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Chapters (28)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. Chapter 1
  6. Chapter 2
  7. Chapter 3
  8. Chapter 4
  9. Chapter 5
  10. Chapter 6
  11. Chapter 7
  12. Chapter 8
  13. Chapter 9
  14. Chapter 10
  15. Chapter 11
  16. Chapter 12
  17. Chapter 13
  18. Chapter 14
  19. Chapter 15
  20. Chapter 16
  21. Chapter 17
  22. Chapter 18
  23. Chapter 19
  24. Chapter 20
  25. Epilogue
  26. Acknowledgements
  27. About the Author
  28. About the Publisher

Connie stared at Emma, her lips trembling, tears on her cheeks. ‘Why did they save me?’ she cried. ‘They shouldn’t have saved me.’

Chapter 20

I don’t seem to be coping so well since she left. I don’t know why she left. She was my link, my lifeline. And now she’s gone. I still talk to her. Dr. Robinson, I say, that’s a nice dress you’re wearing. What did Si Hubby make for dinner last night? Or if I’m feeling cheeky, like in the old times, I’ll say, Did Si Hubby get lucky last night, Dr. R? But she doesn’t hear me because she’s only in my head, I know that. But I imagine the way her hair will slip forward and how she’ll blush and look a bit flustered. Or she’ll smile and how great that will make me feel. But I didn’t make her smile in the end. No, she gave up on me; I did something too awful to forgive. I have lost everyone now.

I think Karl has visited me once or twice. I don’t remember seeing him but I have seen a Twix by my bedside and a crap magazine. I do not eat it and I do not read them. I do not wish or deserve to be alive any more, yet still my body carries on. And I wonder why; I don’t use it, I don’t feed it and I don’t want it. All it does is lie on the bed; I have a tube that feeds me, pumping in the nourishment, and another one that pumps out the waste. Sometimes people turn me this way or that or wash me and I suppose time passes, but I have lost all concept of that because time is perspective and too much perspective is a terrible thing. Perhaps the Devil got me in the end and I am in hell and hell is here in this room.

The ceiling has fifty-seven panels on it; the paint is peeling off two of them. Is this hell, Dr. Robinson? Please tell me. Are you at home, Dr. R, with Si Hubby, Netflix and chilling? Do you ever give me a thought? I miss you and your endless silly questions. I imagine her getting on with her busy professional life, visiting other patients, sitting there with her notepad upside down, vomiting in their toilets, and I’m jealous. I thought we had something. I look back to then as the good old days; sometimes I go through every session we had in my head, everything she said, all the secrets she told me. I imagine I am her, pushing that pushchair, hungover with tiredness, that screaming child . . . I never offered her comfort. I wish I had. Oh so many things I wish I had done differently.