‘Lowry? I’m Rachel, your therapist.’

He blinked, doing a theatrical double take. ‘Wow.’ A slow smile spread across his face and both of his hands closed around mine.

Oh God no, not one of them! A pathetic flirt-monster who won’t rest until everyone fancies him.

He was a photographer—high-end, but dressed like an indie-band singer, in a fashionably washed-out Karen Carpenter T-shirt and embroidered cowboy boots. Friendship bracelets and other nonsense festooned his wrists, tattoos ran up and down his arms, an army dog tag hung heavy around his neck and his collarbone was inked with ‘Dead on Arrival’.

‘Please sit down,’ I said.

He lounged low in the chair, manspreading like no one’s business, his long limbs and even longer boots stretching almost to the far wall.

‘So?’ I asked.

‘So?’ He smirked, as if we were on a first date.

‘Why are you here?’

‘This place has a good rep. A boot camp for the mind. You guys need to sort me out.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He took a breath. ‘Depression. Bad. I’ve had it on and off for years. It’s the reason I drink and get high. But you guys get to the root cause, right?’ He produced a pack of cigarettes from his jeans, flipped one into his mouth and mumbled, ‘Okay if I smoke?’

‘There’s a smoking area in the garden.’

‘Wow.’ Radiating woundedness, he replaced the cigarette in its box. ‘So yeah,’ he said. ‘Once you discover what went wrong for me, I won’t need to drink as much.’

This was a regular thing—addicts showing up, convinced that all that ailed them was a forgotten trauma. They expected that we’d forage around until we’d plucked it out, like an ingrowing hair, then they could resume their drinking or whatever their poison was and everything would be dandy.

But ten times out of ten, our foraging revealed that the reason they felt depressed was because of their heavy drinking or enthusiastic drug consumption.

Still, I had to be clear with him. ‘This is a rehabilitation centre, not a hospital. There are no doctors. We treat alcoholics and addicts. If that’s not what you want, you should leave.’

‘You’ve got me wrong. I’m not an alcoholic.’

‘Lowry, you were employed to take photos of a wedding. Someone’s special day. You got so drunk that most of their photos are unusable. You fell into an ornamental lake. You knocked over the wedding cake and stood on it—’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘You vomited on the wedding car. You made a pass at the bride—’

‘Hey—’

‘Then made a pass at the groom’s father.’

He waved a hand. ‘Love is love.’

‘It sounds more like alcoholism to me.’