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Alex spends twenty minutes trying to find a parking space at the hospital, increasingly frustrated with each wasted second. Eventually, he convinces the chap at the payment office to let him park up on the kerb beside it, because Alex is very good at convincing people to do things even when they know they shouldn’t.

It’s a short dash to the front door of the hospital through the driving rain.

His mother is on the second floor, which Alex learns en route is home to the Intensive Care Unit. This is why Ed sounded off, Alex realises. His mother might still be alive but she’s not out of the woods.

Last year, Alex had tried to make his parents take out a private health insurance policy. They refused. One thing to have their mortgage paid off with their son’s ill-gotten gains, quite another to jump on the two-tier bandwagon slowly chipping away at the NHS. Alex pointed out to Ed and Sue that it was no longer a slow chip under the current government; it was a sledgehammer. Their romanticised version of the National Health Service was dead and they would be too if they didn’t take out a proper care policy.

His father is sitting outside his mother’s room when Alex reaches the second floor. He’s leaning forward on the chair, tilted at an angle that makes his son think he might tip over on to the floor if Alex doesn’t get to him first.

Ed looks up at Alex when he feels the hand on his shoulder and croaks one word.

‘Son.’

She’s already dead, Alex thinks. He can see it in his father’s eyes, in the hollowed-out, devastated expression on his face.

‘I came as fast as I could,’ Alex utters, a completely useless thing to say but something that he thinks he should.

He thinks of his sister Vicky listening to the two voicemails he left her. She’ll be in an airport now, not even aware her mother is dead. She’ll be crushed.

‘She’s in an induced coma,’ Ed says, and cocks his head at the room behind them.

Alex, confused, looks in the window.

There’s Sue propped up in a bed. She’s hooked up to various wires; her blonde hair, normally curled and set, is flat against her head and the side of her face is bruised. But she is still very much alive. Alex looks back at his dad.

Ed’s own dark hair has thinned since the last time Alex saw his father, though his beard is thicker than ever. They’ve always been hairy men, the Evanses. He remembers as a kid, his parents bringing them to Whitby beach, his father’s bare chest covered in tufts of black hair as he carried both Alex and Vicky, one in his arms, one on his back. The strongest man we knew, Alex thinks. In every way. Something he admired as a small boy, hated as a teenager.

How could you ever amount to much, when your father was a giant?

Alex wonders what has happened to reduce Ed so, to take so much out of the man that he can’t even stand up.

‘What is it?’ Alex asks. ‘What have they said? Is she brain-dead? Is it something else? Did they find something else?’

‘Your mum’s fine,’ Ed says.

He heaves himself to a standing position so they’re face to face.

‘The heart attack was brought on by the news. It’s Vicky, Alex. She’s dead.’

Alex blinks.

The world falls out from beneath his feet. Everything is moving slowly and quickly at the same time. Alex can hear his heartbeat, his breathing; feel his father’s grip on his arm. But his vision is blurred, the lights overhead are buzzing, and the blood has turned cold in his veins.

‘What did you say?’ he asks.

‘Vicky is gone, Alex.’

‘She can’t be gone. She’s in Finland.’

‘We got the call in the early hours. That’s when your mother fell ill.’

‘I don’t understand. How did she die? What happened?’

Alex is unable to process the information.

‘Was it a car crash? Did she fall?’

Alex is shaking Ed. He needs to know everything, right now.

‘She drowned,’ Ed says, without emotion. He’s adjusting, bury-ing his own feelings in order to respond to the violence of Alex’s reaction. ‘They say she was in the lake for weeks. We hadn’t heard from her since September. We weren’t worried. The last time we spoke, she said it was getting busier over there, there were loads of tourists. We thought, she’ll be home for Christmas. You know what she was like. She wouldn’t phone unless she needed something. God knows what they think of us, that we didn’t even realise she was missing. . .’

Ed’s head slumps.

Alex is frozen to the spot.

‘She can’t have drowned,’ he whispers. He doesn’t recognise his own voice.

He hasn’t spoken to her in months.

Had she been trying to reach him?

Had she dialled his old number only to find it was out of service?

He’d deliberately not sent her the new one.

Alex almost retches.

‘You’re in shock,’ Ed says.

Vicky, Alex thinks. The warm body next to his when they were small, the pest who was always telling tales to their parents. The little girl who once wrote an essay about how Alex was her role model because he’d done something nice for her that week. The teenager who nicked his cigarettes and took his first expensive car on a joyride just to push his buttons. The woman who could make him laugh and seethe in equal measure. . .

Vicky. Twenty-six-years-old, Vicky.

And even while he’s trying to absorb the punch to the gut, Alex feels a rising anger.

This is so typical of his sister, to cause them all this pain, to take such risks that she’s ended up bloody killing herself. How dare she? How could Vicky do this to them?

He turns away from his father, and without thinking, punches the wall.

It’s only the fact it’s some sort of cheap plastic divide and not actual concrete that saves Alex from breaking his hand.

The pain shoots through his knuckles and wrist and Ed grabs him before Alex can draw back his arm and add another dent to the first one.

‘No,’ Ed says.

Alex drops his arm. He doesn’t need to do it again. The force was enough the first time to redirect what he was feeling from emotional to physical.

‘I need you in control,’ Ed says, cutting through the mists. ‘I can’t leave your mother.’

Alex swallows.

‘They need a family member to officially identify the body.’

Alex looks at Ed. His father can’t expect him to get on a plane, to go to a strange country, to function like a normal human being after what he’s just been told.

Ed meets Alex’s eye.

‘Pull yourself together. You can fly out to Finland tomorrow. Bring her home. Bring my little girl home.’