At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.

He took eleven days to accept it and he has paid back three hundred dollars of it in instalments that I cannot stop him sending.

He works for Vantry now. Not as a gift.

He is a field assessor, which means he goes into people’s houses and works out what they actually need, and he has nineteen years as a paramedic and three years as the father of a man with a complete injury, and he is the best appointment I have made in fourteen years.

He is also, and I did not plan this, extremely good at the part of that job I have never been able to do, which is sitting in a hallway with a family for two hours while nobody says the real thing.

Ozzie is twenty-three. He does not entirely like me and I think that is completely reasonable.

He said something to me in the summer that I have kept. He said, “You didn’t fix anything. You just had the right stationery.”

He is right. That is exactly what happened.

You mop floors, Rye. You don’t hand me paperwork in here.

Noreen Sackville said that in a staff canteen to a man holding his own third surgical deferral, in front of twenty-five people including a consultant, and every single one of us let it go.

I was one table away.

I was a woman who had spent three hours in the corner of a school gym in 1996 while four hundred people managed not to look at one chair, and thirty years later I sat one table away with a sandwich in my hand and did the same thing to the only person in that gym who had not.

I did not say anything to her that day and I have not since, and she still works there.

The difference between that canteen and that gym is not that I turned out to be a better person than the people at my prom