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Mariana reached into the nearest box, she pulled out a pair of shoes. She considered them the old green trainers he had for running on the beach. They still had a slightly sudden feel about them with grains of sand embedded in the soles get rid of them. She said to herself throw them in the bin. Do it even as she thought this she knew it was an impossibility.

They weren’t him. They weren’t sebastian, they weren’t the man she loved and would love forever. They were just a pair of old shoes, even so parting. With them would be an act of self-harm like pressing a knife to her arm and slicing off a sliver of skin. Instead mariana brought the shoes close to her chest, she cradled them tight as she might a child and she wept would she ended up like this?

In the space of just a year, which once would have slipped by almost imperceptibly and now stretched out behind her, like a desolate landscape flattened by a hurricane, the life she had known had been obliterated, leaving mariana here, 36 years old alone and drunk on a sunday Night clutching a dead man’s shoes as if they were holy relics, which in a way they were something beautiful something holy had died. All that remained were the books. He read the clothes he wore the things he touched. She could still smell him on them, still taste him on the tip of her tongue. That’S why she couldn’t throw away his possessions by holding on to them.

She could keep sebastian alive, somehow just a little bit if she let go. She’D lose him entirely. Recently. Out of morbid curiosity and in an attempt to understand what she was wrestling with mariana had re-read all of freud’s writings about grief and loss, and he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or Else, you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia, and we call depression mariana understood this. She knew she should relinquish sebastian, but she couldn’t because she was still in love with him.

She was in love, even though he was gone forever gone behind the veil behind the veil behind the veil. Where was that from tennyson? Probably behind the veil? That’S how it felt since sebastian died. Mariana no longer saw the world in color, life was muted and gray, and far away behind a veil behind a mist of sadness.

She wanted to hide from the world all its noise and pain and cocoon herself here in her work and in her little yellow house, and that’s where she would have stayed if zoe hadn’t phoned her from cambridge that night in october, zoe’s phone call after the monday Evening group, that was how it started. That was how the nightmare began: 2.

The monday evening group met in mariana’s front room. It was a good-sized room. It had been given over to the use of therapy.

Soon after mariana and sebastian moved into the yellow house, they were very fond of that house. It was at the foot of primrose hill in north west london and painted the same bright, yellow as the primroses that grew on the hill in the summer, honeysuckle climbed up one of the outside walls, covering it with white, sweet smelling flowers and in the summer months, Their scent crept into the house through the open windows climbing up the stairs and lingering in the passages and rooms filling them with sweetness. It was unseasonably warm that monday evening, even though it was early october, the indian summer prevailed like an obstinate party guest. Refusing to heed the hints from the dying leaves on the trees that it might be time to go. The late afternoon, sun flooded into the front room drenching it with a golden light, tinged with red before the session mariana, drew the blinds but left the sash windows.

Open a few inches to let in some air next she readjusted the chairs into a circle: nine chairs,

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