Harriet Watson emptied the shopping bags onto the worktop and began grouping the tins. She opened the cupboard door and placed them carefully, one by one, on the bottom shelf.

Three tins of baked beans, two tins of chopped tomatoes and four tins of tomato soup. All labels facing outwards and grouped by their contents.

‘Those belong on the second shelf.’

Harriet jumped back, dropping the tin of peaches in her hand, watching helplessly as it crashed down onto the worktop, narrowly missing the carton of free-range eggs perched there.

‘Mother.’ She turned around. ‘What are you doing up?’

‘This is my house, remember? I can get up any time I want to.’

Harriet narrowed her eyes until her mother’s outline came into sharper focus.

‘Tinned fruit, rice pudding and custard belong on the second shelf,’ the old woman said. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’

The surface of the worktop felt smooth and cool beneath Harriet’s fingers. She picked up the tin of peaches and turned back to the cupboard, sliding it onto the second shelf, into its rightful place. In front of the fruit cocktails and adjacent to the orange segments.

When she turned back to the doorway, her mother was still standing there, watching.

Harriet noticed she was bare-footed and wearing her lily-of-the-valley embroidered cotton nightdress. The one that hung loosely on her bones, like a filmy shroud.

‘You ought to wear your dressing gown and slippers,’ Harriet said, reaching for her spectacles that lay abandoned next to the stainless steel sink. She took a few steps forward. ‘You’ll catch a chill on these floor tiles.’

‘Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Pneumonia would be a clever excuse to keep me bed-bound and out of your hair.’

‘That’s not the case at all, Mother.’

‘When is she coming?’ The old woman rubbed at the loose fabric that gathered around her frail wrists. ‘When will she be here?’

Harriet wanted to reach out and press the cool tips of her fingers into the pale, wrinkled skin on the old woman’s forearms. Skin that was once so firm, and decorated with clusters of merging freckles like skeins of spun sugar.

‘I told you, Mother,’ Harriet sighed. ‘I’m working on it.’

Her mother huffed, then turned and hobbled back down the hallway.

‘I’ll bring you some tea up once I’ve finished my jobs,’ Harriet called, but there was no response.

A minute or two later, she heard the stairlift whirring into action.

She finished arranging the last few tins before standing back to admire the symmetry. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with the enormous bag of her mother’s medication that she’d collected on repeat prescription that morning.

Harriet opened all the packets and carefully counted out the correct mix of multi-coloured tablets, dropping each tiny pile of seven pills into the daily sections of the medication box.

As she worked, deep frown lines lined up like tiny soldiers alongside the deep vertical scar that divided her forehead.

It was difficult to imagine how these minuscule, powdery torpedoes could keep a person alive. Twice a day, the old woman flipped open the relevant daily box and tipped the tablets into her palm. She studied each and every pill before tipping them all into her mouth and flushing the whole lot down with water.

It was the drug companies that her mother needed to watch; they were the ones who cared more about profits than people.

‘Medicine and money mix about as well as education and budgets,’ Harriet had commented only the previous evening whilst reading an article about NHS-banned medicines.

Her mother’s answer: ‘Did you take the salmon fillets out of the freezer?’

Luckily for the children in her care at school, money had never been Harriet’s primary motivator in life.

The education system focused on examinations, even for the youngest students. Harriet felt sure that Ofsted inspectors were only interested in test results, not the young people or their lives. She had been through four inspections now and the officers had never cared enough to carry out even a cursory study of exactly how she, personally, had affected the lives of her children.

The inspectors were only interested in the qualified teachers. It was an insult.

Well, more fool them. She had far more power and influence over these children than people realised.

In just under two months, it would be her nineteen-year anniversary as a teaching assistant at St Saviour’s Primary School. Nineteen long years of giving her all, of making sacrifices that nobody cared enough about to count or quantify.

As far as Harriet was concerned, she was a proper teacher and that’s exactly what she told anyone who asked what she did for a living.

‘But you’re not a teacher, you’re a teaching assistant,’ her mother was fond of pointing out. ‘That’s like the difference between a fully qualified doctor and his auxiliary who empties the bedpans.’

She had asked her mother to stop saying that but the request had fallen on deaf ears.

Harriet taught the children in her care. She gave them valuable insight about themselves, insight they wouldn’t find anywhere else in a world that pandered to their every whim.

Her mother didn’t have a clue. None of them did.

All she wanted to do was help people, couldn’t they see that?

But she hadn’t got this far by taking unnecessary risks. She picked her children very carefully; she knew exactly what she was looking for.

She pulled the new term’s class admission papers towards her and glanced over the names again. Yesterday, Harriet had logged into the pupil database, printed it out and made pencilled notes alongside each child.

This term there was a girl admitted from down south. Single mother, father deceased. They’d just moved into a property on Muriel Crescent. Harriet knew it, just off Cinderhill Road in Bulwell, not a million miles away from her own house.

According to the database, today was their moving-in date, their first proper day in the area. She smiled to herself, wondering how they were settling in.

Harriet turned back to the medicine organiser and snapped the lids firmly closed, pausing to stare briefly out of the kitchen window.

Steel-grey and fluffy white clouds butted up against each other as if they were battling for control. She watched as they scudded across the sky, burying the last bright rays, until not a single glimmer of sun remained.