He squeezes me tight. “Have you considered speaking to someone?”

“You mean a therapist?”

He nods.

“I told you, I saw a therapist after Alice died. I can’t keep raking over the past, Ross. It’s too much.”

“I don’t mean about the past. I mean about the present. Talk to someone about how Catherine coming back makes you feel.” He looks at me from under his eyebrows. “Maybe a counselor could help you work through your emotions,” he says. “What if you need to confront your feelings about her if you’re ever going to move forward?”

“You’re sounding like a counselor yourself.”

“Well, I am a GP.”

“Hmm.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Okay.”

But I won’t. I can’t. Because it isn’t just about Catherine Dawson. It’s about me. And the thing in my head that won’t go away. The thing I can’t allow myself to think about.

I lean against Ross’s chest and breathe in his clean, male scent. I don’t want these pictures, but still they come, spooling out like a scary film I’m compelled to watch. It isn’t true. It can’t be. Everything I told the police and my parents and Angela Harris is true. I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember.

20

THEN: AFTER

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8, 2007

It’s my second session with Angela Harris. Today, she is wearing brown velvet trousers and a green blouse. Her hair is tied back into a loose ponytail and she is writing something in her notebook with a scratchy pen—something about me.

I don’t like that. Don’t like the fact that she gets to write things down—things I’ve said, or things she thinks of when I tell her something—and I don’t get to see them. I don’t like the fact that she can keep secrets from me, but that I’m expected to tell her all of mine. It doesn’t seem fair.

Alice had a secret she wasn’t telling me, too.

Angela Harris uncrosses her legs, then recrosses them on the other side. She’s wearing the sort of shoes I used to wear when I was about seven. Flat with a T-bar and a little pattern over the toes made with holes. “What else has been happening since we last spoke?” she says.

I worked out last week that she never asks me a question that I can answer with a yes or no, which is really annoying. I think she does it deliberately to make me say more than I want to. But she’s slipped up with that last one, because although I can’t answer it with a yes or no, I can say “nothing much” and she’ll have to ask me something else.