He laced his fingers together and regarded her with paternal sympathy, hoping she would take his advice to heart. Though he didn’t want to belabour the point, she seemed reluctant to leave, as if needing something more. ‘In humans, consciousness is both a gift and a curse,’ Gessen said. ‘We spend the vast majority of our time either agonising about the mistakes of the past or worrying about the future. Ever aware of our mortality, how do we construct a healthy life? How do we live, love, work when we know that obliteration awaits us at some unknown point in the future? Death might be decades away.’ He paused. ‘Or next week.’ He had her attention now. ‘Terrifying isn’t it?’ He tried to soften his words with a smile. ‘It’s no wonder we’ve invented all kinds of defences and distractions to avoid this one inescapable fact: that our time here on Earth is finite, and none of us gets out alive.’

‘That’s awfully gloomy. When you put it that way,’ Libby said, with a nervous laugh. ‘You’d think more people would put themselves out of the misery of waiting for the end.’

‘Many do.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t need to tell you that.’

Her face blanched.

Of course, she was thinking about the brother who’d hanged himself. It was Libby who’d discovered the body when she arrived home from school. A shy and sensitive girl of twelve, just embarking on adolescence, the experience could have destroyed her. But that early tragedy had spurred her on to learn about the human psyche and fostered a desire to help others construct meaningful lives in the face of existential terror.

A shadow passed through Libby’s eyes.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Just that… I wish it wasn’t necessary to lie to him about who I was. He only confided in me because he thought I was a patient.’

And not my spy. He leaned forward and met her gaze. ‘We’re all patients,’ Gessen said. ‘All of us. I myself have regular sessions with the analyst I’ve been seeing for years. Sometimes only two or three times a year, but when it’s time to meet with her, and take my turn on the couch, I am reminded how fragile we are. Even those of us who pretend to have all the answers.’

When she didn’t respond, he searched for something to give her solace. ‘If you go on to qualify as a practicing psychotherapist, you’ll find there are hard choices to make with every patient. Ethical dilemmas will come at you from all directions. I once had a patient whose mother died while he was in residential treatment. He suffered from severe depression and had attempted suicide twice. I made the very difficult choice to wait until he was stabilised before I gave him the news.’

‘How did he take it?’