Idiopathy

and pity, for all it was worth, could never equate to whatever it was that drove her and Daniel to drive each other insane.
    So he’d decided to leave. Not while the argument was happening, of course, but immediately after, before Katherine could leave or anyone could apologise or the argument could march even further into territory from which there was ever less hope of return. He shouldn’t have come, he thought. He should have suggested coffee with Katherine, or not called her in the first place, or, even better, not had that stupid conversation with her a year and a half ago which had, and he could admit this now because he felt done with it all, led him into all this in the first place.
    But then Angelica had arrived, and although she couldn’t possibly have known (despite the fact that Daniel had, very obviously, said something to her), she had in fact said the only thing Nathan had wanted to hear since the day he’d left his treatment and come home:
We’re so glad you’re here
, and that had made it rather more difficult to leave, and there was something about the fact that he had, in that simplest of everyday moments,
decided
to stay a little longer, that meant he was no longer trapped, and which meant in turn that, as he now found himself at the centre of exactly the attention he’d spent all evening trying to get but which, now that he had it, he was no longer sure he really wanted, the sense of being pinned to his seat left him, and he felt opened up and oddly calm.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was …’ He paused, thinking. ‘I was just going to talk about the last time we saw each other, really, and ask you how you felt about that now.’
    ‘Felt about what?’ said Katherine.
    ‘About what I said, then. That night.’
    ‘Which bit of what you said, specifically?’
    Nathan took a breath, allowing himself a moment to reflect. There was not, now, any need to do this, as he’d said, but there was perhaps some sense in doing it, in seeing it all through and being done.
    ‘Well I can’t remember exactly how I put it,’ he said, ‘but I think the basic message was that I was in love with you.’
    Katherine arched an eyebrow. ‘Was it now,’ she said.
    It was, Nathan thought, fairly foolish of him to have thought Katherine would help him in any way, or reveal any of her feelings before he did, or indeed do anything to make this experience anything other than the ordeal she seemed to want it to be.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that was the gist of it.’
    ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘That bit was lost on me. All I heard was a load of stuff about you. About how you were lonely. About how you thought I was lonely, and how together we might be less lonely, or something.’
    Nathan remembered trying to tell her how he felt, and the grim, dawning realisation that what he felt was indescribable, and the disappointment he’d felt at realising the one person he’d hoped would understand was not going to understand – not because she couldn’t, he realised, but because she didn’t want to, just as she didn’t want to understand now, either.
    ‘I probably didn’t express myself very well,’ he said.
    ‘You can say that again,’ she said.
    ‘I had a lot on my mind,’ he said.
    She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, holding his gaze.
    ‘Why don’t you try again?’ she said.
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘You know what I mean. Stop asking what I mean.
Christ
.’
    Nathan nodded. He looked down at his hands, turning them over, holding them up in front of his face. After the dressings came off, he’d worked hard to help them heal. There were ointments and oils; stretching exercises to make sure his skin still fit his knuckles. After months of pain, there were now patches where he had no sensation at all. He stood up and took off his jacket, then rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing the vines and creepers of scar tissue and tattoos that crept over his forearms. Katherine did her best not to appear shocked. He sat back down and crossed his legs. He felt a great sense of clarity and calm. He’d come here, he now saw, for all the wrong reasons. He’d wished, for over a year, that Katherine had understood him, and that had been for the wrong reasons too. And now here she was asking to understand, again, for all the wrong reasons.
    ‘After we’d talked,’ he said, his hands now folded neatly in his lap, ‘I walked out into the woods.’
    ‘This isn’t what I asked,’ said