She stopped, looking into another room, her arms stretched out between the doorframe. “I’ll only be a moment,” she said to whoever was inside. The nun stood, with one foot slightly lifted and pointed behind her, as if she were a dancer, but wearing trainers. Turning back to Harold, she gave a warm smile, and said they were nearly there. He was cold, or tired, or something that seemed to squeeze the life out of him.

The nun walked a few more paces and stopped to knock gently at a door. She listened a moment, with her knuckles resting on the wood and her ear flat against it, and then she opened the door a crack and peered inside.

“We have a visitor,” she said to the room he could not yet see.

Pushing the door to the wall, she flattened herself against it as he passed. “How exciting,” she said. He took a deep breath that seemed to come from his feet, and lifted his gaze to the room ahead.

There was no more than a window, with thin curtains partially drawn, and beyond that a sky that appeared far away. There was a simple bed set under a wooden cross, with a pan beneath it and an empty chair at its side.

“But she’s not here.” He felt a giddying wave of unexpected relief.

Sister Philomena laughed. “Of course she’s here.” She nodded in the direction of the bed, and looking at it again he found a slight form beneath the ice-white sheets. Something stretched at its side, like a long white claw, and then as Harold peered again it occurred to him that this was Queenie’s arm. He felt the blood rush to his head.

“Harold,” came the nun’s voice. Her face was close to his, the skin a web of fine wrinkles. “Queenie is confused, and in some pain. But she has waited. As you said she should.” She withdrew to let him pass.

He took a few steps closer, and then a few more, with his heart throbbing. And as Harold Fry finally arrived at the side of the woman for whom he had travelled so many miles, his legs almost gave way. She lay, not moving, only a few feet from his touch, her face towards the light at the window. He wondered if she was sleeping, or maybe drugged, or waiting for something that wasn’t him. It was intensely private; the way she did not move, or notice his arrival. Her body made almost no shape against the sheets. She had the smallness of a child.

Harold pulled the rucksack from his shoulder and held it flat against his stomach, as if to keep the image in front of him at bay. He ventured one step closer. Two.