I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about the rabbit with the hacked-off ears. What would I have said? They already think I’m losing it. I could see it on Dad’s face when I said I didn’t feel safe. A cuddly toy would have been a step too far.
I can’t resist asking Danny about it, though, when he comes to visit. We are in the rose garden. From the dance studio comes the sound of flamenco-style music and hands clapping and Grace’s voice calling out, ‘Stamp those feet! Harder, harder! Get it all out!’
‘I haven’t a clue where that bloody rabbit is,’ Danny tells me. ‘Your mum probably cleared it out, along with the rest of the stuff.’
‘All of it?’
Mum said she’d been helping Danny ‘sort out’ our flat. I’d guessed she might have meant Em—the spare room, but it still hurts. I want to ask what they’ve done with the baby things, but I can’t face hearing that they’ve gone to the charity shop. Someone else’s baby wearing all those lovely clothes.
‘So you couldn’t clear out the nursery yourself?’
Danny looks at me coldly then from under his dark lashes and I want to wind the words back in, like reeling in a fishing line.
‘For fuck’s sake, Hannah. What did you think? That I was going to kneel on the carpet in the middle of all her stuff and pick out little shoes and toys and have a little cry like she was a real baby? You made her up. That’s the long and short of it. So what does it matter who clears out the baby things? I don’t give a toss if it’s your mum, or the fucking binmen. I just want them out of the house so I can breathe again.’
It’s the longest speech Danny has made since I first came in here and, afterwards, we both look at each other in surprise. We are sitting outside on the bench and I am smoking a cigarette, even though I know Danny hates it.
Do I still love you?
The thought comes out of nowhere, sucking the air from my lungs.
For the last six years, loving Danny has been one of the defining characteristics of who I am. If a stranger had asked me, I’d have said, I’m Hannah. I work in publishing. I’m married to Danny. It’s one of the pillars that has held the rest of my life up.
What would happen if someone took it away?
But now the world slides into focus again as Danny sits back and runs his long fingers through his hair and I recognize him. That is, I recognize him physically rather than intellectually, with my whole body, not just my mind or my eyes.
Of course I love him. I’d do anything for him.
Maybe he’s having similar thoughts, because there’s a softening in him when he looks at me now, a blurring of hard lines, that meets with a corresponding dissolving inside me.
‘You know, Han, there isn’t a day goes past that I don’t feel guilty about what I did. The affair. That’s what set this whole thing off. I know that, and I have to live with it. But we have to put this behind us now. Or there’s no hope for us.’
The phrase ‘no hope’ shimmers between us like a heat haze.
‘I am moving on,’ I say. ‘I feel like I’ve made a real breakthrough in the last couple of days. Ask Dr Chakraborty.’
‘I’ve already talked to Dr Roberts.’
My heart plummets.
‘And?’
‘And he thinks there’s still a lot more work to do.’
‘Maybe I could come home and do the rest of the treatment as an outpatient.’
Danny has already started shaking his head, even before I’ve finished the sentence.
‘We agreed, Han. You promised you’d stay in here until the doctors think you’re well enough to come home.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think this is the best place for me, Danny. There’s something off about it. People die in here.’
Danny throws his hands up and hurls himself backwards on the bench.
‘Not this again. Please. Not the Charlie thing. Do you realize how crazy you sound? How paranoid?’
Desperation makes me angry.
‘Yeah, well, maybe you’d be paranoid too if your husband had screwed around behind your back and lied to you for months. You know there’s nothing forcing me to stay here. The section has been lifted. I could check myself out and come home any time I like.’
‘Just don’t expect me to be there when you do.’
We glare at each other and I have the fleeting impression that he’s no longer my Danny but just some random good-looking thirty-something man. Then his face crumples.
‘I need to know you’re better, Hannah. I can’t go through that again. Do you have any idea what it was like? I thought I was about to be a dad.’
I think about reminding him that I thought I was about to be a mum, but the words stay stoppered in my throat like I am choking back a cough.
After he’s gone, Stella joins me. It’s a bright day but there’s a biting wind that undercuts the clear, crisp air. Stella has on her coat with the fur collar that makes her look like Greta Garbo.
‘Were you waiting for Danny to leave?’
She shrugs. It bothers me that there’s no love lost between these two. They each seem to feel I’ve been taken in by the other. I hate it when the people I love don’t love each other. It makes me question my own judgement.
‘Why don’t you like Danny?’
‘He cheated on you. I don’t like cheats.’
‘But I’ve forgiven him. And if I can, surely everyone else can too. Besides, what I did to him was much worse.’
She flashes me a ‘yeah, right’ look and thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her coat. From the music therapy room behind us comes the sound of three notes of a piano being played over and over again, while in one of the bedrooms above someone is sobbing softly.
‘How come you haven’t got anybody?’ I ask her. ‘You’re so lovely, Stella. Why isn’t there a queue of men beating down the door? Or at least your family. Where’s your mum? Your dad?’
‘People aren’t my thing,’ says Stella.
She is smiling, but her cheeks are pink – although that could be from the cold wind – and her hand is at her throat, reaching through the fur collar to worry at her silver cat necklace.
‘But haven’t you ever had a long-term boyfriend?’ I persist.
‘I went out with someone for five years from when I was fifteen, but Mama and my stepdad didn’t like him.’
‘Why? Because he was a bad influence?’
‘No. Because he was thirty-eight.’
‘Thirty-eight! But that’s not even legal.’
‘He was a writer who came in to school to talk about his books. I emailed him afterwards, and that’s how it started. He liked to call me in the evening and tell me what clothes to wear. I had one of those little Flip camcorders and I’d send him footage of me dressed in the clothes he’d chosen.’
Stella says all this in her everyday, breathy voice as if it were normal and somehow this is even more chilling than what she has just told me.
‘But Stella, that’s abuse. You know that, right?’
Stella smiles.
‘Who was abusing who, though?’ she says. ‘I instigated it. And I kept it going even after he tried to finish it.’
‘Why?’
She shrugs.
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here, would I? Isn’t that what we’re all here for – to find out the why? Isn’t that our optimum outcome from all of this?’
‘But you’ve never talked about this in Group. Do you discuss it in your one-to-ones?’
‘It’s not relevant, Hannah. That girl isn’t who I am any more. She’s gone. I’m a different person now. I even have a different name.’
‘Really? So what—’
‘Aren’t you two cold? It’s freezing out here. What are you guys talking about?’
Odelle is shivering, despite the huge puffa coat that dwarfs her tiny frame and the outsize knitted woollen scarf from which her head emerges like a tortoise’s.
‘Oh, just boring stuff,’ says Stella.
Odelle sniffs. Her nose is already bright red from the freezing wind.
‘Fine. Whatever. Anyway, Dr See is looking for you, Stella.’
My startled brain grapples to work out which doctor could have earned that epithet, until I realize that of course she is saying ‘Dr C’. Classic Odelle.
As Stella stands up to follow Odelle’s hunched shoulders along the path that leads around the back of the clinic and in through the car park, I put a hand on her arm.
‘What happened to him? The writer? Please tell me he got done for something.’
Stella giggles, showing all her small, perfect, white teeth.
‘No. But I nearly did.’
‘You? What on earth for?’
‘Harassment. But like I say, I was a different person then.’
When I’m alone I find myself shivering. But I don’t think it’s the cold.