rather than a saviour. At first you could be the enemy – especially if therapy wasn’t their choice.
Jessica ignored the question and, placing her elbows on her thighs, leaned in to decrease the distance between them.
‘What makes a person good or evil, do you think?’ she asked, her voice so low that Karen had to inch forward on her seat to hear her. ‘Their thoughts? Or is it just when you actually do the things you’re thinking of? A lack of morals? Empathy?’
‘Are you concerned about thoughts you’ve been having?’
Jessica smirked slightly, her unremarkable face becoming unattractive with the expression. ‘Not exactly. You haven’t answered me.’
‘It’s a complicated question, Jessica, and not one I’m sure I’m qualified to answer. But if you’re worried about your thoughts, I’d say that the fact that you are here trying to get help with them shows that they are a product of your situation rather than an inbuilt cognitive dysfunction.’
‘Do you always sound like a textbook?’
‘I’m sorry—’
‘And do you always apologise so much?’
‘I—’
‘Okay, what does Freud say about hurting people by accident?’
A tiny thread of tension twisted a knot inside Karen’s chest. It wasn’t often she lost control of a session, but it definitely felt as though this one was becoming counterproductive. ‘Have you hurt someone by accident?’
‘Who says I was talking about me?’
The dread inside Karen caused her hand to tremble almost imperceptibly, and she wondered if Jessica had noticed her discomfort. She couldn’t have known the reaction she’d get from that question, and yet the ghost of a smile that settled on her lips before her face reverted to impassive suggested she had.
‘An accident is just that, Jessica. Accidental. It’s often the way we deal with the fallout of our actions that defines our character.’
‘My father always had this funny way of looking at accidents. Not the tripping-over type, but the really bad things that we allow to happen in life because we’ve taken our eye off the ball. He’d say that nothing in this life was accidental, that accidents don’t just happen. He said they were ways of our subconscious allowing us to act out our true feelings under the guise of being unintentional. Do you think that makes sense, Dr Browning?’
The tension tethered them together like a rope, her innocent question thick with unspoken meaning. Karen said nothing.
‘I think you’d like my father.’
Karen’s thoughts scrambled to join themselves into coherent sentences. Buzz words from her training – father, subconscious – triggered automatic questions, and yet she struggled to voice them. Before she could say anything, Jessica started to speak again.
‘It was at a charity gala.’ Her eyes were fixed on a loose piece of skin at the edge of her thumbnail, the jagged skin bringing to mind anxiety disorder. Her nails were short and uneven – bitten down rather than filed – and free of nail polish.
It took Karen a second to realise that Jessica was answering her original question, the mask her patient had arrived with having slid back down into place. She allowed herself a second to gather her work persona, slotted her professionalism back into place and continued the session as though the last few minutes had never happened.
‘Are you involved in the charity world?’
‘Not really. Someone I know had a spare ticket. He was at the bar and he looked just as bored as me. He made some joke about paying me to stay there with him, and I said I wasn’t a prostitute. He got really flustered and started saying he hadn’t meant that; he was worried that he’d insulted me. That’s when I noticed how good-looking he was.’
She looked up from her hands and smiled, not the smirk that had played across her lips a minute earlier, but a real smile at the memory. It didn’t transform her face the way some people’s smiles did. If anything it made her plainness stand out more, the fact that even a smile couldn’t light her up. It made a difference, physical appearance, as to how people treated you, and Karen could well imagine this girl being swept away by the attention of an attractive man. ‘He was cute, though, not all cocky and self-assured like some good-looking men.’
‘Is that your experience of men?’
She didn’t miss a beat with her story, as though Karen hadn’t even spoken. She described in great detail the evening she’d met her married lover, the jokes he’d told, the way his hand had rested so close to her knee that every time