I shake my head. It’s taken me time to be able to talk about it so calmly. There were times when someone being kind would bring tears springing to my eyes. Grief is weird like that. But now I feel like – well, I guess I’ve made my peace with it. And somehow, I feel like Dad would be quite impressed that I’d decided to do something I felt passionate about, just like he did.

‘It’s okay. But the thing was, watching him, it made me realise I’d always wanted to do something that was going to make a difference and sitting in an office doing corporate law shit wasn’t going to do that. The nurses in the oncology unit – they were amazing when my dad was in their care.’

We’ve stopped now, and somehow we’re sitting on a wooden bench that looks down Elgin Avenue. Buses trundle past and heave to a halt at the stop a few metres away, spilling out a sea of people who scatter in different directions in the late afternoon greyness. It’s so cold I can see Jess’s breath as she looks at me over the top of her coffee cup.

‘So, that’s what made you want to do it?’ she asks.

‘Yeah.’ I take a sip of almost-cold coffee, make a face and lower it again. ‘Only it turned out that unravelling the life I’d made wasn’t as easy as all that.’

‘Tell me about it. So, what happened?’

‘Well, I got talking to one of the Macmillan nurses after Dad died when she was picking up some of the stuff we’d had at the house – equipment, and things like that. I thought she’d think I was crazy, but it turned out she’d only done her training a few years before herself – and she was almost forty.’

‘So you jacked in your high-flying career and got a place at uni.’

‘And now here I am. I mean, it wasn’t that much of a high-flying career, to be fair. And I had some savings and some money that Dad left me, so I thought I might as well just go for it.’

‘Exactly.’ I notice Jess is sitting with her hands inside her sleeves. It’s cold, and sitting still makes it seem even more so. ‘Shall we keep going?’ Jess stands up.

‘Where are we going? The suspense is killing me,’ Jess says.

We turn the corner and I nod my head towards the sign on the edge of the road. It’s a second before she gets it.

‘Abbey Road? Like the Beatles’ Abbey Road?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I didn’t even know it was a real thing.’ She laughs.