‘Come to the neck! She’s been hit by a car! We’ve got the ambo on the way.’

He froze up. He just stood there, by the kitchen sink. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t do anything; he just stood there. His hearing went all muted like he had earmuffs on, and from somewhere far away he could hear Flo’s parroty tones: ‘Jem? Jem? Jem?’

Then he snapped back to it, said, ‘I’m coming,’ and ran out of the house with no shoes on.

He was in the car, sole to the pedal, pedal to the metal, and was by Lucy’s side before he had a chance to think, before he had a chance to prepare himself for it.

Not that you can ever prepare yourself for it. He had heaps of time to prepare himself with the cancer and he was still a stunned mullet when she went in for that surgery, he was still dazed through the nightmare of chemo. It was so disorientating; the whole gruelling thing was. It was the strangest mix of utterly boring and utterly terrifying, and it had gone on for what felt like forever, but in such an abstracted and timeless way, where it had felt like their life had turned into nothing but potential tomorrows—like there was no today that mattered except the today to be endured because there must be a tomorrow. There must be, Jem had kept thinking. There must be a tomorrow.

But that night wasn’t about the anticipation of a tomorrow at all; it was about the shocking, shocking moment in which he saw Lucy, lying there in the January night, on the side of the road, unconscious, with blood coagulating in the gravel beneath her.

‘The paramedics said not to move her,’ Flo told him, so he just stroked her back and kissed her cheek—the one that was upturned—and prised the octopus arm from her fist.

Not my Luce, not my Luce, he thought. Not my Luce not my Luce not my Luce.

He couldn’t believe it was happening again. The circumstances were different, but the fear seizing his chest was instantly recognisable.