Logan sifts his first meetings with Dr Salmon for grit; for signs of complicity in his deception. Is she pawn or puppet? Plant or mole? All he knows is this: he is out of his depth. And if she is a charlatan, he has put his most high-profile client to date in her care.

‌Peace

It is odd, not to know who you are. In the early hours of the morning, April sits on her bed, fully dressed, and listens to the silence. Not just the ordinary silence of the building. The extraordinary silence of her head. Before the pool party cracked through her defences, before she had to muffle it under hymns and nursery rhymes, she’d used bees. Beneath the buzzing, not only Dr Logan’s voice. Beneath the buzzing, the secret enemy of her peace: the relentless chatter of her brain. For years she has been harangued from troubled waking to exhausted sleep by a self-generated critical commentary over which she has only minimal control. Emerging into consciousness, recalling perhaps some strands of some bloody awful dream and it would be off.

But now, this morning, nothing.

At first she doesn’t move. Protecting the fragile peace, her body stalls. As if moving might wake the beast. Kick the voice into speech. Automatic, to minimize her breathing, like a child hiding when someone is coming, someone is looking. But no one is coming. And no one, so far as she knows, is looking. She’s alone on the bed, fully dressed, cross-legged, and her head is as still as a pond. Not one ripple.

All her fears gather up into something that needs expelling: she sneezes. Nothing else happens. The voice remains quelled. Not just silent: not there. No praise, no damnation.

She is renewed. Her brain was an attic room, full of mouldering toys, too-small dresses, things you can neither bear to look at, nor let go. Now it is swept clean, junk-free, stripped down to sanded wood floors that almost snug up to your feet as you ballet across them. Yes, unweighted by self-blame, unhampered by fear, she could dance.

So she breathes, and she is, and the dawn light grows in the window, and after some time, a shaft of it falls through and across the floor like a gift. Like God unfurling His palm and saying, Look.

She unfolds her legs, gets up, walks into sunlight. The floor is cold beneath her feet, but her face receives the magnified warmth of the late year, the sun touching her skin as tentatively as a new lover. It is beautiful. It is miraculous.