Lacy Clare isn’t. She’s euphoric. ‘He did it, Dan! He told his mother to back off,’ she tells him. ‘He was kind, but firm, so firm, and manly.’ Her mother-in-law left ‘with a bee in her bonnet and she took her Bundt cake with her, which would have been dry anyway’. Dan smiles weakly, encouraging her to carry on.

‘When the phone call from my father-in-law came to say, “Mummy isn’t feeling well. She worries it’s her heart. Perhaps you’ll call her,” he didn’t. He didn’t do it, Dan! He told his father she’d be better off getting some rest and he’d call them in the week.’ Lacy was so pleased with her husband that they’d had awkward but very satisfying sex – ‘Truly wonderful, Dan’ – in one of the positions recommended in her yoga-for-pregnancy book.

Dan is glad for her but riddled with jealousy, which is not like him. He sees his clients as little seedlings. His aromatherapy-scented office is a warm little propagator in which they can germinate. He keeps the thermostat set at the exact same temperature. Offers them water as he sits them in the patch of sunlight refracted off the sea. He creates a bubble, a greenhouse in which they can throw their angry stones, break their little bell jars and bloom.

Not today, though. He is not enjoying Lacy Clare’s efflorescence. He wants to snatch her happiness and take it for himself. He is Morticia Addams, snipping the heads of roses in bloom. He wants to lie on the couch and have someone listen to him talk about how confused and angry he’s feeling.

His next client is significantly less happy. Dan is relieved – and disgusted with himself for that. He tells the bullied teenager that often the way people treat you is more about themselves than it is about you. ‘No one has the power to make you feel anything. You have a choice and you can choose not to believe the names you’re being called. You can choose to believe your own version of yourself, not other people’s. You are the one with the power.’

Dan feels like a fraud as the trite words fall out of his mouth, like broken teeth. How can he sit there and say the power is hers when Atticus has him in his fucking pocket? Dan is there, in his phone under contacts, and he hasn’t called, hasn’t texted.

Whenever anything happened to Dan as a child, whether it was a bad fall, score or disappointment, his nan would always say, ‘Some people have no legs, Daniel. Think about that and then how bad your problem is.’ That was the reason he wanted to become a counsellor. His nan was wrong. Pain and suffering are personal and incomparable. A lost leg is no more distinguished than a lost lover or a dying dog.