She was standing her ground, glaring at them and trying not to shout or cry or curl into a ball. Then she felt an arm go round her and she leaned into a bulky overcoat.

“Come on, Jude. This way.”

It was her consultant. He bought her a coffee and she told him, between hot and comforting gulps, that she was having a bit of a crisis, as he had probably gathered by now, but she was fine to work. It would help, in fact: the structure and purpose. Her hands trembled so much that she could barely steer her mug to her mouth. Hot liquid slopped onto the table.

“You’re sure?” he asked doubtfully, looking at her shaking hands, her tired face, her flannel shirt that she realized was wrongly buttoned up.

So it was that Jude was signed off work for two weeks. She returned to her empty flat, packed two bags of clothes, her laptop and chargers, and other basic things she thought she would need to tide her over the next few days. She stayed that night at Dee’s. Jude didn’t want to talk and Dee didn’t press her. She was peaceable like that. They ate takeaway pizza and watched a film and then Jude slept on the fold-out sofa bed and looked through the uncurtained windows at tower blocks and cranes and the winking lights of planes, climbing higher, going somewhere far away.

She woke in the early hours, when the rain had stopped; there was a slice of moon in the window. She lay staring out at it, feeling the strangeness of her life now, so abruptly hollowed out.

The following morning she moved into Simon’s flat. It was in Tottenham, in the basement of a narrow Victorian house wedged between two modern blocks of flats. The rooms were dark and Jude could smell the damp. There was nowhere to put her bike, so she leaned it against a counter in the kitchen area. The sofa was stained. The stove was small and rusty, and there was no electric kettle, just a stainless-steel one you had to put on the hob that took ages to boil. In the windowless bathroom, the shower dripped steadily. The plants that Simon wanted her to water were ferns and succulents, and the cat was a narrow, grizzled tabby with a torn ear and an unfriendly gaze.

She had a fortnight off—or rather, she realized as she unpacked her meager belongings into the drawers that Simon had cleared for her—she had even more than that because of time owed after her night shifts. She and Nat had planned to go away somewhere for a long weekend.

She plugged her laptop into the socket by the small table in the kitchen, then opened up the mailbox. Emails started appearing from friends. There were dozens and most were about the same thing. She winced and connected to her work emails instead.