Dan makes a note to phone her and tell her she needs to reinforce the messages being discussed in their sessions. The old Dan would have run down the stairs, caught up with the girl at the door and made eye-contact with her. He would have told her she was doing really well and deserved happiness. He’d have pressed an acorn from the stash he keeps inside an old marbles bag into her hand and said, ‘Remember. Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must itself become a wreck.’

Dan has photos of saplings in pots on windowsills. They live in houses belonging to people he will never see again. He doesn’t need to. He can see they’re growing just fine without him.

Where is that Dan now? This version of him feels made up of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The phone finally pings at twelve thirty, as Dan is looking at his sandwich and thinking he’s never felt less hungry. He tries not to lunge across the desk to reach it.

ATTICUS: I climbed up the door. And opened the stairs. I said my pyjamas. And put on my pray’rs. I turned off the bed. And crawled into the light. And all because you kissed me goodnight. Xxx

Dan has to google the lyrics, and in the break between his afternoon patients, he puts his feet up on the sofa and listens to Doris Day crooning at him that ‘’twas midnight and yet, the sun was shining bright, and all because you kissed me last night’.

Dan’s afternoon flies by and he’s soaring. He finally manages to convince a long-standing patient who needs citalopram, not counselling, to go to the doctor. ‘You deserve a better life. You deserve not to carry this anxiety around with you. You deserve to arrive in St Pancras station and see nothing but the best bits, not spend your time frantically searching for escape routes. I want you to stand next to the piano as someone plays and listen to them while you miss your train.’

What a speech, Dan! He’s so buoyed up when she leaves, tears in her eyes, that he calls the mother of his last patient and gives her a list of books to order and tells her to make sure her daughter attends the next session, along with his personal phone number, which is entirely against the rules.