For a moment I thought I might be dreaming. Not because what was happening was especially nice, but because it was so intensely unbelievable that it couldn’t have actually been happening, like all your teeth snapping out of your mouth or inexplicably forgetting that one must wear clothes to school.

My stomach rolled. I clicked my phone to life to check the time – it was just past midnight.

June knocked again and gestured towards the patient entrance, the door that led outside, or, conversely, inside, like this whole time I’d simply been confused as to what to do next. Yes. The door. How novel. But in her defence, I was just sort of staring at her, unblinking, probably drooling, not because I wasn’t sure what the logical course of action was but because opening the door would make this real and I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to participate in whatever sort of late-night debauchery this was. Maybe if I pretended this wasn’t happening then it would just go away.

But then I realized how hypocritical that was and got up to let her the hell in.

The cold hit me straight away; a frigid gust of wind whipped June’s hair across her face. ‘Evening,’ she said, casual, over the buffeting air.

‘Hi, uh, what’s –’

She shouldered her way past me, which I thought was just to get out of the cold, but then she collapsed into the shallow indent in the patient couch like she owned the place, and stretched her arms so high above her head that a sliver of taut stomach emerged from underneath her jacket.

Not that I noticed.

I shut the door and with the howling muffled, the main sounds were fabric rustling on fabric and the perpetual chaotic screeching in my brain. ‘Uh,’ I said, lamely, ‘yeah, just get comfortable, I guess.’

Meanwhile, June’s frown was almost childlike, like she’d opened all her presents but was expecting more, and her forehead creased. She eyed me up, then looked down beside her, to where Dad’s copy of Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy lay, then looked around all at once like she’d unexpectedly arrived by teleportation. She exhaled through her nose. ‘I’m sorry.’

I wasn’t totally sure what she was apologizing for. ‘It’s OK, I guess, but –’