‘Not now, not now, I don’t have time for this.’ Liz muttered, rummaging in her handbag for some paracetamol. Her headache was threatening to turn into a full-blown migraine. Her growing anxiety, fuelled by what seemed a very long wait, on her own, in the car, deepened. She began gasping like a fish out of water, and for a few minutes she struggled to catch her breath, fighting wave upon wave of tension and black despair. Something awful was about to happen, she felt sure. And then, as abruptly as it had arrived, the feeling lifted and her chest eased, letting her breathe more easily. Her heart continued to pound as though she had run a marathon. She swallowed the tablets with some lukewarm water from the bottle she found in the glove compartment.
‘What the heck?’ she wondered aloud, rubbing her chest to ease the soreness. She was a fit woman, with no health problems as far as she knew, and to have this sort of episode twice in as many days was really worrying. A panic attack? Angina? She resolved to book herself in with her doctor for a checkup as soon as all this nonsense was out of the way. But how could she describe what she had experienced? Rehearsing what she might say to her doctor sounded odd, even to her.
‘I had a feeling of helplessness and impending doom and then I couldn’t catch my breath.’
Maybe she should renew her gym membership - book in with a coach and get some gentle exercise routine going. Yes, that was a good plan, she’d do that. She reached into her bag, thinking to make a note in her phone and remembered she’d given it to Jean-Claude because his phone had no charge. Hadn’t Xavier said something about not using phones anyway, to stay safe? She sighed and checked her watch. They’d been gone about twenty minutes now. What were they doing?
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