The Woman Who Borrowed

I want to state clearly, before anything else, that I am not certain about Niamh Delaney.

I have been a clinical psychologist for twenty-two years. I have sat across from people who have lied to me with such fluency that their falsehoods carried the texture of lived experience, and I have sat across from people whose truths were so fractured by trauma that they sounded like lies. I have learned to distrust certainty in either direction. What I am about to describe is what I observed, what I came to suspect, and what I still, even now, cannot resolve into a single coherent picture. I owe you that honesty, at least.

I should also say that I am aware of how this will sound — a therapist who lost her objectivity, who allowed a professional relationship to become personal, who saw patterns where she needed to see them. My colleague Stephen Harrington said as much when I brought my concerns to him over coffee in the Westbury Hotel, the rain sluicing down the windows onto Grafton Street while he stirred his Americano and chose his words with a care that was, itself, diagnostic. “You’re describing a woman who copies her friends,” he said. “That’s not pathology. That’s Dublin.”

He was wrong. But I cannot prove he was wrong, and that is the problem.

Niamh first came to me in September 2023, referred by her GP for anxiety and what the referral letter described as “possible recovered memories of childhood abuse.” She was thirty-four, originally from Navan, living in a flatshare in Rathmines. She worked part-time at an estate agent’s office on Camden Street, the kind of place with photographs of Georgian terraces in the window and a persistent smell of instant coffee. She was pleasant-looking without being remarkable — medium height, light brown hair she wore in a low ponytail, a face that seemed designed to avoid notice. I remember thinking, in that first session, that she was the kind of woman who could sit in a room for an hour and leave no impression on it.

That observation, I now realize, may have been the first thing she wanted me to think.

The recovered memories emerged slowly over the first months of treatment. Fragments, she said, arriving without warning — a cellar, a man’s hands, the smell of paraffin. She could not place them in time. She was not sure they belonged to her. She described them with a detachment that I initially attributed to dissociation, the psyche’s elegant trick of separating the self from unbearable experience. She would sit in the green armchair — my patients always choose the green armchair, the brown leather one might as well not exist — and recount these images with the precision of someone describing a painting she had seen in a gallery. Not lived experience but observed experience.

I want to be fair to her. The dissociative presentation was textbook. The memories arrived in the sequence and manner that recovered memories typically present: sensory fragments first, then spatial context, then emotional content. If she was performing, she had studied.

If she was performing.

I first noticed the borrowing in April 2024, seven months into our work together. It was trivial — so trivial that I might have imagined its significance. Niamh arrived for her session wearing a silk scarf in a particular shade of dusty rose that I recognized because my daughter Aisling owned the same one. Not the same brand, probably. Not even the same scarf. But the shade, the way it was knotted — loose, thrown over one shoulder like an afterthought — was so precisely Aisling’s gesture that I felt a small cold current pass through me, the kind that has no clinical name.

I noted it and let it go. Therapists are trained to notice counter-transference, the emotional reactions our patients provoke in us, and I categorized this as my own projection — a mother seeing her daughter in other young women, which is common enough to be unremarkable.

Then, in May, I learned something that recontextualized the scarf.

Niamh mentioned, in passing, that she had joined a book club. “One of the other members is lovely,” she said. “She works in tech. Fiona. Very sharp.” She smiled in a way I had not seen from her before — admiring, almost hungry. “The kind of person who walks into a room and everyone just… adjusts.”

I asked what she meant by adjusts. She considered this with what seemed like genuine thought.

“You know those people who have a gravity to them? Not because they’re loud. Just because they’re — assembled. They know what they want. They know what wine to order. They know what to wear to a funeral. They’re not performing confidence, they just have it, the way some people have good bone structure.” She paused. “Fiona is like that.”

I wrote in my notes that evening: Patient idealizing a new acquaintance. Possible mirroring behaviour. Monitor.

What I did not write, because I did not yet understand it, was that Niamh had already begun to dismantle Fiona’s life and reconstruct it as her own.

The facts, as I was able to piece them together later, are these. I should say that “facts” is too solid a word for what I have — fragments from Fiona herself, from Aisling, from social media accounts, from my own clinical notes. I have assembled them into a sequence that may or may not reflect reality. Memory is an unreliable architect, and I have spent my career watching it build beautiful, load-bearing lies.

Fiona Brennan was thirty-six, a UX designer at a software company in the Docklands. She lived alone in a well-appointed apartment on Grand Canal Square, one of those glass-fronted buildings that look like they were designed for a magazine rather than a life. She had what I believe the internet calls “a curated aesthetic” — her flat, her clothes, her social media presence all projected a coherent image of tasteful, effortless success. She wore her hair in a particular way, a half-gathered arrangement with loose strands that framed her face. She drank natural wine. She ran 10Ks for charity. She had a friend group composed of similarly polished women who met for brunch in Portobello and weekends in Connemara.

