I didn’t say a lot. Not at first. Eventually, I told her about the accident. Sketched it out, rough and meaningless, the way I’d been sketching it out for myself since it happened, pretending it wasn’t a big deal, that it didn’t matter. That everything that happened after was normal—shock—and everything before was fine, just life.

Lina had taken the day off, and afterwards she drove me to the mountains.

She’d gone back to work at the start of the week, and I’d been home alone for days, mostly sleeping, catching up. My head still hurt nearly all the time and sometimes when I moved my joints creaked and groaned, but it wasn’t like it had been, it wasn’t as raw. I didn’t dream, not that I remembered, but sometimes when I woke up my chest felt tight and there was a sick dread in my stomach and then I cried again. The silence took turns being deafening and comforting. In between, or when the dread got too much, I watched shitty TV. I finished The OC in a matter of days, moved on to Veronica Mars. It made me cry. Lina called at lunch, on her afternoon break, checking in. Did we need milk? Was there enough lettuce? Code for Are you still there? Still alive? I told her she didn’t have to but, truthfully, sometimes I waited for her calls with bated breath.

But I didn’t say all that to Georgia, not the first time. I didn’t know how.

The mountains were terrifying. The roads curved around cliffs and they made my heart race and at first I felt my heart jump with every curve, every bump, but then it steadied, found its rhythm. I clutched the blue elephant, grateful its batteries had run out so Lina didn’t have to throw it out the window. We had lunch in a bakery that opened out onto a little garden, so green it looked like a postcard I’d once found of somewhere in England. ‘Thank you, Caitie,’ she said, as we got in the car to drive back.

‘What for?’

‘For trying.’

I cried then, again.

The next appointment, I inked in some of the lines, added the merest hints of colour, of truth. Sawyer’s. Dex. Tom. After. Georgia asked me questions but she didn’t push. Sometimes, she asked me how I’d felt—after the accident, after leaving Sawyer’s, all the times in between—and I tried to tell her, tried to remember, but I didn’t like going back there, didn’t like thinking about it. The blackness, the certainty that this was all wrong and I wasn’t supposed to be here, the way it had chased me home that afternoon, demanding I give in to it.

‘Why didn’t you?’ she asked.