‘What are you doing?’ she yelled. ‘You fucking idiot! You selfish cow! How dare you?’

She slapped my hand hard – the one that still held five tablets.

‘Let them go! How many have you taken? How many?’

‘None,’ I mumbled, and Grace prised open my hand, snatched the tablets and flung them across the room so hard they bounced off the wall. She grabbed one of the packets. ‘You didn’t take any? Are you sure?’

I shook my head miserably. A failure again.

We stared at each other. Grace had her hands on her hips and she shook her head at me in disgust, her nostrils flaring and her face squashed with anger. Two spots of colour had appeared on her cheeks.

‘You have no idea!’ she yelled, her voice hard with passion. ‘You have no idea how lucky you are to be here. To be alive! To be healthy! To be here, studying for a degree. Some people never get that chance!’

I clamped my hands over my ears to dampen her words but still I could hear and, all the while she went on at me about getting through this together and making the most of my life, I stared at the floor, looking at the pills scattered on the carpet, feeling smaller and smaller. I tried to swallow but I couldn’t. My face was hot and my throat thick with shame. Tears pricked at my eyes and my nose throbbed with the effort of holding them in. And still Grace’s words rained down on me, hot and acrid, like lava, ramping up the self-disgust that built in my belly because, underneath everything, I knew what she was saying, and I knew that it was true: I was selfish.

Getting up to leave Moira’s office, I remembered those desperate times in the first year – the utter blackness that had so nearly consumed me; the pointlessness of life that had swum through my veins; the emotions that had tried to destroy me – and recalled how Grace had pulled me through. Without really knowing how, and certainly not knowing why, it was Grace’s tough love that had ultimately saved me.

‘You need to make your life count,’ she told me when the dust had settled, and I was back on track. ‘Do something worthwhile with it.’

The thought that I’d let Grace down grew inside me as the Tube rattled me towards home, until it was a balloon that filled my insides, squashing my organs and choking me. I pressed my hand to my throat, swallowing again and again, to try and rid the feeling that I couldn’t breathe but I knew there was only one way I could puncture that balloon and create the space to breathe: I needed to strip Grace of that power she had over me. I needed to bury the past.