I’m so lonely,” my mouth said, and I started to cry.
Within a minute I was being asked to get into the police car, and within ten minutes I was standing outside a women’s refuge.
The refuge had a big common area with sofas and a hand-painted mural of a forest across three walls, and a kitchen for us to eat together. The dorms were all full of women and children, but the lady in charge said I could spend the night on a sofa.
I ended up spending the week there. It felt nice, like a little community of bruised, terrified, and addicted women. Jill ran the place with a team of volunteers. Jill was large and had bright red hair piled on top of her head and she always wore a black vest top with a swishy black skirt with purple Dr. Martens. There was a massive garden out the back with deck chairs, and Jill told me every day to sit out there and “clear my mind.” A doctor visited and I told her I needed a refill prescription of the medicine I’d been on. She frowned and suggested I try a lower dose of something that was apparently “less taxing” on the brain. Another woman—a volunteer at a charity shop—came around with clothes, which was great as I literally had only the clothes on my back. I picked out a black trouser suit with a white shirt for my interview, and she found me some sensible shoes.
Wednesday came and I got on the train to London for the interview. I was super nervous, but Jill put some makeup on me and insisted that I look at myself in the mirror. I was surprised. My eyes always looked sallow, but she’d blotted out the dark circles with concealer and added mascara and a flick of kohl just above my eyelashes. A dab of bronzer made me look healthy, and on my lips she dabbed a demure coral lipstick that apparently made my eyes “pop.” I found this to be a rather distressing mental image, so Jill clarified: “It means your lovely brown eyes look like melted chocolate. OK?” Melted chocolate can only ever be a pleasant thing.
I also washed my hair for the first time in weeks—months, maybe—and she used a hair dryer and scorching-hot tongs to bring it to life.
“There you are, my lovely,” she said, spritzing my hair with something called “gunk.” “Just like Kim Kardashian, you are.”
* * *
—
I’d expected the interview to be in some big, space-agey skyscraper, but instead the taxi dropped me outside a beautiful mansion in leafy Hampstead—close to the Freud Museum, as it happens. I’d often wondered if lying on a couch talking about my problems—or rather, my mother—would have done a better job of fixing me than medication, but then I figured that slathering myself in snake oil or burying a potato at the root of an oak tree on a full moon would have done a better job of fixing me than medication, so the answer was probably a resounding yes.
I walked up the garden path and pressed the buzzer outside the red door, which had a crescent of stained glass in every color.
A heavyset woman with cropped platinum-blonde hair opened the door. She looked like she was midfifties, with a handsome face and an intelligent, penetrating look about her.
“I’m here for the interview?” I said softly. “I’m Lex— Sophie. My name is Sophie Hallerton.”
Damn. I’ll never remember to keep that one up. Sophie. I’m Sophie. Sophie. Sophie. Sophie.
“Maren,” the woman said, holding out a hand. I shook it. “Do come in.”
It became clear that the house wasn’t an architecture firm but a family home, with rustic wooden floors, sage-green walls dotted with family photographs, an old rocking horse, and a glass cabinet filled with pictures and cute ornaments in the spacious hallway. A staircase swept upward, where a children’s program was playing on a TV. Maren gestured for me to follow her through the hallway toward a large kitchen, which was a mixture of high-end design and country charm. An open-brick chimney breast was filled with a silver range cooker; in the center of the room was an island with six white barstools and an arrangement of baby-pink peonies. To my left, a pretty garden was visible through French doors: a weeping willow, a pond. The marble surfaces were pristine, but I could make out children’s drawings stuck to the doors of a double fridge freezer standing at the