‘It will stop in a minute. Everybody is just overreacting.’

‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. There’s a damn great gash in your head. Stop being so stupidly macho about it all. What happened?’

‘I was walking under the scaffold and one of the blokes tripped over something. His foot caught a hammer that he’d just put down and knocked it off the edge of the scaffold. I looked up at the shouts, which is when it clocked me straight on the bonce.’

‘Why didn’t you have a hard hat on?’

‘I did. Well, I did have until the second before. It’s so hot, the sweat was running in my eyes, so I’d just taken it off to wipe it away. Bad timing.’

Another flash of memory ripped through me, and I pushed it away to deal with later.

‘Jesus Christ. Did you lose consciousness?’

‘Not that I remember,’ he said with an ironic smile.

I was failing to see the humour in the situation at this moment. I instructed the Bluetooth in my car to redial my phone’s last number. Within a couple of rings, Sanjid’s voice was on the other end.

‘Hi, it’s Lily. Does anyone know if Jack lost consciousness? The hospital will want to know.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lily,’ Jack snapped. ‘I just told you I didn’t.’

I ignored him, waiting for Sanjid to reply. ‘I don’t think so. He certainly fell down and it is a hard surface there, but he was already sitting up by the time I sprinted across the garden, which was less than a minute after it happened.’

‘OK, thanks, Sanjid.’ I hung up and could practically hear Jack seething next to me. Right now, I didn’t care. The most important thing was to get him checked out properly. If he chose to be angry at me for that, then so be it. Some things were more important.

Several hours later, I was walking up and down the same patch of corridor that I had been wearing out for the last couple of hours. I’d sat occasionally in the waiting area, but I couldn’t focus on anything and probably got my day’s ten thousand steps in within the first hour.

‘Are you Lily?’ A nurse was walking towards me.

‘Yes,’ I said, moving quickly to meet her. ‘How is he?’

‘He’s fine. We did a full scan as he had quite the impact at the front, and we don’t know for sure whether he lost consciousness when he fell to the ground. It’s better safe than sorry in these circumstances.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But the scans were all clear and you can see him now,’ she said, pushing open a door and allowing me to go through to where Jack was sitting on a bed in a hospital gown, a row of dark stitches down his forehead above his right eye. Despite all that, he still managed to look sexy as hell.

He raised a hand and gave a slightly sleepy smile.