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“Uh… Yeah, sorry,” I said making the foolish decision not to say a word to anyone. Not even Karen when she caught up with me at five forty with my coat already over my arm.

“Oh good, you’re still here.” She had that expression on her face which told me I knew what was coming.

“I don’t suppose you could do me a huge favor and stock the treatment room before you go. Marianne’s on a late start tomorrow and we’ve got the accreditation visit at nine, and if that room isn’t right I will personally lie down and die.” I chuckled at her dramatic finish.

“Of course.”

“You are an angel and I will remember it.” She was already walking. “It’s quiet down there this time of night, it’ll take you half an hour, tops.”

“No problem,” I told her and I looked at the window on my way down.

Black.

Completely black, and it had been since about four thirty, because it was the back end of November and the days had gotten so short that I had stopped seeing daylight from either end of a shift. You leave in the dark and you come home in the dark and the middle of it belongs to the building.

I remember thinking that I would be home by seven.

But that end of the ward wasn’t pleasant at night. In fact, it was creepy as hell.

The corridor lights were on a sensor and I hated that. The way they came on as you walked, only to go out again behind you. It made it feel as though you were in a horror movie. But in a place like this, it was all about saving money.

I got the list from the office and let myself into the treatment room and propped the door with my hip while I found the light.

And then I started counting gauze.

It was genuinely that boring. You go down the list, and you open the cabinets and you write numbers in boxes. A monkey could have done it. But then I got as far as the dressings when I stopped, because I had the feeling.

The one on the back of your neck that makes your hair stand on end.

I turned around only to be met by the empty room, the propped door and the unoccupied corridor beyond it where the sensor light had already gone out.

“Okay,” I said out loud, to nobody, in my best sensible voice.

“Stop freaking yourself out.” I told myself and the empty room before I went back to the cabinet.

Four minutes later I had it again, and this time I went to the doorway and stood in it, waving my hand around to activate the sensor. Half of me expecting a face to appear out of nowhere. But the second the lights flicked on, there was nothing. Yet I still stood there for a good ten seconds like an idiot before I gave in and said it.

“Ghost?”

My own voice came back at me off the walls as there was no answer, and I felt so stupid about it that I actually laughed.

Because that was what he had done to me. Filling my mind with images of him and a thousand different scenarios of when he could show up. And crazier still, some small disgraceful part of me had wanted him to answer.

I went back in and counted the suture packs, which was when I heard the door open behind me.

But I didn’t immediately turn around.

I had my hands full of suture packs and my back to that door, which I should have looked at. Instead, I heard it open and every single part of me went warm instead of cold, and I smiled at a cabinet.

“You really should not be in here,” I said. “Somebody could see you.”

Then the lock went.

A door locking behind me in an empty corridor at ten to six at night, and what went through me was not fear.

No… It was anticipation.

Every part of me was already somewhere else. Already on that bed, already being lifted onto it, already arguing with him about whether we could or could not do this again. And already knowing exactly how the argument was going to end.