My father stopped speaking to me when I dropped out of medical school to care for my sick boyfriend. Five years later he drove over to take me home — and the moment he walked into our front room he stopped mid-sentence and said this can’t be real.

I got into Wexley College of Medicine at twenty-one and my father cried in the driveway, which I had never seen him do and did not see again until much later and for a very different reason.

I loved it there. I was good at it — not the best in that class, but comfortably in the front third, and better than either of those things at the part nobody grades you on, which is sitting with somebody.

I met Kes Ardleigh in the second year.

He was not a medical student. He worked in acquisitions for a university library and he could talk for forty minutes about the history of a binding, and the first thing I ever loved about him was that he asked me one follow-up question more than anybody else ever did.

Eleven months into it, in the January of my third year, he woke up with pins and needles in both feet.

Four days later he could not stand.

It was Guillain-Barré syndrome. It comes on like that. It goes up the body from the feet and in the bad cases it reaches the diaphragm, and Kes was a bad case, and he spent nineteen days on a ventilator in an intensive care unit forty minutes from my flat.