Four days later, on the Saturday, I went to your house. I’d looked at your husband’s party’s event calendar and he was listed as attending a rally in Kristiansand that weekend. It said that there would be a gala dinner on the Saturday evening with local stakeholders and politicians, and I knew that you would be accompanying him to that, like you usually do.

On the Friday in my session, we had a moment when we were talking through some particularly difficult stuff I’d been dealing with, to do with compulsive thoughts of suicide and self-harming, when your eyes filled with tears. I asked you why you were crying, and you said you felt so moved by what I’d said and so empathetic toward me for having to deal with it. Your display of emotion, and the validation it brought, moved me so much, Kristina. It was in moments like that that I believed what we were doing in that room really had the power to heal me.

I walked out of there and straight home, not even considering hanging around Kaffebrenneriet in the hope that you’d stop in. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, tears rushing from my eyes. I felt so bad, then, for everything I’d done. For a moment, I considered calling you and confessing, laying it all bare so we could start over. But I knew it was already too late. I was in too deep. I promised myself that I would go to your house, satisfy my curiosity and then stop. I cried harder because I knew that even if I actually managed to walk away after that, there would always be these secrets between us now. I cried with confusion and jealousy, because in your diary I had read page after page about the worrying blanks in your mind, and about someone called Elisabeth, who sounded like another client, but not a single word about me.

I cried myself to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, and when I woke up it was close to midnight. I poured myself some wine and sat on the floor, letting the warm summer night into the room through the wide-open windows. I looked at your solemn face in your driving license picture and then I spent a long while reading through your journal again and looking at the strange drawings you’d made. I looked at the calculations too, and though math wasn’t my strongest subject at school; it seemed to me like they were some kind of probability equations, page after page after page of them. I had to know more, Kristina.