‘Forty isn’t old!’ she cried. ‘You’ve every chance of getting pregnant again.’
I almost smiled. It was such a New York way of thinking, that science could make nature dance to its tune.
‘I’m too …’ I tried again. ‘Anna, I don’t think I was meant to have this.’
‘You can’t give up,’ she said, little and fierce. ‘You need to have hope.’
‘Anna …’ It was so difficult to say the words. ‘Luke … he blames me. For her dying.’
‘No! He doesn’t –’
‘It’s true. He hasn’t said it out straight, but the way he looks at me, it’s awful.’ I choked. ‘I’m so ashamed and – I’m afraid. Me and him, it’s not good, we’re not being nice to each other.’
I’d been reading about couples who’d lost a baby. How, often, they blamed each other. How, frequently, the relationship broke and ended. It felt as if it was happening to Luke and me. Previously it had been unthinkable, we’d been so close, so very much a team. But when Yara died, something had ruptured.
I hadn’t noticed it straight away, because we’d been lurching around, appalled and disbelieving. But now that some time had passed, the landscape was starting to look more settled – and very different from how it had been previously.
I’d catch Luke watching me, almost evaluating me, as if I were a puzzle he needed to figure out.
He was distant. Irritable. At times cold.
And I felt … Well, all I wanted to do was sleep.
We needed to talk but if he admitted that he thought Yara was my fault, we might never get past the damage.
There was a morning when I tiptoed into Yara’s room to find Luke sitting on the floor, holding a small teddy bear and full-on sobbing. I was so shocked – so ashamed – of the pain I’d caused that all I could do was stare, then back away.
We lost our dreams when we lost our baby and now it looked like we were losing each other.
62
‘Morning,’ Brianna said. ‘Your new client is in room three.’
‘Thanks.’ I needed to get my head in the game and focus on Lowry Cooke. He was thirty-nine, cross-addicted to alcohol and cocaine and had been persuaded in here after his life had fallen asunder: his girlfriend had left him; his friends had walked away and he was being sued by a pair of newly-weds for ruining their wedding.
I opened the door and there he was, good-looking in a lanky, loose-limbed, slightly grimy way, waxy jeans hanging loose on his hips, dark hair flopping over his forehead.
‘Lowry? I’m Rachel, your therapist.’
He blinked, doing a theatrical double take. ‘Wow.’ A slow smile spread across his face and both of his hands closed around mine.
Oh God no, not one of them! A pathetic flirt-monster who won’t rest until everyone fancies him.
He was a photographer – high-end, but dressed like an indie-band singer, in a fashionably washed-out Karen Carpenter T-shirt and embroidered cowboy boots. Friendship bracelets and other nonsense festooned his wrists, tattoos ran up and down his arms, an army dog tag hung heavy around his neck and his collarbone was inked with ‘Dead on Arrival’。
‘Please sit down,’ I said.
He lounged low in the chair, manspreading like no one’s business, his long limbs and even longer boots stretching almost to the far wall.
‘So?’ I asked.
‘So?’ He smirked, as if we were on a first date.
‘Why are you here?’
‘This place has a good rep. A boot camp for the mind. You guys need to sort me out.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
He took a breath. ‘Depression. Bad. I’ve had it on and off for years. It’s the reason I drink and get high. But you guys get to the root cause, right?’ He produced a pack of cigarettes from his jeans, flipped one into his mouth and mumbled, ‘Okay if I smoke?’
‘There’s a smoking area in the garden.’
‘Wow.’ Radiating woundedness, he replaced the cigarette in its box. ‘So yeah,’ he said. ‘Once you discover what went wrong for me, I won’t need to drink as much.’
This was a regular thing – addicts showing up, convinced that all that ailed them was a forgotten trauma. They expected that we’d forage around until we’d plucked it out, like an ingrowing hair, then they could resume their drinking or whatever their poison was and everything would be dandy.
But ten times out of ten, our foraging revealed that the reason they felt depressed was because of their heavy drinking or enthusiastic drug consumption.