The crow has settled in my arms, but I can feel its tiny heartbeat thundering away against my own. I feel its terror inside my own chest too. The darkness I’ve shrouded it in pacifies it, in a way it never does me, and I keep my grip on it tight, knowing that if I should loosen it and it should struggle free it could hurt itself even more in its desperation to get away. I only want to help, but the bird doesn’t know that. If we’d left it there it would have died. At least this way it has a fighting chance.

I ponder the ways you can splint a wing without causing more damage, and where I might put the bird after, to contain it safely while it heals.

Liam smiles at me, shaking his head ruefully as I soothe the bird.

‘Tiger used to bring birds home all the time,’ I tell him. ‘Half dead.’ Tiger’s my old cat, an orange tabby with an unoriginal name.

‘I remember,’ Liam laughs. ‘Little animal sacrifices.’

He’d bring them to me as gifts, leave them half eaten on the doormat, or even on the bed. I’d try to patch them up, if they weren’t already dead. I got my love of animals from my grandad. He would often rescue birds and small creatures like mice that he found on his allotment or on walks through the countryside. One time he saved a baby hedgehog and I helped him nurse it back to health on a cocktail of milk and soaked bread, and then, when it was strong enough, we let it go. I cried, worried that it wouldn’t survive on its own without a parent to look out for it, but my grandad reminded me that we’d done all we could; it was now up to the little creature to figure out how to survive in the wild. ‘Only the strong survive,’ he’d told me. ‘That’s just nature’s way.’ I knew he was right, but it still hurt. It didn’t feel fair on the vulnerable and the sensitive who didn’t choose to be that way. But as he used to point out to me, even the smallest, weakest-seeming insect or animal often has hidden strengths. Take the hedgehog: it’s slow and sleepy, but its spikes give it all the protection it needs from predators.