“I had often tried to get out of your room, having travelled all the way there. It frightened me to be caught in a trap which was becoming painful, and one from which I had no escape.”

“I was more anxious about leaving you than last time. Supposing you did not come back, and I would never be in your room again? Separation was an agony for me which, as soon as one holiday ended, started again in anticipation of the next.”

“Everyone fears catastrophes and disasters and crashes and deaths, and people who attack you in the dark. You made all that worse for me. I felt something might happen which would separate me from you, and I could not deal with life without you.”

“I pretended it was nothing. That day I told you about my baby, and why I had had an abortion. It would have damaged other lives. I had killed my own real baby ten years before, but it remains my living child, and will always be so. It is worse when there is no grave. I wanted you to recognize its existence. No one else does, and that is what I cannot bear.”

“If I was late, I became so anxious that I might miss one single minute of my time with you that I would close my eyes at the red traffic lights, or look around for people who wore wrist watches to see the seconds ticking by as the traffic came to a standstill. Then I would run and run through all the people, and finally up the stairs, until I reached your room. 'I am not late' I would shout and I would hide myself in a corner by your cupboard and refuse to speak to you. 'Exaggerated behaviour' perhaps, but it is only those who have experienced it, who can know what it is.”

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off!”

“I woke with a dreaded pain of hunger this morning, but it was not for food. You knew about hat. It was our most important secret, and because you knew, it kept me alive.”