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I dragged my mind back to the present, to Colette’s warm kitchen and her placid tones. “Probably not. He likes me, but he’s not very experienced with relationships. I’m concerned he’s diving too quickly into this one. He wants it to be special, but I’m scared to give him false hope. To throw myself into it and then not be all he thinks I can be. Because I might not improve, you see. I might always be this way. And it wouldn’t be fair to saddle him with someone like me.”

She frowned at me, tapping her pen. “Is that your opinion or Max’s?”

“Mine.”

“Were you in a better place when you first met him?”

I was lying semi-conscious on sharp wet gravel. “Not exactly.”

“Can I suggest, therefore, that he might like you as you are?”

I barked a laugh. “You can suggest all you like, but I have a hard time accepting it.”

“Perhaps that is also something you could go away and think about.”

Maybe doing this in a foreign language helped, or maybe the French did therapy differently. I’d anticipated rehashing my father’s death and the failure of my marriage, but we’d divedstraight into the here and now, and touched on the future, too. More pragmatic life-coaching than therapy, like an older, wiser friend pointing out what was bleeding obvious to everyone except me.

“I asked what the loudest voice right now was, and you said your anxiety. What’s the loudest voice when you are on set?”

I chuffed. “100 percent my anxiety. It screams. It… it makes me want to vomit.”It knew all my insecurities and used them against me. It told me to cut myself.

“Is that due to the people you surround yourself with, or the job itself?”

“Both. There’s nowhere to hide on television. It’s… intense, and close up. You have to be on your game when you’re filming. And that’s hard for me, especially working with my ex and his partner.”

“And the medicine you take—I’ve gone over the list—do they help at all?”

I considered for a moment. “Yes, they stop me having regular panic attacks. They keep everything more on… a low simmer. Like, it’s always there, but more predictable. More of a constant grinding nausea rather than outright retching.”

“And the side effects? Constipation? Dry mouth? Ejaculatory?”

“Um… tolerable.” I preferred to avoid discussing my sex life with strangers. And the state of my bowels, to be fair.

“So your libido is okay.”

“Yes.” Clearly, she’d missed the part about embarrassment.

“Is there anything else you feel I should know about you today, Caspian?”

“Yes. I cut myself. A lot. I’m very ashamed of it, but I can’t stop.”

“There’s nothing shameful about mental health problems, Caspian.”

That old chestnut. Maybe she wasn’t so different. “Easy to say if you don’t have any. Or arms covered in scars. I’ve cut for nearly twenty years, on and off. It brings me temporary relief.”

“Do you feel like cutting yourself now?”

“Yes.”

She changed tack. “Let’s go back to that sickness you mentioned, that uncomfortable sensation in the pit of your stomach. Do you have that now, too?”

“Yes.” I turned my face to the window, closing my eyes.

“Can I suggest that it’s a mix of shame as well as anxiety? And that your meds probably help somewhat with the anxiety, so what we need to focus on is the shame?”

The fucking woman was right, of course. Tears began trickling down my face. Inevitable self-pity settled around me, snug as a woollen blanket. Wallowing in that was pretty addictive, too. I’d wasted day after day thinking about solutions for getting over my shame. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t one of them.

I’m not sure how long I sat in that kitchen with a box of tissues. Colette didn’t ask me anything else. In fact, she made inroads into the basket of ironing. And when I gathered myself to leave, she gave me a hug, which wasn’t in any therapy manual I’d ever come across.

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