The rough nights. The nights he did not come home at all. A forty-four-year-old consultant surgeon in a hi-vis vest, loading pallets, on the shift nobody wants because it pays eighty pence more an hour.
Here is what happened in the March.
A twelve-year-old patient, and I am not going to write about that child beyond saying that she is alive.
He was suspended pending an investigation.
And when that investigation finally reported — three weeks before I walked into that corridor with a lunch box — it found no fault on his part.
None. It is in writing.
It was a system failure. A rota running two short on a Saturday night. A second signature required by policy with nobody available in the building to give it.
Three weeks, he had had that letter. Three weeks of still getting up at ten past seven.
I have asked him about those three weeks more than about the other eleven months.
Because the eleven months I understand. Eleven months is a man in a hole digging.
Three weeks is a man with a ladder.
And what he has told me, eventually, in the July, is that he read that letter in the car outside the hospital and then he sat there for about forty minutes.
And what he was working out was not how to tell me.
It was how to explain the eleven months.
Because the day the letter arrived, the thing he had been protecting me from stopped being the suspension and became the lying.
He said: I had something I could survive telling you in March. By January I didn’t.
