‘I think I need to spend a penny,’ she said, standing up on her thin scratched pins. And I got up to help her but Dr. Rhys Evans stopped me with a hand on my forearm and asked Sebo whether she wouldn’t mind doing the honours, which was a bit much given the insult she had just received.

They left the room. I wasn’t comfortable it just being the two of us. Unwillingly I sat back down and rummaged for my phone in my bag to signify that I would wait patiently for the return of my mother, and then to make up for the implicit rudeness of my gesture I said, ‘Yes, I know, she’s getting worse.’

Dr. Rhys Evans stared at me – not my breasts or my shoes, but my eyes. It was an uncomfortable silence so I broke it. ‘But, hey ho, none of us are getting out of here alive . . .’

‘And you?’ she said, like a real doctor, which I kept forgetting that she was. ‘How are you coping?’

I was surprised by the question. ‘Me?’ I said.

‘Yes, how is everything with you?’

I was stunned. For a long time, no one had asked me this. They asked me how my parents were doing, how my children were doing, how Karl was doing, how Ness was doing. But nobody asked me how I was doing.

‘Yes . . .’ I said.

I felt exposed; my eyes began to sting. She saw it. Oh no. I would for ever be cornered in the deli section at Sainsbury’s.

My woes felt small in comparison but ever since Ness and Leah had broken up, I hadn’t felt myself. My resistance had dropped. I felt like I was crumbling, not dramatically, but in little pieces. No matter how hard Karl and I worked, we were always stretched financially. Every month we were sliding further and further into debt; there seemed to be no way out of it, as we lived way beyond our means. And work itself was challenging: I’d written a piece on the CEO of a pharmaceutical company for a broadsheet and had been bombarded in the comments section by the most vitriolic, personal attacks on a thread that just kept spinning. I know this is how it works now but if you’ve never been on the receiving end of it, Dr. R, it’s really hard to explain. As a journalist, I’m supposed to just take it on the chin – it’s your own fault for putting your opinions out there. But I’ve never been great at taking anything on the chin and fatally, I got involved, defending my point of view. And then things escalated, culminating with rape threats and several poisonous comments about how I was too ugly to be gang-raped. Who the hell are these people?