She knew that he was drawing very close to the end of his life. Maybe today would be the day that he finally passed away. It seemed now that every day could be that day.

After a while, she and her mother stood up to stretch their legs and get a coffee.

‘We’re just going to get a coffee, Dad,’ said Bailey gently, not knowing if he could even hear her.

His eyes opened briefly, and a weak smile flickered across his face, then he closed them once more, lapsing back into whatever oblivion he’d been in. Leaving him like that, they both left the room and walked slowly along the corridor of the hospice in the direction of the café.

The hospice hummed quietly with activity – doctors and nurses trotting back and forth dressed in scrubs, cleaners wheeling trolleys laden with cleaning paraphernalia, patients limping along in their dressing gowns. It all seemed so reassuringly mundane to Bailey. After what she’d been through over the past week or so, she welcomed a bit of normality.

Eventually they reached the café, where Bailey bought coffee for both herself and her mother. They both sat there for a little while, sipping the scalding drinks, Bailey’s mother enquiring yet again about her black eye and Bailey yet again trying to avoid going into too much detail as to how it had come about; at least the bruising was starting to go down now.

Physical injuries aside, the past few days had seen Bailey accustoming herself to finding and then losing her sister. She knew it would take some time to come to terms with the whole tumultuous experience, and as she sat there in the café with her mother, it saddened her to be unable to share her feelings about it.

After twenty minutes or so, they ambled slowly back to her father’s room.

When they got there, they saw that his eyes were wide open and that he was awake. It was the first time all morning that he’d been properly awake. Looking closer, Bailey saw that he had tears in his eyes.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ she said anxiously.

He blinked at them both and swallowed. By the alertness in his gaze, Bailey could tell that he was having a rare moment of lucidity.

‘You know, a weird thing happened to me just now,’ he said, his voice laboured. ‘I had a vision, after you’d gone…’

Bailey and her mother exchanged glances. They both leaned in.

Her father’s eyes glowed in an unearthly way and a dreamlike smile came across his face. ‘In my vision, Jennifer came into the room. She was all grown up. She was beautiful. A woman. My Jennifer.’

A powerful shiver went through Bailey.

‘It must be the drugs,’ said her mother. ‘Didn’t the doctor say that high dosages can make you see funny things?’

He frowned and shook his head. ‘It was so real. I can’t explain how real it was. But then with this dexamethasone stuff, I don’t know if I’m coming or going. They’re giving me so much of it these days…’