He was on a high floor, in the bed closest to the window. While Jake slept, exhausted by pain and medication, I stared out of the window, over the bland fields where work had begun on another wing of the hospital, cranes and diggers bright and stark against the wash of the sky. The last times – the only times – we had been in hospital together before this, our children were being born. Time didn’t move in hospital, I had noticed back then: it pooled, gathered, got stuck.

The one time my mother was hospitalized, we didn’t know it was happening. She’s having her wisdom teeth out, we were told, and for years – decades – afterwards I thought this was what dental surgery did to your face, that it caused swollen lumps around the eyes and mouth, that it somehow painted the colours of a storm – deep indigo, bottle green, streaks of navy – across the cheeks.

Children can suspend their disbelief to an extraordinary degree, I was told later. Things that make absolutely no sense – the neck cast, the wrist cast – can become plausible, can be blended into the picture, be made to fit. It was a different hospital to this one, but it looked just the same. Same floor, same windows as those I stood at now – thick, plastic, jump-­proof – looking out at clouds moving across the day.

Now, the curtains moved, awkwardly, as though someone wanted to knock. The sound of a man clearing his throat.

Mrs Stevenson? A voice, so clear and authoritative. The curtains parted. A white coat, a pale, thin face. The doctor asked whether, despite Jake’s apparent lack of history, there was something going on they should know about.

Does he ever talk about hurting himself? Has he ever attempted suicide? I answered no to everything, kept my eyes down. I knew he was trained to spot people like me: liars, sadists. Monsters. My hands curled over in my pockets, the nails sharp against my palms. I had wiped the razor, buried it without thinking in our household bin, under teabags and banana skins, the waste of our week.

At any moment, I thought, I would be dragged away: I kept picturing the men who would take me, a criminal-­looking gang with masks over their faces, pulling me out of the high clear light of the hospital, recoiling in revulsion as they fastened my handcuffs.

The doctor asked his questions, and I answered them, my mouth dry and twisting, my voice coming out high, then low.

I went into the room, and he had the razor. There was blood everywhere . . .