If I didn’t go, she wonders, would Suzette hunt me down? Just how much can they force someone to attend therapy? And who are they, anyway?

She’s bustling about the bedroom in her undies, pulling clothes out of the closest and discarding them on the bed, trying to figure out what to wear. It’s cool outside, the sky a pale blue: one of the first true days of autumn, a day that smells like fresh water and wood smoke. Normally she’d be excited about the chance to dress up in a more wintery outfit, not because she loves winter fashion, but because those first days of the new season mark a change and a chance to wear something new—or more, revisit something old—rather than put on one of the same outfits she’s been wearing for the past months. But nothing feels right: not the stylishly over-sized, pale blue cashmere jumper; not the flowy, high-waisted, floral skirt that flutters against her calves as she walks, which she’d imagined pairing with the cropped, burnt orange, lightweight merino that picks up the colour of the flower’s stamens perfectly.

It’s Suzette’s fault, she thinks, bitterly. After their conversation last time, how is she meant to not feel self-conscious dressing for her appointments?

If Jem were here he’d laugh at her—laugh with her about it. But he’s not here. He’s on the west coast diving, making the most of the cool, calm weather to nestle up into normally hard-to-reach abalone-rich clefts. He’ll come back full of highs and lows, full of stories about the surfs he grabbed in secret spots, and about the plastic, which storms on the back of the roaring forties and smothers the shore of the south-west in man-made colours, which are incongruous even against the bright orange lichen that fuzzes the rocks, and certainly against the backdrop of the scrubby brown–green bushlands, which roll up into mountains of white quartzite and gunmetal dolerite streaked with deep, emerald furrows of ancient rainforest.

‘It’s such a remote shoreline, and it’s being strangled by plastic tossed over the sides of ships on the other side of the world,’ Jem told her once, shaking his head in genuine grief for the innocent coast marred. ‘It’s like it’s a tip for the ocean.’ He was quiet for a moment, then murmured: ‘What seal guts must look like.’

Seal guts, dolphin guts, bird necks. There’s too much in this world to fret about: what to wear, environmental degradation, the warming planet, not to mention her octopus. As she bustles, she catches its eye in the mirror. She stops, turns, and approaches it, so that she can gaze at it front-on.

She knows she’s been spending a lot of time in front of the mirror staring like this. But she doesn’t think she’s being narcissistic, because there’re two of them, morphing together as her skin heals.

Me and the octopus, she thinks, gazing at its reflection. The octopus and I. Me and the octopus. The octopus and I.