didn’t want to think about her—a mother of two sons, one of whom had killed the other. How would you endure such anguish?

The answer, it turned out, was Alfie.

“He’s with us,” said Tara, throaty and thick-voiced as though she had a bad cold. “We’re his family now.”

“I’m glad,” said Jude. “I hope that’s some kind of solace.”

Anything she might say seemed paltry and tasteless.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Tara. “But me and Andy, we’re going to do everything in our power to give him a proper childhood.”

“That’s good,” said Jude. “I’m sure you will.”

She put her mobile under her chin and pulled on her mittens, taking care not to scrape her injured hand. Her breath was smoking.

“Danny’s mother died several years ago and her father’s got a history of violence, so it was always going to be us.”

Jude tried to suppress the memory that flashed into her mind, of Danny and Tara pulling at Alfie like an awful tug-of-war.

“Right,” she said.

She put on her helmet. She’d borrowed a friend’s bike while hers was being fixed.

“You know what happened?” asked Tara.

“Yes.”

“Of course you do. The whole world knows.”

“They’ll forget again.”