Outside, the sky was blue and the April sunshine bright. But Sarah’s head was too full of last Saturday’s awful events to pay either much attention. Life was complicated enough with trying to sort out how she felt about Cahal, while deflecting Ian’s misguided attempts at a reconciliation. Tony popping up, threatening her relationship with Becky, was the last straw. All tied up in knots inside, she wondered if she was that different really from Aunt Vi, who lived in a perpetual state of worry. She glanced at her aunt, who wasn’t looking at the cloudless sky either, but staring grimly at the road ahead. Her left hand hovered uncertainly in front of the dashboard, poised to brace herself in the event of a sudden stop or worse. In her last year living at home, Sarah had found Vi’s presence suffocating, but over the years she had become more understanding. She’d read an article about people with the same phobia in a Sunday supplement once. It even had a name – Generalised Anxiety Disorder – and opened up sufferers to all sorts of worry, from the weather to being mugged on the walk home from church.
