‘We’re fine. But thank you,’ Bell managed, seeing how Hanna was trembling, as white as the walls. The nurse walked on.

‘Come and sit down, you look faint,’ Bell said, tugging Hanna forward by the arm to a leather tub chair. She collapsed into it, staring into nowhere, caught in her own head.

Bell crouched down to clasp her arms around Linus. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ she whispered, pulling back to look into his eyes, to smooth his hair back from that beautiful face, to reassure him that it was all okay again. His sobs had subsided, but his eyelashes were glossy with hot tears. He nodded, but the movement was shaky, the movement of a child wanting to make his mother happy again; his eyes kept tracking back to her, fearful.

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded again, but he would only look at his mother.

‘Hanna?’ she asked, turning to her too and touching her arm lightly.

Hanna blinked, her eyes darting everywhere. ‘I’m . . . I’m fine.’

Bell felt the silence expand as they each recovered. Away from the distraction of the confusion and chaos in that room, in the calm of this corridor, it was filled with something heavy – something that had been said and couldn’t be unsaid. She felt a rush of anger that Hanna had allowed this to happen. To have handled it that badly . . . Max had been right. Linus should never have come here; and if Hanna was adamant he must, she should have told him the truth before they’d gone in. She should have explained exactly who that man was, and what had happened to him – and what might happen when he was reunited with the poppy-tall son he had last seen as a toddler. Instead, she’d left it to chance, and it had blown up in the most terrible of ways.

‘She called him my father.’ It was a statement, a question, an accusation.

Oh God. Bell felt her stomach twist as she saw the uncomprehending expression on Linus’s tear-streaked face. He had been told the truth, and now Hanna had to explain it to him. Everything was back to front; it should never have happened this way . . .

Hanna looked back at him, finally, and with outstretched arms, drew him towards her. Her hands were trembling still, her smile sketchy and weak. Bell swallowed. How could she say these words, here, in a hospital corridor? Max, fifty miles away, unable to tell the boy he had raised as his own that he was still his father, would always be that.

‘. . . That doctor was just confused, sweetheart.’

Linus blinked, not so easily fooled. He was nearly ten, almost in double figures, a few years from being a teenager. ‘But she said—’

‘I know, but she was wrong. He’s just an old friend of mine. He’s your godfather.’

Bell stared at her in horror. What the hell was she doing? She could understand why Hanna hadn’t told Linus about his real father before he had woken up: Linus would have been just a toddler when the accident had happened, and if the prognosis had been so poor . . . And Max had been an excellent father to him. There had never been any sense of difference that even she had discerned between his affection for Linus and for his sisters. But all of that was irrelevant now that the man in there was awake and was, in one way or another, going to be back in their lives. Linus had to know the truth. It couldn’t be kept from him. And yet –