Reaching the second-floor corridor Honor is momentarily blindsided by the smell of illness. Checking the signs on the wall she turns left through a set of double doors and down a corridor towards the intensive care unit. There, a tired-looking woman with a scraped-back ponytail and a smile left over from the start of her shift explains that Satnam’s parents have not long since gone and they are restricting visitors to close family ‘for the time being’. Honor has no desire to run into Narinder or Bikram Mann and the feeling is almost certainly mutual. When Satnam came to stay on the Kingfisher last summer, Honor had found herself caught in the midst of a family dispute, with Satnam refusing to speak to her parents and Bikram accusing Honor of turning their daughter against them. Not long afterwards Nevis received a call from Narinder asking her to reconsider sharing a flat with their daughter on the grounds that Nevis was ‘unsuitable’ and Narinder found her ‘strange’.

The last part stung, not least because Honor had heard it so often and because she knew that this was part of the reason Satnam liked her. So much so, in fact, that one evening last summer on the boat, Satnam had found Honor alone and told her that Nevis ‘might well be the best person who ever lived and it is the great wish of my heart that we’ll be friends for ever’.

The great wish of my heart.

How could you not love a girl who spoke like that? And how could you not worry that such a girl found so little in her life to love that she was prepared to end it?

When Honor persists the tired-looking woman blinks then sighs and, calling her colleague Becky over, explains the situation.

‘Very very quickly, then,’ Becky says. ‘Follow me.’ They move through the waiting area to a corridor and from there to a smaller wardroom labelled ‘Pine’. At the door Becky turns and says, ‘Satnam is unconscious. We’ve intubated her so the respirator is doing her breathing for her. Five minutes max, please.’

At the cubicle curtain, Honor hesitates, her mind tunnelling through time, to a memory, a single point inhabited now only by darkness and by Zoe. Steeling herself she raises her chin and slides between the curtains. The young woman looks dreadful, her skin grey-brown, her face and arms such a tangle of pipes and tubes that it gives her the appearance of something not quite human. Someone, one of Satnam’s parents, Honor supposes, has left sweet pastries on the table, a gesture whose tender optimism moves her so much that she finds herself having to bite back tears. It’s not going to end like this, with sweets and sympathy. Whatever happens to Satnam now, the Mann family will never quite recover. Nevis will never quite recover. No one will ever be the same.