Oh. ‘Weirdly, that’s good to know. It’s easy to assume everyone else has it sorted while you feel like you’re floundering, and I floundered more than most for what felt like the longest time.’
‘What happened once you got to hospital, Georgie?’
A chill ran through her and she shivered. ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘I do.’
Hmm, that was all very well, but what purpose would it serve either of them? She could see no advantage in rehashing the past. Much of it, blessedly, she couldn’t even remember. And, while sharing might have been recommended as therapy, as far as she could see she was doing perfectly well without it. ‘Why?’
‘I want to know everything about you.’
Oh.
Well.
That was different, then, she thought, her heart slowly turning over as she scoured his eyes, looking for signs of flippancy and finding none. That was shifting this...whatever this was...to another level. And as her heart melted and her resistance evaporated, quite suddenly she wanted to tell him. She wanted him to tell him everything. She didn’t want anything to remain between them. He could handle it. He’d handled everything so far with rock-solid strength and complete equanimity, and she rather thought that, even if they hadn’t been legally joined, he’d stick it out. She’d trusted him with her body. Surely she could trust him with her secrets.
‘It’s not pretty,’ she warned, nevertheless scarcely able to believe she was going to open the door for him on what had been for her the darkest of times.
‘I won’t judge.’
‘If you did, you’d find me guilty.’
‘None of it was your fault.’
‘I know that, but that doesn’t lessen it.’ She swallowed hard to ease the tightness in her throat and took a deep breath. ‘I never mentioned how I ended up in hospital in the first place, did I?’
‘No.’
‘While I was staying with Carla and everything started to fall apart, not only did I begin to behave erratically and have delusions, but I also found myself beginning to really resent Josh. I started to believe that his arrival had ruined everything and...’ She paused, momentarily unable to continue, hating herself for what she was about to reveal but reminding herself that it had been a symptom of her illness. ‘I didn’t want him,’ she finished shakily. ‘I fantasised about how much easier things would be without him. I became obsessed with leaving him somewhere like outside the hospital and just walking away. One night I even got as far as the bus stop.’
‘What happened?’
‘Carla showed up and when I told her I was going to the hospital said she’d take me herself. Only when we arrived she had me sectioned.’
‘That must have been distressing,’ he said, his voice gruff.
‘It was. I sort of knew that it was the right thing to be doing but I also hated her for it. The diagnosis that followed was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it was a relief to know there was an explanation for what I was doing and thinking and feeling, but on the other it was a struggle to make sense of it all.’ She shook her head and frowned. ‘I was supposed to be so together. Something like that was never supposed to happen to me. And then it got worse.’
‘How?’ he asked, his gaze darkening with a concern that heated the chill in her blood and eased the pain of her memories.
‘I naively assumed that when it be
gan, the treatment would instantly sort everything out and I’d be better. But it didn’t. I was all over the place. For days I’d feel full of energy and be buzzing, convinced that I was doing fantastically. I clearly remember a week or so when my thoughts zipped along, hopping from one to another at incredible speed, and it was so exhilarating to be able to think so fast and so brilliantly. But then I’d suddenly crash to unbelievable lows. I had the most unimaginably horrible hallucinations.’
‘About what?’
‘Death,’ she said. ‘My death mainly. I kept having visions of a bunch of doctors and nurses decked out in scrubs and face masks approaching my bed in order to lift me off and put me into the coffin that sat beside it.’
‘My God,’ he murmured, visibly blanching.
‘I did warn you it wasn’t pretty,’ she said, watching his jaw tighten and his Adam’s apple bob as he fought for...well...something. ‘The periods in between were filled with the many anxieties I had over Josh. Because of the medication I was on I couldn’t breastfeed him. I couldn’t interact with him most of the time and I became obsessively worried about how that was going to affect him. Like how he wasn’t going to achieve his milestones and things because I wasn’t capable of teaching him anything. How badly I was letting him down. I was also terrified I was going to in some way harm him. Or myself.’
‘But that never happened.’
‘No.’
‘It never would have happened.’