THE TWO VERONIQUES

There is nothing Veronique doesn’t worry about. This is what she is thinking as she sits here, now, the evening darkening to charcoal beyond the consulting room windows. Whether she has offended somebody so badly at work that they had complained to HR; if she might get caught parking so badly on CCTV that she goes viral, every single person in the world laughing at her. What if she falls asleep with a candle left alight and so burns the house down? All their possessions, gone?

Veronique has always been this way, until this past year, when it’s elevated from worrying to something… something beyond that.

The therapist gazes at her now, across the lamplit room. Veronique wonders how they