Cut into Cassie, and take out her flesh? Her golden unmarked skin, sliced open? I started to shake. ‘What would that mean?’ My voice sounded echoey. It was like when you’re really drunk, you hear yourself talking but you don’t really understand that those words are coming from you.

‘It’s not to be taken lightly. It can be quite debilitating. And the scarring and so on.’ I felt like she was running through a checklist of things to say to the family. ‘Why don’t you discuss it with her, anyway. If not, we’ll have to wait for an anonymous donor.’

I didn’t know what to say. How could I ask Cassie to do this, cut up her body, take bits out of it, for God’s sake? Did Mike even deserve it? I nodded mechanically, and the doctor gave me her tired, automatic smile, and went out. I’d promised I would talk to Cassie, but of course I didn’t have to. I was her mother, and she was underage. I could just not give consent. I could just not tell her the tissue matching was an option.

Mike was there, but not there. I felt I was alone in the room, even though he lay there, his chest rising and falling, his cheeks yellow-tinged. His face was growing greyer by the day. His skin was dry, shrivelled, washed by efficient hands with astringent hospital soap from a squirty jar. He would have hated that, with his moisturisers and toners. I brushed the hair from his face. Despite myself, despite knowing he’d cheated on me multiple times, and in my own home too, I felt guilty. I was as bad as him now. I’d taken Bill into our bed.

And yet I didn’t feel bad. I felt as if, finally, I’d done the right thing. How patient Bill was. What a stupid, naïve girl I’d been, dangling myself in front of him like that, darting back to Mike if things ever went too far. It served me right that Bill had been swept up by a beautiful, assured older woman. But it all could have gone so differently that night of the ball, and maybe it would have, if Martha Rasby hadn’t died.

‘What happened that night?’ I muttered to Mike, once again. ‘Did you really leave her safe in the garden?’ It didn’t sound right, as I said it out loud. If he was so concerned about helping the poor drunk girl, why not stay with her, see she was safe? Why take her to a secluded spot then just leave her? Oh Mike. Just wake up, will you, so I can ask you these questions? Under his dry grey eyelids, his eyes moved. I wondered what he was dreaming.