Oh God. ‘What did your dad make of her behaviour?’
‘Dad was a bit like you.’ A small smile. ‘Always saw the best in people.’
He turned away from her and paced to the glass wall, his back to Lulu. ‘I should have tried harder to make Dad see what she was really like.’
‘But you don’t know that Maggie was responsible. You don’t know what happened to them. Probably you’ll never know – and maybe you’re going to have to accept that.’
‘There was blood.’ Nick turned back to face her. ‘On the drawing room carpet and in the hall. When the police had it tested, they found it had Maggie’s DNA. They concluded it was irrelevant to what had happened, that Maggie maybe cut her finger or something. But I think that must be where . . . where she did whatever she did to Dad. He must have put up some sort of a fight, but – he wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her, you see. Everything in him would have been screaming that he couldn’t hurt a woman.’
There was a long silence. Then Lulu said, ‘It must have been so hard, losing them and then being packed off to boarding school, living amongst strangers . . .’
His face twisted. ‘Dear Auntie Yvonne and Uncle Michael were kind enough to arrange that for me. Yvonne got herself made what they call a judicial factor loco absentis, which let her take control of Dad’s affairs until he was declared officially dead. She organised the letting of the house to give me an income. And they allowed me to stay with them for a week at Christmas and a week in the summer, but not at Easter or half term or any other time. They pretty much washed their hands of me.’
‘Your whole world imploded,’ she summarised, going to him and pulling him into a hug as the tears came, for both of them.
‘I’ve blown it, haven’t I?’ he sobbed. ‘I’ve pushed you away!’
She wasn’t going to lie to him. She took a deep breath. ‘You haven’t blown it, Nick, but I do think the way this relationship is developing is unhealthy. Getting Harry to spy on me . . .’ To soften the impact of her words, she rubbed his back. ‘That crossed a line.’
‘Oh God! Please give me another chance! I’ll never do anything like that again!’
She kept rubbing his back. ‘That’s easy to say. But the first step in making a change is to accept that you have a problem. There’s nothing terrible about having a mental illness.’ She had to tread gently here. ‘It doesn’t mean that you’re like Maggie.’
He made a wordless sound and broke away from her, staring into her eyes as if scared of what he might see there.
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that you need help.’ She took both his hands in hers.
It was strictly against the code of ethics she’d signed up to, to treat a member of one’s own family. She could lose her licence for this. But so what? She wasn’t sure she even wanted to be a therapist any more. And anyway, Nick was more important.
‘I love you, Nick. I’ll always love you. You’re not going to lose my love by letting me help you through this. Quite the opposite. Please, will you let me help you heal?’
After a long moment, he nodded.
She squeezed his hands. ‘I know you’re very frightened, but you don’t need to be. Therapy for PTSD now doesn’t involve making you talk endlessly about the trauma – that method has been totally discredited. It’s been shown to make things worse for people, if anything. Oh, Nick, were you worried I would make you do that?’
Another nod.
‘I only use evidence-based therapies.’ Safe therapies, she had been about to say . . . but then she flashed on Paul, crying after the EMDR session. Karla had assured her that EMDR was safe, but Lulu had stopped using it. She’d switched her remaining clients on EMDR to other, equivalent ways of revisiting their trauma. Just in case there was something she was doing, some quirk in her application of EMDR that had caused Paul to end his life.
She wasn’t about to take that chance with Nick.
She felt she needed to really be there with him as he revisited the trauma, not just sitting moving her finger in front of his eyes as he went back there alone.
It took a huge effort to continue to speak calmly, but this was what she had been trained to do – to make the client feel safe with her. ‘The therapy I’m thinking of using – yes, you have to revisit the trauma, but only briefly, and I’ll be with you, physically with you, in every way I can be, grounding you in the here and now and putting the past back where it belongs. The idea is to stop you being trapped in the trauma – which I think you are. I think that’s why you’re behaving the way you are with me.’