Back in the nineties, when I was young and foolish, I wed the wrong guy. He was lovely and I very much loved him but he was the wrong guy. One clue which might have alerted me to the wrongness of our union, had I not been so young and foolish, was that, to officiate the ceremony, we chose our couples therapist
I’ll say that again. I was married by my couples therapist.
The counsellor – let’s call her Francoise – was the very essence of Frenchness: glamorous, immaculately coiffed and with a voice that could slay a rock.
Looking back, I think we probably both in love with her.
Thirty years on, with that marriage in the long-distant past, and newly qualified as a therapist myself, that moment in my life got me thinking.
For sure, Francoise seemed the part. She asked all the right questions. (Her best, still etched in my mind, to my then-fiance, was: ‘Why, when Mel asked you to buy an avocado, did you come back with a multipack of strawberry yoghurt?’) Back then, as now, finding a therapist was a punt. We got to Francoise’s through a friend of a friend. (This was long before websites.) Things between us were not going well. We were vulnerable and a bit desperate. It was a case of any port in a storm.
Let’s just say, there were a lot of assumptions, among which was that Francoise was actually who she said she was.
Now that, I thought, could be the starting-off point for a very intriguing suspense story.
And so I wrote one. It’s called Tell Me Your Secrets, and it starts with a desperate couple, Marc and Meg, each of whom is hiding a dark secret, pitching up at the anonymous East London office of Janette H. How vulnerable and trusting they are! How prepared to bare their souls!
How very much in need of the kindness of a stranger.
Tell Me Your Secrets by Mel McGrath is published by HQ