Within two months of joining the book club, Niamh had cut her hair to match Fiona’s. She had started drinking natural wine. She had begun using phrases I had never heard from her before — “absolutely not” and “hard agree” and “I just think there’s something in that” — delivered with a cadence that was not quite hers, as though she had learned them phonetically.

These are things I noticed in our sessions, across weeks, without initially connecting them. I am a therapist. I observe behaviour. But I was observing a patient, not a suspect, and the framework of our relationship — the fifty-minute hour, the confidential space, the assumption of good faith — made it difficult to see the pattern forming.

The pattern was this: Niamh was not imitating Fiona. She was replacing her.

Let me describe Dublin in that spring, because the city matters. It rained for most of April and May, a relentless grey rain that turned the Georgian streets into corridors of reflected light and made every building look like it was dissolving at its edges. I walked to my office on Merrion Square each morning past the sodden park, the bare trees black against the sky like circulatory diagrams, and I felt the particular oppression that Dublin exerts in the wet months — not dramatic, not stormy, just a steady pressure, as though the clouds had settled permanently at roof height and meant to stay.

My office was on the second floor of a Georgian townhouse, the kind with high ceilings and corniced plasterwork and windows that let in a quality of light I have never found anywhere else — silvered, indirect, faintly luminous even on dark days. I had practised there for fourteen years. The green armchair sat opposite my own chair, a low table between us with a box of tissues and a clock I kept angled so only I could see it. The room smelled of the beeswax I used on the floorboards and, faintly, of whatever the previous patient had worn. It was a room designed to feel safe. I believed it was safe. I am no longer certain of that.

The city itself seemed to participate in what was happening to Fiona. Dublin is a small place in the ways that matter — the social circles overlap, the connections compress, and a person moving through a particular stratum of young professional life will encounter the same faces at the same restaurants and the same gallery openings and the same charity runs in the Phoenix Park. Niamh inserted herself into Fiona’s world not through force but through a kind of osmotic persistence, appearing at the edges of events, making herself useful, making herself pleasant, making herself forgettable in exactly the way that gains trust — because people who are forgettable are assumed to be harmless.

By June, Niamh had Fiona’s hairdresser — the same woman in Ranelagh, the same cut, requested by name. By July, she had Fiona’s personal trainer and had taken to running the same loop around Sandymount Strand at the same early-morning hour. By August, she had Fiona’s friend group — or enough of it that she was included in the Connemara weekends, the Portobello brunches, the tickets to the Gate Theatre. I learned all of this later, in pieces, and the picture I assembled had the quality of those composite photographs the police use — recognizable but not quite right, the proportions slightly off, the whole somehow less convincing than any of its parts.

There was one detail that stayed with me. Fiona, I was told, had a particular way of holding a wine glass — by the bowl, not the stem, cupping it in her palm the way you might cup a small animal. It was a distinctive gesture, the kind of thing people noticed and found either charming or irritating. Niamh began holding her glass the same way. Not just any glass — wine specifically, and only in company. I saw her do it once, at a charity function I attended in the Shelbourne Hotel, where I had gone to support a colleague’s fundraiser and found myself watching my patient across a crowded room, her hand wrapped around the bowl of a glass of Gruner Veltliner, and I felt the thing I had been trying not to feel for months: that I was watching something meticulous and purposeful, a study being conducted in real time.

And by September, one year into our therapeutic relationship, she had my daughter.

I need to explain about Aisling, and this is where my objectivity fails me, and I know it fails me, and knowing does not help.

Aisling was twenty-eight and worked as a junior solicitor at a firm on Fitzwilliam Square, a ten-minute walk from my office. She was the kind of young woman I had hoped she would be — competent, kind, possessed of a dry humour she had inherited from her father and a stubbornness she had inherited from me. She wore the dusty rose scarf because I had given it to her for her birthday. She lived alone in a flat in Ranelagh. She was, in the taxonomy of Dublin’s young professionals, precisely the sort of person Niamh had learned to orbit.

I did not know they had met. Niamh never mentioned Aisling by name in our sessions — she spoke of new friends, of social engagements, of the pleasurable sensation of belonging to a group for the first time in her adult life, and I encouraged this. I was pleased. It looked, from within the fifty-minute hour, like social integration, like the rebuilding of a self that childhood trauma had fractured. I noted progress. I was optimistic.

Then, on a Thursday in late September, Aisling mentioned over dinner that she had made a new friend.

“She’s quiet,” Aisling said, twirling pasta around her fork in the particular way she had done since she was nine. “But really observant. She notices things about people. Like, she remembered that I mentioned wanting to see that Vermeer exhibition, and she just showed up with two tickets. Not in a weird way. Just — thoughtful.”

