Edward is by the pool but hears us and comes in, giving me a sanguine smile.

“How are you this morning, my dear?”

“Tired,” I say, “and mortified.”

“Oh don’t be,” Gemma says. “Panic attacks are the absolute worst. Edward told me, but don’t worry, we’ve all been there.”

“Well, I’m grateful. Some party guest I am.”

“Oh, every good party ends with sedatives,” Edward says. “Trust me.” He takes his sunglasses off and it occurs to me that perhaps he hasn’t slept at all. “You’re not the only one who needs some help to make it to morning.”

“Goodness yes,” Gemma says, returning to the table with toast. “I spent most of my first week in Buenos Aires on the floor of Edward’s bathroom.”

“Really?” This comes as a surprise from the lighthearted Gemma.

“Oh yes. I didn’t leave London because things were going well.”

“What happened?”

“I had a nervous breakdown, or I suppose that’s an old-fashioned term, isn’t it?”

“Psychotic break,” Edward says.

“That’s the one. Oh, that sounds rather less romantic though. Anyway, I had one. I’d been depressed for a while before that, I realize now. Very depressed.”

Edward leans over to squeeze Gemma’s hand. I realize that her cheerful demeanor might be as much smoke screen as anything.

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“The strangest thing. It was this completely ordinary morning. I was making tea for my husband, Thomas, and I had this deep moment of”—she searches for the word—“dissociation. I had this sudden realization that all my life was making tea for my husband—dash of milk, heaping scoop of sugar like a child would want—and everything else was a mirage. I was in hell, and hell was standing forever at the counter of our Mayfair town house stirring sugar into tea. I began screaming all of these delusions at my husband.”

“Whoa. What did he do?”

“He told me to pull myself together and left for work. British men, at least the ones of Thomas’s ilk and age, don’t really ‘do’ mental health. All things can be solved by a stiff upper lip and—irony!—a cup of tea.”

“So what did you do?”

“It only got worse from there. When Thomas dismissed me, I decided he was the devil—the actual devil, remember, I thought I was in hell—and became extremely paranoid and obsessed with escaping. I didn’t sleep or eat for almost a week. I crashed my car and ended up in hospital.”

Gemma looks into her cup of tea as though to add something but thinks better of it.

“Sometimes,” Edward says when the silence becomes heavy, “there’s no way out but out.”

Penny Is in Love for Real