A lover? That was my first thought. It struck me like a bolt of lightening; the idea of you doing something sordid was totally irreconcilable with what I needed you to be. At the same time, I was intensely jealous at the thought of you having an illicit affair, and confused by those feelings. I knew you were married from the simple gold ring on your finger, and Google easily uncovered that your marriage was rather high profile. I’ll return to it, of course. But back then, it wasn’t Mr Moss who most held my attention. It was the suspicion that you were something other than I’d thought.

I fell into a routine of sitting at that café several afternoons a week, keeping an eye on the door to your office building across the road, waiting for you. Sometimes I’d get up and follow you for a while; other times I’d just watch you, committing what you wore to memory. After those first couple of weeks of sheepishly following you around, my fascination with you grew drastically. You might think that observing another person’s day-to-day life might reveal them to be as underwhelming and boring as most people probably are, but oh, no – not you. Some parts of your life were as shiny and perfect as I’d previously imagined them to be. Your house, for example. Your husband. Your marriage. Your friends. (But only your new ones, right?) I’ll return to all of those things.

The thing I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that you clearly had some problems. Secrets. In our sessions, you’d encourage me to look where it hurt, to try to describe painful experiences, insisting that to process them, they must be brought out into the light. But what about yours?

*

The following Friday we had another tough session.

That day, you asked me to speak directly to myself as a child, to reconnect with that inherent goodness all children have and to consider whether I could find empathy with the little girl I once was. It didn’t work like that for me because the little girl I saw was worthless and dirty, like a thieving street urchin. You were moved by the way I spoke of myself and you asked whether I would be willing to consider from whose point of view I was observing myself as a child. Could it be that it wasn’t my own perception at all? What child perceives herself as inherently bad and unlovable? Could it be that this was how I imagined my father saw me, as a way to comprehend the profound rejection of his departure? And if so, could it be that my interpretation of this was simply wrong and entirely unrooted in reality?