‘That’s it,’ said Amber. ‘Puff it out. Faster! Expel that rage from your body.’

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor of her treatment room, cushions spread out all around us. I’d arrived half an hour ago with tears streaming down my blotchy face, trying to avoid the nosy looks from the market traders setting up their stalls for the day. I’d called her the night before in desperation, and Amber – caring, kind Amber – had carved out an emergency appointment for me at 7.30 a.m. It was two days since my dinner with Mum and the emotional rawness that I’d been feeling before it was now more like an open wound. I had to work. I had to live. I couldn’t afford to bleed out.

I collapsed back against the bank of cushions, exhausted. Amber smiled down at me from above, her dark fringe swept across her high forehead, her lips smudged with a sticky red gloss. She looked so beautiful and fierce.

‘Your body was holding on so tightly, wasn’t it? You did so well, expelling that rage. Pushing it out of your cells.’

If only it were that easy, I thought. Of course, she knew that’s what I was thinking.

‘What’s she talking about, right?’ she said, eyes dancing. ‘Trust me, I know how hard it is unravelling the bonds of a toxic relationship with someone you love.’

The words were like an electric shock.

‘I don’t think…’ My thoughts were scrambled, impossible to order. ‘Do you really think that’s what it is with Mum?’ I said. ‘Toxic?’

Amber looked down at the woven ethnic rug we were sitting on, her fingers playing with the fringing.

‘I’m sorry, that was me going too fast again,’ she said, her gaze coming up to meet mine. ‘Sometimes, when I can feel your pain in my own cells so acutely – it makes me try too hard to help you heal. I’ve been tuning into you since you called. It’s been agony, hasn’t it?’

Everything she said made our bond sound so tantalizingly intimate. It was food for my unhealthy craving to know her better – to understand her pain, to be more than just another name on her fat roster of paying clients. I’d tried a deep-dive online, but nothing had come up – no Facebook account, no Twitter. I’d had high hopes for an Instagram account stuffed with inspirational quotes and photographs of her pretzeled into complex yoga poses against Ibizan sunsets, but there was nothing there either. If I was really devious, I could use the servers at work to penetrate way further than Google could, but so far I’d resisted the urge.

A backdraft of defensiveness swept up. ‘I haven’t always described her right,’ I said. ‘She can be the most amazing Mum, too.’