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."

I have moved it about four hundred times to wipe under it.

The bottle I picked up on the Thursday morning and carried across town in my handbag and tried to hand over at a reception desk —

is not that.

It has not been that since the twenty-fourth of June. Four months.

Same shape. Same size. Same dispensing chemist, so the same printing.

Same place on the counter.

Different drug. Different name. A different line underneath it that I could have read in about two seconds at any point in four months.

I held that bottle in my hand for about twenty-five minutes on the Thursday morning.

In a car. In a queue at a coffee place. In a lift. Standing at a reception desk explaining to a stranger that my husband had left his medication at home.

And I never once turned it round.

I had not turned it round in four months, because why would you turn round a thing you have been looking at since 2019.