“Yes!”

Zara groaned at the toaster again.

“When I asked you to explain panic attacks in your own words, not with the definition you learned during your training, you used the words ‘bandwidth,’ ‘process,’ and ‘firewall.’ Words that don’t fit easily into ordinary vocabulary usually come from their parents. If they had a good relationship with them.”

The psychologist tried to regain the initiative in the conversation by asking: “Is this why you’re good at your job at the bank? Because you can read people?”

Zara stretched her back like a bored cat.

“Sweetie, you aren’t that hard to read. People like you are never as complicated as you’d like to be, especially not if you’ve been to university. Your generation don’t want to study a subject, you just want to study yourselves.”

The psychologist looked ever so slightly offended. Possibly more than ever so slightly.

“We’re here to talk about you, Zara. What are you hoping to get out of this?”

“Sleeping pills, like I said before. Ideally some that will go with red wine.”

“I can’t prescribe sleeping pills. Only your doctor can do that.”

“So what am I doing here, then?” Zara asked.

“You’re the best person to answer that,” the psychologist replied.

* * *

That was the level on which their relationship began. Things went downhill from there. But it’s worth saying at once that it wasn’t at all difficult for the psychologist to make a diagnosis of this new patient: Zara was suffering from loneliness. But instead of saying that (the psychologist hadn’t burdened herself with more than half a decade’s worth of student debt just to learn to say what she thought), the psychologist explained that Zara was exhibiting signs that she was suffering from “nervous exhaustion.”

Zara didn’t look up from the newsfeed on her phone when she replied: “Yes, well, I’m exhausted because I can’t sleep, so just get me some pills!”

The psychologist didn’t want to do that. Instead she started to ask questions, with the intention of helping Zara to see her own anxieties in a broader context. One of them was: “Are you worried about the survival of the planet?”

Zara replied: “Not really.”

The psychologist smiled warmly.

“Let me put it like this: What do you think the biggest problem with the world is?”

Zara nodded quickly, and replied as if the answer were obvious: “Poor people.”

The psychologist corrected her in a friendly way: “You mean… poverty.”

Zara shrugged. “Sure. If that feels better for you.”

When they parted, Zara didn’t shake hands. On her way out she moved a photograph on the psychologist’s bookcase and rearranged three books. Psychologists aren’t supposed to have favorite patients, but if this psychologist had one, it definitely would not have been Zara.

* * *

It wasn’t until their third session that the psychologist realized how unwell Zara was. It was just after Zara had explained that “democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.” The psychologist did her best to ignore that, and asked Zara instead about her childhood and work, wondering repeatedly how Zara “feels.” How do you feel when that happens? How does talking about this make you feel? How do you feel when you think about how you feel, does that feel difficult? So in the end Zara did feel something.

They had been talking about something else for a long while, and suddenly Zara seemed to be looking deep inside her, and when she spoke she whispered the words, as if her voice were no longer her own.

“I’ve got cancer.”

The silence in the room was so extreme that you could hear both women’s heartbeats. The fingers falling flat on the notepad, the breathing that grew shallower, lungs filled no more than a third with each breath, terrified of making a noise.

“I’m truly very sorry indeed to hear that,” the psychologist eventually said, her voice trembling, and with carefully practiced dignity.

“I’m sorry, too. Depressed, actually,” Zara said, and wiped her eyes.

“What… what sort of cancer?” the psychologist asked.

“Does it matter?” Zara whispered.

“No. No, of course not. I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.”

Zara looked out of the window, not really seeing anything, for so long that the light outside seemed to have time to change. From morning to midday. Then she raised her chin slightly and said: “You don’t have to apologize. It’s made-up cancer.”

“S… sorry?”

“I haven’t got cancer. I was lying. But that’s what I was saying: democracy doesn’t work!”

And that was when the psychologist realized what a very unwell person Zara was.

“That’s a… an astonishingly insensitive thing to joke about,” she managed to say.

Zara raised her eyebrows.

“So it would have been better if I had cancer?”

“No! What? Absolutely not, but—”

“Surely it’s better to joke about it than to actually have cancer? Or would you rather I had cancer?”

The psychologist’s neck flushed red with indignation.

“But… no! Of course I don’t wish you had cancer!”

Zara clasped her hands together in her lap and said in a grave tone, “But that’s how I’m feeling.”

* * *

The psychologist had trouble sleeping that night. Zara sometimes has that effect on people. The next time Zara visited her office the psychologist had removed the photograph of her mother from her desk, and during that session Zara actually considered telling the truth about the cause of her sleeping problems. She had a letter in her bag that explained everything, and if she had only shown it then, everything that happened after that might have been different. But instead she just sat for a long time staring at the picture on the wall. It was of a woman looking out across an endless sea, toward the horizon. The psychologist moistened her lips and asked gently: “What are you thinking when you look at that picture?”

“I’m thinking that if I had to choose just one picture to have on a wall, it wouldn’t be that one.”

The psychologist smiled tightly.

“I usually ask my patients what they think about the woman in the picture. Who is she? Is she happy? What do you think?”

Zara’s shoulders bounced nonchalantly.

“I don’t know what happiness is for her.”

The psychologist said nothing for a while before admitting: “I’ve never heard that answer before.”

Zara snorted.

“That’s because you ask the question as if there’s only one type of happiness. But happiness is like money.”

The psychologist smiled with the superiority that only someone who thinks of themselves as being a very deep person can.

“That sounds superficial.”

Zara groaned like a teenager trying to explain anything to anyone who isn’t a teenager.

“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”