“No! Ha, it’s not tea, it’s vodka!”

Lissa had absolutely no idea why she just said that. Anita smiled politely, as if it didn’t matter to her if it was tea or vodka.

“I’m only kidding! Look!”

Lissa tilted the cup toward the camera, which led to a predictable outcome and resulted in more precious seconds lost in finding a tea towel. She was just about to apologize and suggest they start over when a voice suddenly screamed, “Mummmyyy!”

Anita’s face winced, just a little.

“Mummy’s busy, darling,” she hissed out of the side of her mouth.

“Samosa done fall in the toilet.”

Lissa and Anita both froze.

“Um, do you want to go sort that out?” said Lissa.

“No, no, I’m sure it’s fine,” said Anita, doing her best to look unflustered. “Now, where were we? What we’re going to do is carefully go through everything that happened that day, look carefully at the details . . .”

“I just eating it.”

There was another long pause.

“Just go,” said Lissa, even as Anita jumped up, knocking over a tall pile of notes and case files onto the desktop as she went. Lissa glanced at them as she heard a lot of yelling and negotiation taking place off-screen. “PTSD” was written on hers; she could make it out, bold as brass. She stared at it. Was that her? Was that who she was? Some crazy person? With a label and a padded cell and . . .

Anita came back, her dark hair ruffled, noisy crying still happening off-screen.

“So,” she said. She started clearing up the papers, spilling her coffee cup in the process. She screwed up her face. “Sorry,” she said. “Some days . . .”

“I know,” said Lissa. “You work for the NHS. I know what it’s like.”

But inside she was burning up with her diagnosis.

“So, I have PTSD?” she found herself saying abruptly.

“What?” Anita’s phone was ringing. She glanced at it, hung it up. It started ringing again.

“That’s . . . that’s what you think I have?”

“I think it’s a— Sorry, I just have to get this.”

She grabbed the phone.

“Where are you?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, where’s your bus pass? . . . But if you don’t take your bus pass how can you expect . . . I’m working here! . . . Well, you’ll just have to wait. Where are you? Well, what can you see?”

She made an apologetic face at Lissa, who was beginning to wonder whether this was, in fact, the therapy, designed to make her feel better about being all by herself in the middle of nowhere.

By the time Anita had untangled herself from the complexities of the phone call and was nervously eyeing something Lissa couldn’t see but could only assume was almost certainly her car keys, their time was almost up.