‘Oh, look!’ I say, getting up. ‘I think it’s starting to snow!’ She turns suddenly and we both stare. It is snowing. She joins me by the window. It’s beautiful! Big fat flakes start swirling silently past our noses; we’re like children, our eyes wide with wonder. We are no longer psychiatrist and patient – we are just two people watching the snow falling.

When we sit back down, the atmosphere feels different. It’s as if the snow has softened me; I stop being so combative. I don’t know why I’m so angry. I feel rootless and scared sometimes in here. ‘It’s the context of the day you have to understand,’ I say.

‘OK,’ she says. She can be so gentle sometimes, so motherly. What I really want to do is lie down with my head in her lap and go to sleep. ‘Give me the context.’

I pause a moment and think back. ‘I now need these pills just to feel normal, Dr. R. On Wikipedia I find out that 1 mg of Lorazepam is the equivalent of 10 mg of Valium and some days I’m taking three or four. By this point, I’m a bona fide junkie and it’s all pretty much legit.’

‘Did your doctor know the quantities you were consuming?’

‘My doctor snorts lines of cocaine in the children’s toilet at the Christmas Fair, Dr. R.’

‘Did you confide in anyone?’

‘I could hardly tell my parents. They’re paid up members of the Bach Remedy Squad. I once snapped my shin as a child and my mother put me to bed and rubbed arnica on it.’

‘And Karl? Did he know?’

‘Yes, to a degree. But Karl was a great advocate of substance abuse; he was all for it. Besides, I think he preferred me dulled, less waspish, less alert. You see, my bone china edges had now become fuzzy and soft like cotton wool, cushioning life’s little blows.’

‘And how were those little blows? How were things between you and him?’

I sigh; I stretch out my stick-thin legs. I’ve got white leggings and white socks on and they look like two cotton buds. I have become something absurd.

‘I’d forgiven him and Ness. Not for altruistic reasons, just because it was the only way in the end for everybody. This way, life could just carry on as normal. I wanted the kids to feel safe and I needed to reassure Josh that Karl and I were OK. I stopped giving Ness a hard time – she’d screwed up, she knew it, but it was over. Things were back to normal; if anything there was a deeper connection that forgiveness brings. She and the girls were at ours all the time as usual. Although . . .’