Page 59 of No Safe Place

Friday | Evening

Lily

She sipped tea on the sofa and nibbled on digestives, while googling her symptoms. Scott was next to her, reading a dry non-fiction book about economics.

He kept making comments about her “getting her colour back”, enthusiastically commenting on the fact she seemed to have turned a corner.

Lily nodded along, but she still felt like shit.

Nothing seemed to fit. It wasn’t food poisoning. Could be a bug – but she didn’t have a temperature.

A few times an hour she would still get cramp. They felt like hunger pangs. The old, familiar feeling, which still brought an undeniable scrap of comfort.

She’d never had bulimia. Her problem with food didn’t stem from a desire not to eat, or to be thin.

She just needed to control how it happened.

What she ate and when and with what cutlery.

On which table, or in front of which person.

How she cleaned her teeth afterwards, how quickly the dirty plate could be removed from sight.

But she’d never wanted to be sick, or to get rid of what food she had managed to eat.

The rules built up slowly, at first. Imperceptible little decisions, like not to eat peas from the plates with the green pattern on them, and not to make tea in the mugs with the coloured insides. The sorts of quirks she thought everyone had.

And always – the fear that no one believed her.

It became harder and harder to follow and obey all the rules, to keep them straight in her mind, to keep them placated even when they were self-contradictory and illogical. And as that became harder, her one defence, the ace up her sleeve, was not eating at all.

Her tea had gone cold.

Scott also liked control. He didn’t have OCD – Lily was certain of that.

David always called OCD the doubting disease.

It made you doubt everything. Intrusive thoughts defied logic; they made you question the evidence of your own eyes, hands – even science.

Whereas Scott had an unwavering self-belief that he was right.

Recently, she’d sometimes wondered if Scott might have mild OCPD.

She didn’t know a whole lot about it, apart from a few things David had told them years ago.

Scott had that perfectionist streak, the determination to follow a process to the letter.

Especially if it was a process that he had designed and deemed the best course of action.

At first, that had been attractive. After the split from Callum, Lily had needed dependable and solid. She’d had enough drama and depression and self-destruction.

And the word “doctor” in Scott’s Tinder bio had helped. Their first date was three weeks after the break-up, and her workmates at the school were surprised at how quickly she moved on. But it had felt right, at the time.

Her phone timer went off and made her jump. Scott had her on a regimen of supplements, anti-nausea meds and ibuprofen.

He looked at her from over his book. ‘Time for more medicine?’

She nodded, queasy.

He got up from the sofa, leaning over to put a palm on her head. ‘Still no fever. Great.’ He withdrew his hand and let out a big breath. ‘I – think you’ll be feeling much better by tomorrow morning.’