voice light, but Karen heard it crack slightly as she said, ‘See you Friday.’
‘Love you.’ Karen signed off with their usual goodbye, but Eleanor had already hung up.
Karen’s last client that morning had been one of her more interesting ones. At the age of forty-two, he’d undergone hypnotherapy to try and find the cause of his issues with food, only to find out that when he was four years old, his mother would alternate between force-feeding him and starving him as a punishment for the smallest slight. Given that his mother had died three years previously, he had no way of knowing if this was a real or false memory, and no way of getting closure. The hypnotherapist had panicked at the implications of the discovery and swiftly referred him to Karen, and they were making slow progress using letter therapy. These were the types of cases she had always wanted to deal with – ones where she could really make a difference to a person’s life. That was all she’d ever wanted to do.
Michael arrived after that session to take her to lunch. Karen still wondered how he managed to turn up at the most perfect times, exactly when she needed him, like the proverbial lucky penny. He’d looked amazing, as he always did, and as she leaned into his dark grey suit she inhaled his aftershave, trying to imprint the scent on her mind for when she had to let him go again. The weeks went so much faster than the weekends; it felt like the twelve-month wait for one day of Christmas.
‘How’s work?’ he asked, trying – and failing – to look suave as he wound noodles around his chopsticks and they fell off for the third time in a row.
Karen laughed, motioning to the woman behind the Chinese takeaway counter. ‘Can we get a fork, please?’
The place had only three tables for a handful of eat-in customers, and the other two were empty, so she had no concerns about being overheard as she answered his question. Michael knew she couldn’t go into specifics about her patients, so they had code names for them and their situations. Her professional ethics allowed this game on the grounds that it wasn’t any different from all the scholarly articles she was permitted to publish as long as identities were concealed.
Karen nodded. ‘Mmm, okay. Travis is still referring to me as “boss” in every other condescending sentence, even though I’m not going to start my training until after Ken’s retirement. The high-class Hail Mary was a bit intense this week,’ she continued, keeping her voice neutral as she referred to Jessica Hamilton. A high-class Hail Mary was a woman who didn’t have a real problem; usually they had done something they wanted to get off their chest and used therapy as a confessional rather than a way to explore why they behaved the way they did. Changing their behaviour was usually not on the cards.
‘She still coming?’ Michael nodded his thanks to the pretty young waitress who brought his fork.
‘Yep. And she’s no closer to figuring out that the reason she hates her lover’s wife is because she feels guilty that she’s screwing a married man with children.’ Karen longed to mention Adam’s name. You don’t have any evidence. Remember your ethics. Remember your promotion.
‘She sounds like a charmer. I’ve said it before, Karen, I just don’t get your profession. You know the exact reason this woman is beating herself up. Why can’t you just tell her?’
‘Believe me, I’d love to.’ She managed to inhale the rest of her beef noodles without any slopping down the front of her beige shirt. ‘But people refuse to believe that they might be responsible for their own disordered feelings. If I tell her straight, that means admitting she’d have to break up with him in order to fix the problem. Which she has no intention of doing. So she’ll come to her sessions and go away convinced that it can’t be her head that’s screwed up, because she saw a psychiatrist and it didn’t fix her.’ Or she’ll try to find another way to break up Adam and Eleanor.
‘Which works out better for Robert, I guess. How would he make his money if you fixed all his clients after one session?’
‘And how would you cope with me having to be a kept woman?’
Her voice was light-hearted, but Michael’s face darkened and neither of them said any more.