After hanging up, I go back to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face, the recently applied mascara dislodging from my lashes and running down my face in black streaks.

All the evidence suggests she’s fine. I should relax now and return to my own life. All the space Leah Iverson has taken up in my mind in the past week needs to be freed up for the things that are actually relevant to my life – my work, my family, my remaining friendships, my marriage. But I’m not going to pretend I’m not a little disappointed in Leah, who, having clearly decided to take a temporary or permanent break from therapy, couldn’t even be bothered to let me know. Intellectually I know that she is going through what is no doubt a turbulent time, but I am still human and feel affected by her actions. I make a mental note to take these feelings to my next supervision with Vera in two weeks’ time. I am also surprised and disturbed that she has clearly extensively lied to me, both about her present and past relationship with Anton von Thaule.

Lying to therapists is surprisingly common, and in Leah’s case, she was most likely ashamed of her own actions during her marriage break-up and reinvented herself as a victim. Then, her book must have exacerbated that false narrative and she got trapped in her own web of lies. This would explain why she was so disturbed and profoundly uncomfortable with her new status as author and well-known abuse victim. Or… Or she told the truth and he played her, perhaps taking out the restraining order to discredit her.

I lie back on the bed for a moment, my head spinning with disjointed, jostling thoughts. In spite of all my training, and all my own therapy work, I am unable to decipher my own feelings in this moment. Restlessness, I think. Underlying anxiety. A sense of unease – it’s the feeling of staring at a puzzle and realizing that a piece is missing. But then again, I have had to get used to pieces missing. Since the age of nineteen, when I suffered severe trauma-induced dissociative amnesia, I have known what it feels like to have patches of your life simply erased. And though my own experience with memory loss is limited to one specific incident, I sometimes have the strange feeling in other contexts, of only seeing part of the picture.

Again, my thoughts return to Leah. I instantly grow tense and annoyed with myself for not being able to let it go now. Am I going to plague myself with ruminations about a troubled client for another week until she decides to turn up for our next session, or not?