I can’t help but think of my father, my sister, Jacob’s wife; their faces warped caricatures of the people I imagine them to be as they goad me. Who knew I had so many enemies?

Boiling water splashes onto my hand as I carelessly tip the contents of the kettle into my mug. I cry out, more in panic than pain.

What if Jacob is a completely fictionalized character? A puppet created and controlled by a master manipulator? He could have been told what to say, how to behave, what to do to reel me in. Vanessa probably doesn’t even exist, a made-up cast member in this debauched pantomime designed to bring me down.

The rising sun streams through the kitchen window, its bright rays falling like daggers onto the tiled floor. A prism of seven colours dances on my bare foot as I step in and out of the shadows.

My mother used to say that we should always try to be a rainbow in someone else’s grey cloud, the brightness when their world is dark; the overarching bridge for them to get to the other side. It’s what she always strove to be, instilling in me that everyone deserves to have colour in their lives.

I’d thought I was the colour in Jacob’s life; selflessly laying myself down for him to cross. But perhaps I’m just a narcissist who feeds my own need for gratification with other people’s insecurities. Even as I’m thinking it, I know it’s not true, but I don’t know what to believe any more.

There’s a movement down the end of the garden, and I freeze, mug in hand, my breathing shallow as I try to focus on what it is. The branches of an imposing oak tree overhang the front of my office, creating moving swathes of darkness and light as they sway in the breeze. And the low sun is blindingly bright, obscuring my vision, but there is definitely a figure there.

I rush to my laptop on the dining table and check my schedule for the day to see that my first client is Melanie Langley at nine.

I inwardly groan. The last thing I feel like doing right now is propping somebody else up when all around me it seems that my good intentions are being exploited. But my dread is immediately replaced with guilt. It’s not all around me; it’s one person and it’s not anyone else’s fault that my trust has been so poorly misplaced.

I check the time on the corner of the screen and again on my watch, wondering why Melanie is an hour early. Or, more likely, how my ravaged brain has got the time wrong.