She smiles, still with shut eyes, and nods her head a little. ‘How nice to have a friend . . . was the dinner good, in the inn?’

‘Yes, it was hearty.’

‘And the room? Was it nice?’

‘Oh yes, we slept in a big four-poster bed.’

She is nearly asleep but she raises an eyebrow there in a questioning fashion. I like her like this, I really do. I’m smiling but she can’t see me.

‘You dirty shrink,’ I say to her, quietly moving the chair from the table to the bedside. She smiles. I sit down and very gently begin to stroke her hair. We are very close. A muscle twitches on her face and I remember Ness lying there next to me in that big four-poster, inches apart, like this. And I remember something she said as we lay there in the great leveller of darkness. She told me that she had something to confess – how excited I’d felt to hear those words. She wasn’t sure exactly why but she couldn’t help feeling jealous of my best and oldest female friends, Ally and Grace, of the place they held in my affections. She’d met them at one of my birthday drinks at the house and I’d noticed she was odd with them. I understood, or I pretended I did, for I felt flattered and tried to cover up my coyness with a pretence of understanding; we talked about female friendship for a while but it was ages before I could fall asleep. This . . . whatever it was that was going on between us . . . this tenderness, was not easy to categorize. It felt precarious, unsettling. Ness on the other hand had no trouble sleeping; at one stage, breathing heavily, she turned in her sleep and wrapped her arm around me, her hand cupping my breast. I suddenly became wide awake, aware of every single nerve-ending, every rise and fall of my chest. I could hear an owl in the woods beyond. She must have thought I was Leah. After a minute or two, I gently crawled out from beneath her hand, got out of bed, tucked her in, and took a blanket and went to sleep on the sofa.

‘Just because we might feel these things, it doesn’t mean we have to act on them,’ I whisper, but Dr. R too is sound asleep now. That mantra I have oft repeated sounds hollow now in this sterile room, my voice just a rasp.

‘I never wanted mess in my life, you see,’ I say to no one. ‘I’ve always been very clear about that. I hate mess. I hate deception. Karl deserved so much better than that . . .’ I sit back. I look around and think about the mess my life is in right now. ‘I hate mess,’ I repeat quietly, confused by everything.