They talk in turns. Logan speaks of amorality, the absence of guilt, the dissolution of conscience. Gabrielle Salmon speaks of insight, peace and clarity. Logan launches into a deconstruction of the psychotic personality, peppered with technical language, though so impassioned that towards the end he inadvertently uses the word loon. April is now free of distress, says his opponent, adding as any psychiatrist – or psychologist – would surely want for their client. They butt against each other, but so unalike in their substance that where Logan comes away feeling fragmented, his opponent simply subsides, unharmed as a tide.

Rain applauds at the window. He has lost. But even in the knowledge of his loss, a salient point floats like a fragment of wreckage to the top of his mind, and Logan attempts one last stab at his argument. (Though won’t water simply part for a blade and lighten the arm that wields it?) His eight-year-old self, once told off for tearing a boy’s shirt in a fight he didn’t start, and not believed, stares at the floor and divests himself of what feels most abhorrent:

April said all deaths are suicides.

Gabrielle Salmon has been swinging in her chair, one way, then the other. Now she stops, and, without looking up, Logan feels her stillness. It is the stillness of a hawk hovering over a field mouse. Then the rapid descent.

This is about your daughter, she says.

Times folds over the room once, twice.

He wants to look up but can’t now, for the tears in his eyes.

Logan, she says, for God’s sake, do the process. How can you function under this burden?

And it’s true, it feels like a burden, so suddenly heavy it is hard to breathe beneath its weight. Not only Flora’s death but other losses: his boyhood dog Sandy, who slept in his bed as a puppy, whom he taught to balance a biscuit on her nose before she was crushed beneath the wheels of the island’s only police car; his mother, who said, I will always be here for you, but slipped the emergency suitcase from under his bed without waking him and was gone by breakfast, only a letter to his dad marking her place at the table. Breath-sucking vacuums triggered briefly by every subsequent loss, yet he had successfully contained and sealed every absence, large and small, stored his losses in the dark behind a door he couldn’t even remember how to open. Now time has fermented them. Flora’s loss is too big to contain. And now, all together, they are bursting their lids, and their contents descend upon him, and he dissolves in the office of a woman who already knows too much.