10
Caroline wondered if all therapists’ treatment rooms looked so bland. Perhaps that was the whole idea: dull absolutely all sensory input to the point where you had no choice but to open up and reveal all your childhood trauma, like one of those ‘absolute silence’ sensory deprivation rooms, guaranteed to send anyone mad within twenty minutes.
She wondered how many people used the box of tissues that had been not-so-subtly placed on the coffee table; how many others had sat in this chair before her and counted every single leaf on the watercolour oak tree that hung on the wall opposite.
Rachel was only doing her job, but there was something in her over-soothing tone that almost bordered on patronising. One of Caroline’s early jobs in the Met had been as a trained crisis negotiator. Tas
