Dr Shearer believed that returning as many stolen items as she could was an important step in Tully’s recovery. She wouldn’t be able to return every item, as a lot of things had been thrown out, given away or donated, but he suggested she start by choosing items that she had taken recently, ones that would still be stocked, and the ones that were most valuable. The goal was both to take responsibility for what she had done and to make reparations to the store where possible. Tully hadn’t been keen on the idea, but she’d made a commitment to do whatever she had to do to heal.

Sonny, too, had mixed feelings about the exercise. As a lawyer, he said, I’d recommend against it. If one of the shop owners calls the police, you could end up with a criminal record. But as a husband, I see that it’s important for your recovery, so I think you should do it. He added that, as a lawyer, it was a bad idea for him to go with her. And so Tully had had to swallow her pride and ask the one other person in the world she could tell without being entirely humiliated. Rachel.

‘You need to what?’ she’d said when Tully called her.

‘Return my stolen items,’ Tully explained. ‘I think it’s shame therapy. I must atone for my sins.’

‘And what’s my role?’ Rachel asked. ‘Am I your witness?’

‘Yes,’ Tully said. ‘And maybe my accomplice, if I have to evade arrest.’

Up to this point, the day had not been as bad as Tully had imagined, especially with Rachel coming along for the ride. In fact, it was almost fun, in a perverse kind of way. They’d visited six stores so far, bearing items to return. From the elderly woman who patted her hand and said, ‘I stole the most beautiful pair of earrings from a boutique in Paris once; I still have them somewhere,’ to the baffled woman at the hardware store who kept repeating, ‘A screwdriver? You took a screwdriver?’, everyone had seemed happier to gloss over it and move on rather than make Tully feel bad. But the lady at Myer – Judy, according to her nametag – didn’t seem to have got the memo.

‘Do you mean you stole them?’ she asked, mortifyingly loudly.

‘Well . . . I didn’t pay for them,’ Tully said quietly, turning to glance at the woman who’d just lined up behind her, holding a four-pack of tea towels and a cheese board in her arms.

‘You mean you forgot?’

Tully wanted to nod. Yes, yes I forgot. Here you go, I’ll pay now. Do you take Visa? But that was not part of the deal. When Dr Shearer first raised the idea, Tully had suggested leaving the goods out the front of the shops in the middle of the night, or returning them by post, but neither of those ideas equated to ‘taking responsibility’, which the psychologist insisted was the point of the exercise.