She got up, the metal chair legs screeching on the stone terrace. ‘I need to go.’

‘You can’t drive when you’re in shock, Romy. I’ll take you.’

‘No … No, I’ll be fine,’ she said, although she didn’t feel fine at all: her heart was thumping and she was slightly dizzy. It somehow didn’t seem right, though, to drag Finch into a drama concerning Michael.

Finch had already risen from his chair, a determined look on his face. ‘I’ll fetch the car. Meet you at yours in fifteen,’ he said. ‘I can drop you off. It won’t be easy to park near the hospital.’

Romy knew he was right and, after a brief hesitation, nodded. ‘If you’re sure.’

As she randomly threw clothes into an overnight bag and shut up the cottage, seeing reminders of those wonderful hours last night in the scattered cushions on the sitting-room floor, the rumpled bed, his jacket still on the peg by the front door, she felt the whole thing had happened a million years ago, in a totally different universe.

Romy stared down at the face on the pillow in the high hospital bed and heard her breath catch with distress. It was a face once as familiar to her as her own, but now it seemed like that of a stranger. Michael lay sunken, diminished, his normally animated features flat and pallid, like a clay mask. She placed her hand on his, as it lay on the sheet, gently squeezing it.

‘Michael?’

She hadn’t expected him to open his eyes, but he did, his gaze unfocused. Then they slowly closed again. She had seen him asleep a million times over the years – it was the only time his spirited, intelligent face seemed to find any peace. But now she wanted to shake him awake, jolt him out of this horrible stillness.

Romy turned to Leo. ‘Has he said anything?’ Her son, tall like her, dark like his father, but with her wide brown-gold eyes and mutinous curls, which he kept very short, looked haggard, blinking back tears that she rarely saw from her self-possessed boy. She took his arm and brought him close, but his body was rigid with tension and he did not respond, his eyes fixed on the figure on the bed.

‘He looked at me earlier and tried to speak, but I couldn’t understand what he said.’

Romy checked around the ward, light pouring in through the extensive windows. ‘Who can I talk to?’ There were medical staff everywhere, and a sense of professional calm, with enough room between each bed-station – she reckoned around twelve in all – to give a sense of privacy.

Leo pointed to a woman in blue scrubs with short mousy hair and a large bosom, a stethoscope slung round her neck, talking earnestly to a bespectacled man in a dark suit behind the nurses’ desk. ‘That’s her, Dad’s doctor.’