“I can understand you not wanting to give me sleeping pills, because you’re worried I’d kill myself. But surely if that’s the case, you should be giving me antidepressants instead?”

Nadia folded two unused paper napkins and tucked them away in her desk drawer. Then nodded.

“You’re right. I haven’t suggested medication. Because antidepressants are designed to smooth out the highs and lows of your mood, and if used properly they can stop you feeling so sad, but often they stop you feeling as happy.” She held one hand up, her palm horizontal. “You just end up… on a level. And you would expect that patients who take antidepressants mostly miss the highs, wouldn’t you? But that isn’t actually the case. The majority of people who want to stop medication say they want to be able to cry again. They watch a sad film with someone they love, and they want to be able to… feel the same thing.”

“I don’t like films,” Zara pointed out.

Nadia laughed out loud.

“No, of course you don’t. But I don’t think you need fewer feelings, Zara. I think you need to feel more. I don’t think you’re depressed. I think you’re lonely.”

“That sounds like an unprofessional analysis.”

“Maybe.”

“What if I leave here and kill myself.”

“I don’t think you’d do that.”

“No?”

“You said a little while ago that there’s going to be a next time.”

Zara focused her gaze on Nadia’s chin.

“And you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I can see that you don’t want to let people get close to you. It makes you feel weak. But I don’t think you’re afraid of being hurt, I think you’re afraid of hurting other people. You’re a more empathetic and moral person than you like to admit.”

Zara was deeply, deeply offended by this, and had difficulty working out if that was because Nadia had called her weak, or because she had said she was moral.

“Maybe I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to talk to people I’m only going to get fed up with.”

“How do you know that if you never try?”

“I’m here, aren’t I, and it didn’t take me long to get fed up with you!”

“Try to take the question seriously,” Nadia said, which of course was hopeless. Zara bounced away from the subject as usual.

“So why are you vegan?”

Nadia groaned wearily.

“Do we really have to talk about that again? Okay: I’m vegan because I care about the climate crisis. If everyone was vegan, we could…”

Zara interrupted scornfully: “Stop the ice caps melting?”

Nadia deployed the patience vegans have plenty of time to practice when they spend Christmas with older relatives.

“Not quite, no. But it’s part of a larger solution. And the fact that the ice caps are melting is—”

“But do we really need penguins?” Zara asked bluntly.

“I would say that the ice caps are a symptom, not the problem. Like the trouble you have sleeping.”

Zara counted the windows.

“There are frogs threatened with extinction that scientists say would leave us smothered with insects if they disappeared. But penguins? Who’d be affected if penguins disappeared, except maybe businesses that make padded jackets?”

Nadia lost the thread at that, which may have been Zara’s intention.

“You don’t make… what… do you think they make padded jackets out of penguins? They’re made of geese!”

“So geese aren’t as important as penguins? That doesn’t sound very vegan.”

“That’s not what I said!”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“You’re making a habit of this, you know.”

“What?”

“Changing the subject as soon as you get close to talking about real feelings.”

Zara seemed to consider this. Then she said: “What about bears, then?”

“Sorry?”

“If you get attacked by a bear? Could you kill it then?”

“Why would I be attacked by a bear?”

“Maybe someone kidnaps you and drugs you and you wake up in a cage with a bear, and it’s a fight to the death.”

“You’re starting to get quite disconcerting now. And I’d like to point out that I’ve had an awful lot of training in psychology, so I have a fairly high threshold for what counts as disconcerting.”

“Stop being so sensitive. Answer the question: Could you kill a bear then, even if you didn’t want to eat it? I’m not saying you’ve got a fork, but if you had a knife?”

Nadia groaned. “You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

Nadia looked at the time. Zara noticed. She counted all the windows twice. Nadia noticed. They looked past each other for a while until Nadia said: “Let me ask you this, then: Do you think you mock the green movement this way because it’s the opposite of the finance industry you work in?”

Zara bit back faster than she herself was expecting, because sometimes you don’t know how strongly you feel about something until you’re tested: “The green movement doesn’t need any help to look ridiculous! And I’m not defending the finance industry, I’m defending the economic system.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One is the symptom. The other is the problem.”

Nadia nodded as if she understood what that meant.

“Surely we created the economic system? It’s a construct?”

Zara’s reply was surprisingly free from condescension, and almost sounded sympathetic.

“That’s the problem. We made it too strong. We forgot how greedy we are. Do you own an apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got a mortgage on it?”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

“No. And a mortgage used to be something you were expected to repay. But now that every other middle-income family has a mortgage for an amount they couldn’t possibly save up in their lifetimes, then the bank isn’t lending money anymore. It’s offering financing. And then homes are no longer homes. They’re investments.”

“I’m not sure I completely understand what that means.”

“It means that the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can’t. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, ‘How can they afford that?’ because everyone is living beyond their means. So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you’ve already got. With borrowed money.”

Nadia looked like a cat who’d just seen someone skating for the first time.

“I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that why the stock market and housing market crash?”