I lean forward and place my head in my hands. I imagine Simone as a soldier on some distant shore and myself as a war widow, waiting impatiently by the phone. Praying for a letter that says she is finally coming home.

‘I’m not ignorant to the fact that she is grieving. We are both grieving. But this melancholia refuses to lift. She refuses to even consider the possibility that it could.’

The therapist shifts in her seat. She points to an antique anatomical bust on the windowsill. ‘Melancholia, as you call it, germinates in the mind, but it blossoms in the body. We suffer a loss and we fixate on that loss. We carry it with us. The ones we love urge us to move on, but their encouragement only seeks to further compound our sense of guilt. In a sense we mourn not only our loss, but the loss of our control over the situation, over our ability to repair the damage we have caused.’

I stare at the teacup in front of me. I think of the unending disappeared. The men, women and children all over the country who will be forced to watch their loved ones vanish. Their eyes red, their heads engorged.

‘This can have disastrous consequences,’ she says.

I close my eyes and reopen them. The upper half of my body feels weightless, but my feet feel impossibly heavy. I feel a thin current of air sweeping over my ankles. I reach to touch it but it whistles through the door and blows out into the hall.

‘Do you understand?’ the therapist says, her breathing hard, expectant.

I hear the draught upsetting doors in the hallway. The therapist winces as each slams shut. I feel the floorboards moving beneath my feet, the thunderous sound rippling throughout the house.

‘Do you understand?’ she says again, reaching out to place her hand upon mine.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

I wrench my arm back and get to my feet. She makes no effort to stand as I stumble into the hallway. I move quickly through the house, a maze of closed doorways, its hallways darkening second by second, and I am in my car before I know it. The therapist stands at the porthole window and watches as I pull away. I drive aimlessly round backroads until my breathing subsides, and then I head home.

I find Simone at the kitchen table. She stands to greet me and I can tell that she has been crying. It is strange, I think, how rarely we look at the people closest to us. If you were to ask me to draw Simone from memory I would describe her as she was on the day we first met. But as she stands before me now I realise she is older than I imagine her to be. She seems to have changed almost invisibly.

I reach out to steady her, my trembling hands drawing her body close as if the faintest breeze is all it would take to carry her away. We stand together. Our memory fragile, our time passing.