I had forgotten until she began telling me about going to vet school how she had encouraged me in my desire to go to nursing school. The time I spent in her clinic in Kilmarnock, the smell of disinfectant and alcohol swabs, the confidence with which she gave needles, snipped stitches, bandaged wounds.

I was with her once, during a high school summer vacation, when a kitten who had been hit by a car was brought in. I had been cleaning out cages when she called for towels. The kitten was bleeding on the operating table. Mewling, shaking in pain. Grandma gave it a shot of a sedative and staunched the bleeding. The person who had dropped the kitten off wasn’t its owner, and it had no collar, no ID.

‘The internal injuries are too serious; I’m going to have to put him down,’ Grandma said. ‘You don’t have to stay for this.’

‘I’ll help,’ I said, swallowing my cowardice. ‘Tell me what to do.’

I sat with the kitten in my lap, wrapped in a towel, and stroked his little head as Grandma got the pentobarbital. She had shaved his foreleg so she could better see the vein.

‘He won’t feel pain now, but he might jerk or gasp before his heart stops. It’s a natural reaction. You’re doing great.’

I murmured to the kitten and stroked him, and he looked up at me, let out a meow that went straight to my heart. Grandma, with steady hands, found the vein, inserted the needle, injected the solution. The kitten half closed his eyes, as though in sleep. He twitched, the little body stiffened then softened. He had stopped breathing. Grandma listened for the heartbeat. He was gone.

‘You did well, Hannah,’ Grandma said. ‘Think of how much easier you made the last minutes of his life.’ She took the little bundle from me.

Blood had seeped through the towel onto the leg of my jeans, leaving a dark stain I didn’t want to get rid of. It reminded me of that brief life and the pain I had helped to ease. It reminded me that I could be strong, too.

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 35