They sat silently, watching him, listening to the bleeps, trying to make sense of the various graphs’ interminable repetitive progress. A repetition whose interruption spelt danger. The one thing he understood was that she, not he, should break the silence.

Instead, it was the nurse. ‘Can I bring you tea – or coffee?’ she asked brightly. Sara turned and shook her head. Patrick followed her lead. ‘You must rest,’ said Bridget, ‘nothing will change tonight.’ Patrick tried to catch Sara’s eye, to give her the energy to move and convey the understanding that it was her father’s will, not hers, that would save him.

Eventually – time was relative and unmeasured – she rose and left, Patrick following. Only when they reached the family room, she flopping on the sofa, he sitting opposite on a hard-backed chair, did she say something meaningful to him.

‘The accident doesn’t add up.’

‘You’re ahead of me,’ he said. ‘A universe ahead.’

‘I can’t think properly. I’m hungry.’

‘I’ll check the place out.’ Within a few minutes, he was back. ‘They keep a corner of one of the canteens open overnight.’

They sat at a Formica table opposite each other on plastic chairs. Patrick stirred sugar into coffee, not wanting to tell her that he’d been drinking at a club when she phoned, and then sucked peppermints as he drove. She sipped from a can of Diet Coke and munched monotonously on a plastic-looking sandwich and a banana. Around them were the quiet stirrings of bleary-eyed night life in a hospital that never slept; the anaesthetist telling a joke to the theatre nurse; the three generations of black-scarved, black-robed women – grandmother, wife, daughter – waiting for news of their male loved one; the curly-haired West Indian cleaner rhythmically swishing her mop over the linoleum floor; the cashier flopped on her elbows, forcing her eyes to stay open for the next customer.

Sara leant back and poured the final dregs of Coke down her throat, Patrick trying not to watch her too closely.

‘Do you want to talk?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know if I’m inventing things,’ she said. ‘The shock is probably distorting it all.’

‘Take me through your day. Yesterday you had that phone call. I saw your excitement. It was all you could think about.’ He paused, a regretful kindness in his eyes. ‘You hardly said goodbye.’

She stretched a hand across the table. ‘I’m sorry.’

With one hand, he took it, with the other he stroked the back. ‘What for?’

She described the train journey; the valley; Elizabeth Green; Marion; the deserted Welsh farm; the rescue; the tragedy of destroyed lives. Arriving home, opening the door, his body by the stairs, the voices of the paramedics still echoing in her mind. The kind nurse. The gentle registrar. The fight for life. The last question.

‘What was he implying?’ asked Patrick.

‘I don’t think he was implying anything. He just couldn’t understand it.’