Three days after the therapy session I woke up and noticed something.
Not a dramatic something. Just the specific absence of the bracing. The low-level anticipatory tension that had lived in my mornings for most of the past year checking the phone, assessing the day, running the pre-emptive inventory of what might need managing was quieter than usual.
Not gone.
Quieter.
I lay in bed for a moment and registered this.
Then got up and made coffee and thought: progress is not a straight line, and today the line is slightly further than it was last week, and that is enough.
His message came at eleven.
I was in the middle of the Henderson close, the final stage, the satisfying tidiness of a long project arriving at its conclusion. My phone was face-up on the desk because I had stopped tur
