I Know Your Secret - Ruth Heald Page 0,19

as presentable as I ever manage to look these days. I wash my hands under the tap and hurry out and up the stairs. I don’t want to keep Beth waiting. It’s a week since I’ve seen her last, and I’ve been thinking about therapy a lot.

‘Ready to start?’ she asks, as I take a seat.

‘Sure.’ I nod. I see her looking at the empty space beside me on the sofa. ‘Peter’s not coming today,’ I say. ‘He sees therapy as more for me than for him.’

She raises her eyebrows ever so slightly. ‘And what do you think?’

‘I suppose I agree.’ Peter never had any intention of coming to these sessions. And a part of me never wanted him there, never wanted him to tell his side of the story.

The silence lengthens.

‘What’s on your mind today?’ Beth says eventually, smiling warmly. For a second I think she sees right through me, that she can hear my spinning thoughts.

‘Everything and nothing. Lots of things.’ I pull down the sleeves of my suit, aware of the injuries below, the scars I try so hard to hide.

‘Anything you feel ready to share?’

She looks at me, waiting as the silence fills the room. It’s a technique we use in the courtroom too. Very few people can endure a silence without trying to fill it, and in doing so, people trip up, make mistakes, reveal too much. But I resist the urge to speak.

‘Last week we talked about the fire…’ Beth says eventually.

‘Yeah,’ I say, staring down at the cream carpet. ‘It was awful… to relive it.’

‘You said Peter started it by mistake.’ I hear the slight emphasis she puts on ‘by mistake’, and I know she is already starting to question the story, already starting to doubt Peter.

‘We talked about it afterwards. He was glad I’d spoken about it here. He thought it would help me.’ I don’t say that he said something terrible could happen again if I’m not careful.

‘But he didn’t want to come tonight? Talk about it too?’

‘No. Like I said, he thinks I’m the one who needs therapy. And he’s right. I feel like I lost a part of myself in the fire, a part of my identity. My scars mean that people look at me differently. I used to draw confidence from my looks, but now I feel embarrassed by my appearance. And I don’t know what’s left behind. I don’t know who I am anymore.’ I blink back tears.

She looks at me kindly. ‘That’s a big thing to say, that you don’t know who you are.’

‘Yeah.’ Sometimes I feel like no one knows the real me, no one understands the emptiness inside me, not even me. ‘The fire… it changed everything. How I felt about myself. My relationship with Peter.’

‘It must have been very difficult for you both.’

‘Peter blamed himself. He couldn’t understand how it had happened. How he had made such a big mistake. He came with me to the hospital, saw what the fire had done to me. He felt awful.’

‘Do you blame him?’

‘I don’t know.’ I pull at a thread in my suit jacket absent-mindedly. ‘We’d argued just before the fire.’

Beth meets my eyes and I see the concern in her face.

‘I was scared afterwards,’ I say quietly.

‘Scared that it would happen again?’

‘No, scared of Peter.’ I let the words hang in the air between us, unable to say more.

‘Of Peter?’

The silence grows. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say finally.

She waits for a beat, studying my expression. I feel exposed under her gaze.

Finally she speaks. ‘We can revisit that another time. When you feel ready.’

I nod, but I doubt I’ll ever get there.

‘Perhaps instead it might be a good idea to go back to your childhood to talk about how you formed your ideas about relationships.’

I feel my entire body tense, and the room starts to feel smaller. ‘My childhood?’

‘Yes. It seems to me that it might be relevant to your experiences now. All of us form our ideas about relationships from our own childhoods. I’d be interested to hear about yours.’ She leans towards me, her eyes meeting mine.

‘My childhood was… fine.’ I manage a half-smile.

‘Fine?’

‘I got through it.’ I take a deep breath, try to calm my racing heart. ‘I’m still here. Still fighting. I was in foster care for most of my teens. I lost my parents.’

Beth smiles gently. ‘I’m sorry. How old were you when that happened?’

‘Fifteen.’

Without speaking, she reaches out and touches my hand, but I pull