Her ex-husband. He’d left her about a year ago. I’d texted, emailed and called, trying to persuade him to come in to confront her, but all I’d got was a deafening silence. He was probably trying to move on with his life—who could blame him?

However, two of her friends had shown up and their colourful, exhaustive accounts of her drunken capers had horrified her into seeing she wasn’t just a party girl but an actual alcoholic.

‘Other than Simon, how are you?’ I asked.

‘Peachy, Rachel. Yourself?’

I waited.

‘I only came in here to learn how to drink normally.’ Her voice wobbled; I wasn’t sure if it was with grief or fury. ‘But according to you, I can never drink again. My life is over and I’m only twenty-nine.’

‘What about Tegan?’ I asked. ‘What if she’d had the chance to stop drinking?’

‘Stop trying to guilt me!’

Gently, I reminded her, ‘Tegan died. From alcohol poisoning.’ Tegan had been one of her closest friends. After her death, Harlie’s parents and friends had done an intervention, so that Harlie wouldn’t be the next casualty.

‘If Tegan had been given the choice between dying or getting sober, which do you think she’d have taken?’

‘I don’t know.’

She did know. But right now, it was too painful for her to accept.

After she’d left, I opened the file on the newbie who was arriving tomorrow. Ella Black, aged twenty-eight, her particular poison apparently prescription sleeping tablets. She’d been persuaded she needed rehab after she’d taken her boyfriend’s car for a drive at 3 a.m. and crashed it into the front window of a house. Despite breaking her collarbone, she’d climbed out, walked home, gone back to bed and woken up with no memory of what had taken place.

There had also been a few late-night Facebook incidents. She worked as a social media content provider for an airline—a high-status, well-paid job, according to her boyfriend Jonah, the owner of the crashed car.

Twice in the past seven weeks, Ella had posted odd stuff on the company account—a mad-sounding conspiracy theory about the US government and a wildly libellous claim about the ‘real’ father of Prince Louis. If it hadn’t been for Ella’s boss—someone called Boyd—taking them down before they’d gained any traction, she’d definitely have been fired.

It was always a rush when a new person came into my care; the chance to help them change their lives was exciting. The potential, the possibility of it—of them. Sometimes, of course, it didn’t work out. They didn’t think they really were addicts, or they weren’t ready just yet to give up their best friend.

Frequently, they reappeared in the Cloisters a year or two later, a lot more battered, much more humble.