I peter out – it was almost beautiful, what he was trying to say. I glance out of the window at the cold grey day, at my warrior leaf. All the others have gone now, all of them except for my stubborn friend and some hoodlums around the trunk. A few drops of rain tap against the windowpane. I look down at my hands; they look like my mother’s, the veins protruding, a freckle on my knuckle that hadn’t been there before. Why am I here? I cannot fathom quite what happened.

‘I wonder what it is that makes us so restless as a species,’ Dr. Robinson says. Her voice sounds different, as if she is talking to a human being, a close friend even, rather than a patient. I respond to it, I lean into it – it’s like she’s proffering a warm hand, pulling me up from the abyss. ‘What makes us crave transcendence?’ she continues. She understands what Karl was trying to say.

She too is looking out at my tree and it’s hard to tell if she’s speaking to me, the tree, or to no one. But then she turns to me and we lock eyes. It is the connection I have been craving since she came into the room.

‘I presume it’s just part of being human,’ I say, and I know then that I will tell her everything.

‘“Why don’t we make love any more?” he asked me.’

He’d had no resentment in his voice. I’d replied, too quickly. We do. It was a feeble response – we both knew it, but it just sounded too impossibly sad to agree with him, to admit it; one of us had to protect our relationship with falsehoods. But inside I was marvelling at him, his bravery at venturing into such dangerous territory. I don’t know, I said, because I too wanted to open the cage door.

‘Then I heard myself ask him one of those questions that can never be unasked: “Are you having an affair?” I was no fool, Dr. Robinson. You see, Karl had been away a lot. He’d been on several trips abroad and had been working for a company up in Edinburgh on and off for a year, and I had had my suspicions that something was going on up there. I’d seen a woman’s name – Janine – come up several times on his phone and each time he’d angled the screen away from me and didn’t answer the call. Then a minute or so later I would see him secretively sending a text. But I said nothing; if it didn’t affect us here at home, I preferred not to know these things.’

‘How did he respond?’ she asks.

‘He looked affronted. “No, I’m not having an affair,” he said, eyeball to eyeball. “But you fancy other people?” I asked.’