My wife was four hours late coming home and her phone went straight to voicemail, so I checked her location on our tracking app — but when I drove there and saw what she was doing, I completely forgot how to breathe.

Sorry. Hang on. That’s better. No it isn’t.

And that is what took my legs out, and it was not the table and it was not the sheet.

It was that my wife was chatting.

At half past eleven at night, in a building with no name on it, on her own, to a girl of eight who had been in her care for however long, about her hair.

How it started.

October of 2014. A boy of four.

His mother had been on that ward for five weeks and she could not do it and she asked, in a corridor, whether somebody could make sure he had his own pyjamas on and not a gown.

And Sorcha said she would sort it, meaning she would ring somebody.

And then she could not find anybody to ring who would actually do it in the way she meant, so she rang Wilf Bryce and asked if she could come, and he said yes.

And when she had finished he made her a cup of tea and said: whenever you want. Any time. I’ll leave the back open.

Eleven years.

She has a number.

In the back of a diary, in pencil, a running tally. Not names. Just a line for each one.

It was sixty-one when I found out.

And there is a detail from that room that I did not understand for weeks.

The phone.

It was not on silent and it was not face down. It was switched fully off, on a table by the door, the moment she came in.

And I assumed, on the night, that it was so I could not reach her.

It is not that.

She told me in the January and Wilf told me the same thing independently in a little office with a two-bar heater.

It is because a phone that lights up in that room is unbearable.

Not the noise. The light.

A thing on a table that keeps flickering while you are doing what she is doing — a notification about a delivery, a photograph in a group chat, somebody’s holiday.

“You can’t have the rest of the world in there,” is what she said. “It’s not respectful and it’s not survivable.”

So she switches it off at the door, every single time, for however long it takes, and switches it back on in the car park.

And in nine years there were about four occasions where she came out and found a run of missed calls from me and had to think of a reason.

And last November was the fifth.