It took weeks. Sometimes I’d talk for an entire hour; sometimes I’d only talk for ten seconds and then there would be these long, awful silences as I tried to untangle it all in my head, tried to figure it out. ‘I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense,’ I said once, and Georgia had frowned, told me it did make sense, but that maybe it didn’t need to.

I told her about the trip. I hated talking about it, but I wanted to. I didn’t realise how much until I started. I told her how I’d planned it for Lina but I’d wanted it for myself. How the more safe and careful I was, the more a part of me wanted to do something that wasn’t. Go somewhere I didn’t know, somewhere noisy and wild and alive.

I told her how it was easier to tell myself it was for Lina than to admit it was for me, because then it felt safe, it didn’t feel like such a risk.

‘Why didn’t you go?’ she asked.

‘Because of the accident.’

She waited, tapping her pen on her notepad. I wanted to tell her I knew what she was doing when she did that, but instead I told her the truth.

‘Because I had to be careful. I wasn’t careful and somebody died.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Caitlin.’

I shook my head, not sure I believed her. Not sure I wanted to.

‘It was silly. It was a fantasy,’ I said. The words came hard and even I didn’t believe them. ‘And risky. Dangerous.’ I thought about all the things.

The planes. The guns. The subways.

‘I was scared. I got scared.’

‘Of what?’

After the accident, all those worries turned into cold, raw fear, and I was just scared of everything. Dying. After the accident, it was all I could think about. Dying became inevitable, and it scared me so much.

‘Everything.’

She shifted, tucking her purple shoes and their silver buckles behind the leg of her chair, studied me.

‘What do you want, Caitlin?’ she asked finally. ‘I know what you wanted before the accident, but what do you want now?’

I looked at my hands. One thing.

‘I don’t know.’

But that wasn’t true either, and maybe from the way she looked at me and nodded, she knew that too.

Afterwards, Lina drove us to the Northern Beaches. The blue elephant lived in her car and the sunlight had bleached its fur, turned it nearly white, but still I clutched it as she drove, held on.

‘Tell me about him,’ she said, catching me looking at its broken trunk.

‘Who?’

She glanced at me, shrugged and looked back at the road. I squeezed the elephant, so worn out I could feel the plastic battery box in its belly.