She was not suicidal, unless she could scratch herself to death, which, right enough, Liam Macdowall practically did in the end, but Mary wasn’t wanting to do that. She ripped the page from the flipchart and burned it in the log fire she must have lit a while back. The flame ignited the reason for the flipchart. She was going to fix everything, which meant making an action plan. Mary loved action plans so much. The examining of a life in crisis, the defining and dividing of a problem, the promises you make to try and improve things. Mary chose the blue pen. She didn’t underline or use capitals. Her question was unintimidating:

What is the problem?

There were too many problems. Mary had filled three pages with them and was now howling to a song she should not be playing on repeat. ‘This too shall pass’, the lyric promised, ‘This too shall pass’. It usually helped, but the pipe band would not be beaten by acoustic therapy, and her situation was more serious than late-night shame or early-morning hopelessness, and was not passing.

She ripped the pages from the flipchart and changed the question to:

Who is the problem?

Her first answer deserved to be in red and in capitals and underlined:

ME

If Mary was being interviewed for a court report, she’d be talking about her childhood now, relaying that she was sexually abused twice before the age of five – two one-off occasions thankfully, but damaging nonetheless. She’d be speaking about her parents’ response, which was fantastic. They did everything right, which is probably why it never happened again, and why Mary had a very happy life and marriage, till today. She’d be confessing that her mother smashed bottles against the wall one Christmas, but that she only did this once and cleaned it up immediately. Mary was twenty-one at the time. Come to think of it, her mum was around Mary’s age when the smashing happened and would later refer to this period as her ‘difficult time’. She became moody and tired. She left her job. And she moved to Spain with Mary’s dad, leaving Mary to graduate, start her terrifying career, get married and have a child completely alone. Being abandoned at twenty-one isn’t a thing, though, so Mary had never dared complain about it; but she and Roddie made a pact never to abandon Jack.

Mary yearned to ring her mum, to hear her say: ‘Harry, it’s Mair!’

She longed to hear her dad clapping in the background: ‘My baby girl!’

She and her boys had wonderful summers in Spain. Hopefully they’d get back in the habit again. Her parents were in their eighties now, and Mary didn’t want to infect them with her worries. She dialled but hung up before it was connected.