She speeds through the rest of the Angela Kyle file – she can’t afford to have Alec commenting on her work again today – but she doesn’t put it back in the archive. Instead, when Alec isn’t looking, she slips it into the top drawer of her desk. She’ll wait until he leaves to put it in her bag. Chloe is taking Angela Kyle home.

At Park House that evening, one of the care assistants shows Chloe where Nan is sitting in the recreation room. Chloe doesn’t recognize her at first; she looks smaller here somehow, like she’s shrunken, and takes up less room than she had in her living room with its fake mahogany dado rail. Like the wood moulding stitching together two parts of the wall, Nan held herself and Chloe together too. She was the lynchpin of their family life. Here she appears as anonymous, as tiny, as any other resident. Seeing Nan like that, across the room, unsettles her for a moment.

Chloe takes a few steps towards her, but Nan doesn’t turn around. She watches her silently, this small woman with her delicate frame, her fragile shoulders barely filling her mauve cardigan.

‘Nan?’ she says, more quietly than she might usually. For some reason, this alien environment is making a mockery of them. And as if she feels it too, Nan doesn’t turn around.

Chloe stops then. Which world is she inhabiting in this moment? Is it one where she’s brought Stella back from the dead, or is Granddad off fighting in the war? She never knows what she will face. It used to be day to day, then hour to hour, now it is more likely minute to minute. Faced with such shifting sands, is it any wonder they both let her disease win from time to time? There is another way of dealing with this illness after all: the days when it unwittingly swells their family from two to four could be seen as a gift. A chance for them both to pretend. As if this thief of time that creeps into her brain is letting them both live a fantasy.

As Chloe gets closer she sees that Nan is smiling.

‘Nan?’

She doesn’t respond.

Her hair has been shampooed and set, a brooch she hasn’t seen except in photographs is pinned to her jumper. Her smile is slicked in coral lipstick too. She’s never seen Nan wearing lipstick before.

‘Nan?’

She turns around.

‘Who are you?’ she says.

‘It’s me, Chloe?’

‘I don’t know anyone called Chloe.’

‘I’m Stella’s daughter,’ she says, ‘your granddaughter.’

Nan laughs then, really laughs. Her coral lipstick makes a giant ‘O’ on her face. ‘Stella’s only a baby herself, she doesn’t have any children.’ She turns back to looking out of the window then, still chuckling to herself. ‘I’m just waiting for her to come home from school.’