My husband left his medication at home, so I stopped by his office to bring it to him. But when I asked the receptionist to call him downstairs, she said, "Ma'am, your husband has been on leave for the past week."

Not is he a patient here. Not who.

Are you Mrs Vance.

Which means my own name was written down somewhere inside that building.

Next-of-kin. Four months of it. On a form he filled in on the eleventh of June, on his own, in a chair.

She took me into a side room with two chairs in it and asked me to wait, and said somebody would come through in a minute.

She did not ask me anything else. She did not need to and I have thought about that since.

It was my sister who came.

Four years, and the first time I see Oriana's face she is coming through a door at me in a corridor that smells of hand gel.

And my sister said four words before I could get my mouth open.

"He doesn't know you're here."

Not hello. Not four years of anything. Not one word about herself.