‘There is no more darkness,’ she says. ‘Because when I close my eyes a thousand more open. The light cast through each falls upon me and I see into them like the keyholes of doors. I see my parents. I see how they were before me. I know them from before they even knew themselves.’

When I arrive at the therapist’s house I pass beneath the property’s large iron gates and I ascend the gravel path. I look for Simone against the black mass of the property but she is absent. From the porthole window I see the therapist. She smiles at me and for the first time descends the staircase before I can knock on the red door.

We walk together through the house and I am surprised to find that not a single door is closed. I see paintings of empty buildings. A forest of swaying pine trees turned upside down, their tips reaching into the blue of either ocean or sky. I see a field of rabbits, their ears extended.

We sit beneath a churning sea, separated by timid silence. I try to reach Simone on her cellphone multiple times but there is no answer. When it becomes clear she won’t be attending, the therapist rises and begins to steep a pot of tea.

‘This isn’t like her,’ I say, apologising profusely, making all manner of excuses.

I had spent months insisting that our visits were unnecessary, that Simone simply needed time to collect herself. But her absence today feels like an open admission, proof of a deeper dysfunction.

‘I notice that she has seemed more withdrawn lately,’ the therapist says.

It’s not just during our sessions. At home I talk to fill the empty spaces her silence creates. It is a strange sort of inversion, a reversal of our before lives, where I had been raised to bottle emotions and she insisted on shining a chlorine light upon them. Never go to bed angry had been her campaign slogan in the early years of our relationship, and she had repeated it often. But silence was itself a sort of argument. We had reached an impasse, I felt, a stalemate. I attended the sessions as a means of keeping her hope alive, in an attempt to facilitate a change in her, but she spent them treading lightly. Now, it seemed, she was refusing to attend at all.

‘This could be fortuitous,’ the therapist says, setting down a cup and saucer in front of me. ‘I’d been hoping to talk with you alone. To discuss Simone. You’ve mentioned on several occasions that you’re unhappy with the progress we’ve been making.’

I nod my head and watch as the therapist fills the small china cup.

‘You feel as though she is stuck. That her grief has destabilised her. That it has reopened childhood wounds,’ the therapist says.

‘She makes no attempt to get better.’

‘It is natural, when watching a loved one suffer, to try to motivate them. But it’s important to remember that depression is not a purely mental state. It is not laziness or weakness. The body is at work. It experiences biochemical changes. Patients suffer vegetative symptoms. Their sleep cycle is interrupted, their appetite diminished. The body is flooded with stress hormones. It becomes a war zone.’