Why? When he tried to peer into this rabbit hole he started to feel anxious. What kind of psychopath would actively choose to go out with women who possessed traits he disliked? The anxiety made him feel as if he was his mother, that it was in his DNA, that he was not in control.

Back to the question in hand: why hadn’t he ended things with Lucy? The idea he might love her appealed to him. If this was love, this was manageable; this was not an earthquake waiting to destroy his foundation. If something went wrong in the future with Lucy, he would be sad, but he couldn’t imagine locking himself away for the rest of his life.

There might be another explanation for this stay of execution; that he had started to see value in the sessions with Carol. Growing up, Quinn came to think of therapy as akin to fixing bomb damage with wallpaper – it was something to take your mind off the fact that the walls of your house had been blown to bits. In the sessions with Carol, he’d found himself talking about his mother and father’s break-up, about his mother’s condition, his father’s disappearance. What had made him unload like that, heaping emotional coal into the filthy engine of therapy? Carol just listened, nodding in comprehension; she did not try to wallpaper anything.

At their fourth session, Carol said, ‘Now I know you have booked this as couple’s therapy, but if I’m honest, I feel Quinn could benefit most from some one-to-one sessions. You should only embark on one course of therapy at a time, so you’d have to do one or the other.’

Lucy looked disappointed. She liked being involved; she liked nodding sympathetically, as though if only he could unload all these words about his past, then at the bottom of the pile of words would be the three she was looking for.

‘Well,’ Lucy frowned, looking back and forth between Carol and Quinn. ‘We’ll have to discuss it. I felt we were making progress?’

Lucy leant forward in her chair, her usually taut face creasing into frown lines. She clasped her hands together and nodded both forefingers in Carol’s direction. Carol responded with one of her neutral, dental-advert smiles.

‘I think you were right to want to talk this through,’ she said to Lucy, ‘but what is becoming clear to me is that Quinn needs a lot more time to work through some issues independently.’ Then Carol gave Lucy one of her encouraging nods, the nod that made you feel you’d given all the right answers and were winning the therapy game show. ‘You’re doing a fantastic job being a supportive partner, Lucy.’

‘Well, I have a very secure attachment style,’ said Lucy, keen to out-therapy the therapist.