She left the book and the camellia flower on the hall table to think about later.

Chapter 14

Freud always said that the reason he stopped using hypnosis was that a patient jumped up and kissed him. Apparently the real reason was that his false teeth no longer fitted properly after his gums had been ruined by his cocaine use and he couldn’t speak well enough to easily induce trances. The lesson for us? Floss!

—Excerpt from a speech delivered by Flynn Halliday

to the Northern Beaches Hypnotherapists Meeting,

August 2010

Ellen, my dear. You are looking well.”

“Thank you, Flynn.”

Flynn Halliday bent to brush his cheek against hers.

It was a month since Ellen had returned from Noosa and she was attending the regular local chapter meeting of the Australian Association of Hypnotherapists. Flynn was president and Ellen was treasurer. They ran the meetings in a small room at a local community center, and Flynn and Ellen had arrived half an hour early to set up the room.

“How have you been?” asked Flynn, as they dragged tables and chairs into a horseshoe shape. “Any news?”

Ellen hesitated. She was feeling guilty. She always felt guilty around Flynn, because she felt like she’d let him down in many ways.

She’d known him since she was in her early twenties. He’d employed her for many years in his hypnotherapy business as an assistant, a trainee therapist and finally a hypnotherapist. He’d wanted her to go into partnership with him, and she knew he’d been very hurt when she decided to go out on her own.

There was also that thing she’d never spoken out loud, or even properly admitted to herself; the thing about the way Flynn looked at her. Sometimes she thought she was imagining it, and she was behaving like a typical fatherless daughter by misinterpreting the perfectly acceptable fondness of an older man for a younger colleague. Other times she was quite sure that if she’d ever given Flynn the slightest encouragement, he most certainly would have courted her: with poetry, probably, elaborate compliments and thoughtful gifts.

Flynn, who had never married, or even been in a relationship as far as Ellen knew, was in his late fifties, with fine, fair hair and a rosy, cherubic face. He looked like an elderly choirboy. The idea of sex with Flynn seemed illegal.

There was no need to mention the pregnancy yet. Although over the last few weeks she had begun to feel profoundly different (strange little poking sensations in her belly, tender br**sts, mild nausea that lasted all day long and a permanent sense of quivering on the verge of tears), she looked exactly the same, and anyway, she thought that Flynn would prefer to think of her as a virgin.

But it would be strange not to mention the engagement.

“I do have some news, actually,” she said, pressing her thumb to her ring. “I’m engaged.”

Flynn had been facing away from her. He waited just a beat too long to turn around.

Ellen’s eyes filled. Oh Flynn, you silly man. If only it was possible to live a parallel life, a spare one, where she could have let Flynn court her and marry her, and she could have made him happy. Except without the sex.

“Congratulations!” Flynn came across the room and gave her a clumsy, vaguely peppermint-scented kiss.

He stood back and clasped his hands together like a country vicar. “Wonderful.”

As Flynn groped about for something else to say, Ellen thought about Saskia. If only her relationship with Flynn wasn’t so complicated, she would have asked his advice. She had a lot of respect for his opinions when it came to the human psyche.

Ellen wished she’d never told Patrick about Saskia returning the book. He’d been battling insomnia ever since, pacing the house, frustrated with his own powerlessness.

“I hate that you have to deal with this,” he’d said. His face looked older, weighed down with stress. “I’m meant to make your life better. Not harder.”

“She just returned a book,” said Ellen. “I’m not frightened.” She wasn’t. Not really. Only a mild fluttery sense of unease that could have just been a natural reaction to all the changes going on in her life, nothing to do with Saskia at all.

“So, that’s just wonderful news,” said Flynn again. Then an expression of panic flew across his face. “It’s not that Danny fellow, is it?” he said.

“No. I’m marrying a surveyor actually,” said Ellen. “I shall be a surveyor’s wife.” What? The oddest things came out of her mouth when she was feeling awkward.

“Surveyor! Man of the land, right, wonderful.” Flynn kept his hands clasped and shook them as if he was giving himself a warm handshake. “Yes, yes, because that Danny— Have you heard what he’s doing?” Danny and Flynn had been introduced only once by Ellen at an industry function, and there had been instant mutual dislike.

“I haven’t talked to him for a while.”

“He’s treating hypnotherapy like Tupperware. He’s running these parties and he’s calling them—”

“Hypno-parties!” Marlene Adams sailed into the room. She was another hypnotherapist of a similar generation and mind-set to Flynn. (Why hadn’t he fallen for her?) “Isn’t it dreadful! I heard him talking on the radio just yesterday, and I thought to myself, What? I beg your pardon? Hypno-parties? Well, that’s just going to do wonders for our professional credibility, isn’t it!”

“So, next Sunday is the last Sunday of the month,” said Patrick, later that afternoon.

“Old Jeans,” said Ellen. “This box says ‘Old Jeans.’”

She had stopped in the hallway to look at the neatly written notation in black marker on a large dusty cardboard box. Patrick and Jack had been officially living at her place now for just a week. However, the process of moving in their possessions was proving to be complex. Apparently Patrick didn’t believe in movers. They were “overpaid thugs.” Instead, every couple of days, whenever he got a chance, he picked up a few boxes in the back of his company pickup truck and dropped them off.

Ellen would have preferred that he take a few days off work and hire some overpaid thugs to do the job properly. Instead, her hallway was rapidly filling with giant cardboard boxes, which Patrick didn’t have time to move and which were too heavy for Ellen to lift. Her clients had to shuffle sideways every time they walked through her hallway.