Despite Tom’s reminder about their post-lunch one-to-one, Fran is the first to arrive. She settles herself into the armchair and crosses her arms over her chest, then swiftly uncrosses them again. When Tom arrives she needs to appear open and receptive. No, receptive is not the right word. It has all the wrong connotations.

Open and communicative?

Better.

Not that she expects to get anything out of Tom. The last time she attempted that he twisted the conversation back to her and she found herself so swept along by his questions that, before she knew what she was doing, she was talking about her feelings.

She gives a small shudder and reaches into her pocket for her phone. Her message folder is bound to be bursting with texts from her mother.

She smooths her hand over the flat line of her pocket. No phone. Checks the other pocket. Also empty. She must have left it in her room. Again. She stands up and heads for the door, pauses, then wanders back into the centre of the room. There’s no point getting her phone; not least because she’ll get sucked into her mother’s neurotic vortex and she’ll probably end up spending the entirety of her session with Tom talking about that.

She gazes idly out of the window until she grows bored then paces around the room, her gaze sliding from the beige walls, to the bland painting, to the leather armchairs, to the table with the glasses and the jug and the tissues, to the key fob on the—

She stops walking. The last time she had a one-to-one the key fob was in a dish in the centre of the window sill. Now it’s pushed up to one side. She picks up the dish and pours the coins into her hand. As a child, bored in her grandmother’s house, Fran would often dig around in the dishes and pots on the cluttered shelves and sideboards. More often than not, she’d discover old pennies, big and brown and heavy in her palm. There was something so satisfying about clutching one in her hand. She felt like Jack after he’d climbed up the beanstalk and raided the giant’s house.

But there are no weighty pennies in this dish. Just a handful of tarnished coppers and a few tiny five pence pieces. She tips them back into the dish then picks up the key fob. She turns it over, running her thumb over the matt, black surface. It’s as weighty as her own key fob but there’s something cheap about the plastic and there’s a ridge, just below the keychain hole that runs all the way around. Unusual. She presses her thumbnail into it and is about to lever it open when she hears the click of the door opening.