‘It becomes addictive,’ I say. ‘I know it doesn’t make sense, but it is so tempting to take it the next step, and then the next—if I had three bites of a sandwich yesterday to try having just two today. At a certain point I can’t shut it off. It’s a compulsion.’

‘Does it make you feel better than the rest of us mere humans? The ones who are always eating, always stuffing our faces?’

‘It’s not that. More that it gives me back a sense of control.’

‘Do you want to talk about that, what makes you lose control?’

I shake my head.

‘Okay, then, let me ask you this: where do you see yourself in ten years?’

I shrug.

‘C’mon, answer the question.’

I look towards the window. This part of the ship is most often in shade, but just now light is coming in through the window, and outside there is the pale blue of sky meeting the darker blue of sea. A gull flaps past, carrying something glinting and silver in its beak.

‘Working as an RN. Paediatrics, I hope.’

‘Married? A family?’

I shrug. ‘Possibly.’

‘Still running?’

‘Definitely.’

The doctor sits down on the chair behind his desk. He clicks the mouse to wake up his desktop and types some notes, adjusting his reading glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose.

‘I’m not going to lecture you, Hannah. You’ve heard it all before. You know as well as I do that your goals will be impossible to achieve if you keep this up. Stress fractures, osteoporosis, heart failure—anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Look at your grandmother: you could die before her. Look around you. There’s so much you can do to help other people, but you can’t do that if you can’t keep yourself alive, if you don’t get to the bottom of this—the real reason for your disorder.’

I look away as he says this, keeping my face as expressionless as possible. When he’s finished talking I leave the room, saying I have to get Grandma for dinner.

She is waiting in the library, and as we walk arm in arm over to the restaurant she points out that we don’t have many dinners left on the ship. We stroll underneath the lifeboats, along the deck. The sun is a bright orange ball dropping slowly, then disappearing all at once behind the horizon. The sky turns from orange to violet. I’d pushed away the doctor’s words when he said them—I have heard so many speeches about how selfish I am that I immediately assumed this was his point as well. But now I think about what he said. I don’t want Grandma to have to bury me. I want her to be proud of me. Like I am proud of her.