“What’s her name?” I asked, and I asked it casually, because I had no reason not to.

“Niamh. She’s lovely.”

I set down my fork. The restaurant — a small Italian place on Wexford Street where we ate together once a month — seemed to contract around me, the noise of other diners compressing into something thick and airless. I could feel my own heart, which is not something I ordinarily notice, and I could feel the precise moment when professional obligation and maternal terror became the same thing.

I could not tell Aisling that Niamh was my patient. I could not tell Aisling anything at all.

Here is what I thought was happening, and here is what might actually have been happening, and I cannot, even now, with everything I know, tell you which is true.

The Highsmith reading: Niamh Delaney was a woman of no particular identity who had discovered, probably in childhood, that the easiest way to exist in the world was to become someone else. Her “recovered memories” were a performance designed to give her access to me, a well-connected therapist whose social circle — whose daughter — represented exactly the kind of life she wanted to inhabit. She studied her targets the way one might study a role: their gestures, their tastes, their friendships. She was not cruel. She did not wish to harm. She simply wished to be, and the only way she knew how to be was to borrow the shape of someone who already was. The trauma was the costume, and I was the audience she needed to convince.

The French reading: Niamh Delaney was a woman genuinely fractured by childhood abuse — abuse that had obliterated her sense of self so thoroughly that she had no internal template for who she was. The recovered memories were real. The mimicry was not predatory but reconstructive — a woman with no identity reaching for the nearest models, the way a person drowning reaches for anything that floats. That she gravitated toward confident, assembled women was not strategy but need. That she gravitated toward my daughter was coincidence, or the gravitational pull of my own centrality in her life bleeding outward. She was not a predator. She was a wound, moving through the world, trying to close itself.

I sat with both readings across that autumn, turning them over the way Aunty Buki — no, wrong story. I sat with them the way you sit with a diagnosis you cannot confirm, the evidence pointing in two directions at once, each interpretation coherent, each excluding the other.

I watched my patient in our sessions with a new and terrible attention. I listened to her describe her expanding social life, her growing confidence, her sense — expressed with what seemed like genuine wonder — that she was finally becoming a person. “I feel like I’m arriving somewhere,” she said in October, and her eyes were bright with something I could not classify. Gratitude, perhaps. Or the particular glow of a project going well.

I watched my daughter over our monthly dinners. Aisling spoke of Niamh with increasing warmth. They had been to the cinema together. They had gone walking on Killiney Hill, where the bay opens out below you like a held breath. Niamh had borrowed a book — borrowed, always borrowed — and returned it with a handwritten note tucked inside the cover, a note Aisling described as “really perceptive, like she’d read the book in the exact way I would have.”

“She gets me,” Aisling said, and the word gets landed in my chest like something thrown.

In November I did something I should not have done. I will not defend it. I went through Fiona Brennan’s social media.

It was not difficult to find her — Niamh had mentioned enough details across our sessions that a few minutes of searching yielded the right Fiona, her Instagram full of the curated life I had already constructed in my imagination. What I found there confirmed some of what I suspected and complicated the rest.

Fiona’s posts from the previous spring showed a woman in full command of her public self — the restaurants, the Connemara weekends, the carefully angled photographs. But by midsummer, something had shifted. The posts became less frequent. The captions became shorter. By August, she had not posted in three weeks, and when she returned, her feed had a different quality — defensive, almost. A photograph of her apartment with the caption: Home. Mine. A photograph of a book club gathering in which I could see, at the edge of the frame, a woman with light brown hair and a dusty rose scarf.

In September, Fiona’s account went private. In October, it disappeared.

I want to be careful about what this proves. People leave social media for many reasons. A woman might feel crowded, might feel that her social space has been infiltrated, might retreat because retreat is easier than confrontation. Or a woman might leave because the version of herself that existed online has been so thoroughly duplicated by someone else that the original no longer feels like her own.

Or — and this is the reading I keep returning to, the one I cannot dismiss — Fiona might have been a fragile person herself, one whose curated exterior concealed its own hollowness, and Niamh’s arrival simply exposed what was already unstable. In which case, who harmed whom?

I confronted Niamh in December. Confronted is too strong a word. I raised the subject of Aisling — not by name, not directly, but by asking about “the new friend whose mother you mentioned is a professional.”

Niamh went very still. It was a particular kind of stillness that I have seen in patients who are deciding, in real time, which self to present. The silence lasted perhaps four seconds. In therapy, four seconds is a long time.

“Are you asking whether I know your daughter, Dr. Riordan?”

The use of my title. Not Claire, which she had taken to calling me by autumn. The formality was a wall going up, or a card being played, and I could not determine which.

“I’m asking about the nature of your social connections,” I said, “and whether any of them might be complicating our therapeutic relationship.”

