‘No, I…’ Whenever I thought of my anniversary date, my head filled with a sort of fog. I hadn’t been consciously denying anything. It was more like I couldn’t think about it. But now I saw the truth and it was very painful. ‘My clean time was—is—so important to who I am. I was proud of getting clean and staying clean. Without it, I feel lost. The me I thought I was, isn’t.’

I’d seen other people come back into recovery after a relapse and I’d pitied them.

‘Mourn it,’ Nola said. ‘Do your best to make sure you don’t do it again. Then embrace your actual recovery date.’

I had a clear memory of the morning in New York, a couple of months after Luke had left, when I’d decided to stop taking the sleepers. I’d woken very early—and felt inexplicably calm.

It was more than eight months since Yara had died and the frenzied storm seemed to have finally blown itself out.

I wasn’t okay, not cured—nothing like that. My appalling loss was still sharply defined but the thrashing agony, the anguish I just couldn’t accept, had eased. My little girl was gone, I was changed forever, there would still be terrible times but, finally, I could acknowledge the facts, even submit to them, and my soul was quiet.

I opened the bedroom curtains. Beyond the window, the first glimmers of dawn were lighting the sky. My window was wet, it must have been pelting down earlier. As the sun continued to rise, a ray caught on a raindrop on the glass and broke into the seven different colours of the spectrum, becoming smudged stripes of transparent colour on the wooden floor, right in front of me.

Experimentally, I moved my fingers in the arc of colour, spellbound by the different shades on my skin.

Seeing signs wasn’t really my thing but the same weird calm I’d woken up with was insisting that this was a message from Yara, saying that she was always with me, but that it was time to start living again.

Another certainty settled—from that day forward, I’d be able to sleep. There would be no more need for tablets. I went around the apartment, gathered them all up and flushed them away.

‘How come I just decided to stop?’ I asked Nola. ‘All by myself?’

‘Are you stone mad, girl? Two months earlier, your husband had left you. Into the bargain, the likes of myself and Olga Mae were blue in the face begging you to have sense. The question I’d be asking myself is: What took me so long?’

When she put it like that…‘So what do I do now?’

‘We’ll get busy soon enough, you and me. You need to do your steps all over again.’