‘Started to realize?’ she hissed, sitting up straight. ‘And why the sudden epiphany? We both know the answer – Amber. Dripping poison in your ear. Stealing you away from me.’

I was shaking now, barely able to string a chain of words together.

‘She’s saved me, Mum! I was pretty much killing myself, and now…’ An anxious kind of euphoria rose up in me, almost as if I was still lying spreadeagled on that couch, surrounded by my fellow warriors. ‘Now I’m starting a whole new life.’ The image of Mum in her robes swum up inside me, and I nearly blurted the story out, but I managed to keep it inside. ‘I’m a different person now.’

‘Some days I blame myself,’ she continued, ranting as if she hadn’t even heard me. ‘I’m the one who brought her into your life. And no one even really knows who she is. No real information on her website.’ She was ticking off Amber’s crimes with her fingers. ‘She’s not registered as a therapist with the BACP – I checked. She’s nothing but a charismatic fraud who’s destroying my daughter’s sanity.’ She stared at me. ‘I was desperate when I called her, Rachel. You’d made me desperate.’

This was awful. I had to make her see sense – I couldn’t afford for her to stop paying for my sessions, not with that credit card bill breathing down my neck and rent due in five days. I forced softness into my tone.

‘Mum, I’m so much better for seeing her – I am grateful to you. I feel wise; I feel grounded. I’ve actually got a new boyfriend.’

She visibly flinched at that: the sight of her instinctive reaction made shame flood my entire body. That was how radioactive I was when it came to men. No wonder Arthur hadn’t even bothered to text.

‘Rachel, you’re in no fit state to start another affair.’

‘It’s not an affair! He’s available. He’s great, he’s a…’ What was Arthur, really? Certainly not my boyfriend, and ‘reiki practitioner’ would send her sky high. ‘He’s a filmmaker,’ I said randomly. Most men in West London claimed they were Scorsese, cruelly undiscovered. ‘He’s really successful. You’d like him.’

‘Did you meet him on this transformational retreat?’

‘Yes, but…’ Why was I so incapable of lying to her face? Time squashed flat and I was a child again.

‘Right,’ she said, that contemptuous sneer back on her face. She looked out of the window, as if she had to find a distraction to prevent herself from telling me the hard truth about how unlovable I was. How only she could love me, doomed by biology to take me on.