She looked at me with an expression I have replayed a hundred times. It was not guilt. It was not calculation. It was something closer to sorrow, a deep and private sorrow that lived behind her eyes the way old water lives at the bottom of a well.

“I didn’t seek her out,” she said. “I know how that sounds. But I didn’t. We were at the same event. She was kind to me. People aren’t often kind to me, Dr. Riordan.” She looked at her hands, which were folded in her lap, the fingers interlaced. “I know what you think is happening. You think I’m — taking things. From Fiona, from your daughter, from the others. You think I’m a mimic. A parasite.”

“I haven’t used those words.”

“You haven’t needed to.” She lifted her eyes back to mine. “But here is what I would ask you to consider. When a person grows up without a self — when the people who were supposed to teach you who you are instead teach you that you are nothing — where do you think identity comes from? Do you think it just appears? Do you think there is some essential Niamh buried under the rubble, waiting to be excavated?” She shook her head. “There is no original. There never was. I build myself from what I find. That is not theft. That is survival.”

It was the most articulate, the most psychologically sophisticated thing she had ever said to me. And that, too, could have been evidence for either reading.

I terminated the therapeutic relationship in January. I did it properly — four sessions of termination work, a referral to a colleague in Blackrock, documentation of clinical rationale. I cited the dual relationship — my patient and my daughter’s friend — as grounds for transfer. Niamh accepted this with a grace that might have been genuine acceptance or might have been the smooth accommodation of a person who has spent her entire life absorbing rejection without visible damage.

On her last day, she stood at the door of my office and looked back at the green armchair, the high Georgian window, the corniced ceiling with its watermark in the shape of a coastline.

“I was happy here,” she said. “I know that might not mean what you want it to mean. But I was.”

She left. The door closed. I sat in my chair and listened to her footsteps descend the stairs, and then the front door opening and shutting, and then the particular sound of Merrion Square in winter — the traffic on the wet road, a gull crying over the park, the silence that a Georgian building settles into when it is empty.

Aisling continued to see her. I could not forbid it — Aisling was twenty-eight, a grown woman, entitled to her own friendships. I could not explain my concerns without violating confidentiality. I was trapped in the architecture of my own profession, the ethical walls I had spent a career building now holding me inside while the threat — if it was a threat — moved freely on the other side.

By February, Aisling had changed her hair. She had stopped wearing the dusty rose scarf — Niamh wore one so similar that it felt, Aisling said, “a bit twinny.” She had started drinking natural wine. She had joined a book club.

She had not, I should say, seemed unhappy. She seemed, if anything, energized — as though the friendship had unlocked some new version of herself. But I could not tell whether this new version was growth or erasure. I could not tell whether Niamh was giving something to my daughter or taking something from her.

It is now the end of February, and I am writing this in my office on Merrion Square, the rain doing what it does, the light through the Georgian windows doing what it does. The green armchair sits empty. My next patient is in forty minutes.

Here is what I know: Fiona Brennan moved to London in January. Her friends describe the departure as sudden. One of them — reached through a channel I am not proud of — told me that Fiona had said she “didn’t feel like herself anymore.” This could mean anything.

Here is what I know: Niamh has taken a new job, a better one, in a tech company in the Docklands. She dresses differently now — with confidence, with a curated quality that I recognize. She moves through Dublin’s social landscape with an ease she did not possess a year ago. She is, by any external measure, thriving.

Here is what I know: my daughter calls Niamh her closest friend. They are going to Connemara next weekend. Aisling has started wearing her hair in a half-gathered arrangement, with loose strands that frame her face.

Here is what I do not know, and what I am increasingly afraid I will never know: whether my daughter is befriending a woman who has rebuilt herself out of borrowed materials, a survivor whose only crime is learning to exist by observation — or whether she is being studied, measured, slowly and carefully replicated by a person who will discard her when the replication is complete, the way Fiona was discarded, the way each previous model was discarded when the new one had served its purpose.

I am a clinical psychologist. I have spent twenty-two years learning to read people. And I sit here in my safe room with its beeswax floors and its angled clock and its tissue box, and I cannot read this woman. I cannot read her because the two possible readings are equally supported by the evidence, equally coherent, equally terrifying in different ways — and because the thing that frightens me most is not that Niamh might be a predator, but that there may be no meaningful difference between a predator and a person who has been so thoroughly destroyed that predation is the only shape survival can take.

The rain hits the window. The gull cries over the park. The green armchair holds its silence, the way all empty chairs do — waiting for whoever will sit in it next, ready to receive whatever story they choose to tell.

And I sit here, watching my daughter slip away from me into a friendship I cannot name, and I think: this is what it means to work with the human mind. You open a door. You think you know what is on the other side. And then you discover that the door opens onto another door, and another, and behind each one is the same room, differently lit, and the woman in the chair is always the same woman, and she is always someone else.