Leah has often asked me whether I really care about her, or if I only pretend because I get paid. A lot of clients ask me similar questions and it is one of the more difficult things to address when it comes to therapy – how can they truly trust that I care about their well-being and mental health when we both know I am also there because I am paid? But I care, deeply, about all of my clients. It was something I occasionally worried about during my training, whether I would encounter clients for whom it was impossible to feel empathy and connection. To this day, it’s never happened – every single person I have met throughout my years in therapeutic practice has turned out to be fundamentally worthy of empathy.

I press the doorbell again and imagine Leah rising from the sofa and padding across dark hardwood floors to the door on bare feet. I have a feeling she isn’t here. But what if she is, only she’s hurt herself? Despite Linda’s reassuring text, I can’t shake off the feeling that something serious is going on with Leah. I feel my stomach sink at the random thought of Leah in her home, thinking about ending her own life, perhaps several days ago. How lonely would those last hours have been; how desperate would she have felt? Still, I don’t believe she would take her own life. I press the buzzer again, for longer this time.

Come on, Leah. I care about you. It’s why I’m here.

This is about the truth. Those were some of her last words to me. What could she have meant by this? Over the years Leah sat opposite me every Friday afternoon, I became privy to many of her truths. As we began to explore her inner world and she developed the awareness to make increasing sense of it, we discussed conditioning and how the things we are told about ourselves aren’t necessarily true.

During her marriage to Anton, Leah was conditioned to believe she was worthless and disgusting, that nobody else would ever want her and that she deserved to be punished. It took us years to begin to untangle these beliefs, in part because it became clear that she’d held them even before her marriage, perhaps results of bullying as a young child and her father’s departure. Could this be the misconceived ‘truth’ she was referring to? Or could it be her pregnancy? Or was she referring to some other truth? I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether the truth itself had felt central to Leah’s suffering, that by writing about it so brutally honestly in Nobody, she was left feeling exposed and vulnerable.

‘Hello?’ says a man’s voice, making me jump. I’d been lost in thoughts, momentarily forgetting I’d pressed Leah’s buzzer.