‘We’d been arguing, if you could call it that.’

‘What would you call it?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. An argument requires two parties. After the accident she just receded from her life, from our life together. She disappeared into herself. I supported her for as long as I could. I fed her, I bathed her. I begged her to dress herself, to leave the house. But every day was a constant battle. It was exhausting. I felt she’d been given adequate time to grieve. I felt I was due my turn. The chance to be selfish. To fall apart.’

‘To re-become yourself?’

To re-become myself? Was that what I wanted?

My entire existence feels heavy, as though someone has been stitching weights into the muscles and tendons of my body. I feel myself treading water. I feel it rising. But I no longer fight to reach the surface. Instead I let gravity do its grisly work. Dragging me into the deep.

Down, down.

Into the black water, where light cannot go.

I sweep my feet round like a child as I search for a bottom in the way Phineas must have at the end.

‘I packed a bag. I’d been stashing money away almost subconsciously. I told her I needed space. I turned my phone off and just went. I hoped that by leaving I would shock her.’

‘Shock her?’

‘Into caring. Back into her body. Something.’

I catch a pathetic glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. My eyes red from the salt of my tears. ‘God forgive me.’

‘So you left.’

‘I drove west. I had this sad romantic notion that if I could just keep moving I’d wind up where I needed to be. That I’d discover something. Some missing or long-forgotten part of myself.’

The therapist leans her head back and laughs. ‘This is my favourite part. Tell me about the women.’

I see them simultaneously. Hundreds of bodies spread out on an endless mattress, their limbs woven together, their eyes hungry, their fingers interlocked, their toes curled. I see brunettes and redheads. Blondes with shaved heads. I see tattoos and piercings. Their bodies slick and wet and writhing like sea surf. I see myself naked in the doorway and I watch as I wade into them, disappearing beneath the swell of their bodies. The tide swallowing me. Carrying me out to sea to be alone among my imagined conquests.

I see myself driving along the coast. The sea spray lapping at my skin. The air light in my lungs. I feel lifted with each stolen breath. Until the car leaves the road altogether. Until I am levitating above the curvature of the earth. Weightless, unencumbered. Flung like a comet out of the atmosphere to drift eternally along the firmament.

‘Now I want the truth,’ she says.

The truth was that I never even made it out of the state. I drove until I was tired and took up residence in one of those sad highway motels with a shared communal pool. I ate takeout alone on a lumpy mattress and at night I sat by the pool and drank.