At that appointment, I half-lied about the voices. I heard voices, but they were all versions of my own voice or echoes of voices from my past. Those voices were not, I decided, the ones she was asking about. And I lied when I did not tell her about wanting to burn myself and the cook. I lied when I did not tell her about the door that had opened: The only solution is a permanent solution. My psychiatrist did not ask if there was a seismometer in my midbrain that warned of fissures that would widen into deep chasms and, eventually, into an all-consuming abyss. If she had asked about that, I might have answered honestly. It’s difficult to say.

OK, we’ll tell her you dug the grave.’ It’s the truth – stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?

I did not see him as someone who had changed, but as a man I had never known. I doubted the love I had once been so sure of and concluded that he had married me because he thought I was gullible.

But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers.

I asked her to expand, explaining that I was trying to understand what led us to having to leave. ‘I can’t go into those things, Kealeboga, because they belong in the domain of the African National Congress!’ she snapped. And so we continued, me trying to open the door, her letting me a tiny way in and then closing it. We ended the conversation saying ‘I love you’, but our nerves were frayed.