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isn’t there?”
    “What do you mean?” said Ellen. He’s not Jon, she told herself. He’s just stating an opinion. Calm down.
    “I just mean, it can’t cure everything. When Colleen—that was my wife—when she got sick, people kept telling her to think positively. As if she could just think the cancer away. After she died I saw a woman on TV saying: ‘I refused to let the cancer beat me. I had two young children, you see. I
had
to live.’ It infuriated me. As if it was Colleen’s fault that she died. As if she should have tried harder.”
    Go carefully, thought Ellen. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.
    Patrick put his hand on her knee. “By the way, I don’t want you thinking you’ve got to walk on eggshells whenever anything comes up about my wife. I’m fine about it. I’m not going to go all weird on you, I promise.”
    Hmm, thought Ellen. “My mother is a GP,” she said. “So—”
So what? So I have some sort of medical credibility because of her? My mother doesn’t really believe in what I do either. “
I have looked after clients with terminal illnesses for pain management or stress relief, but I would never, ever promise I could cure them.”
    “I didn’t mean to imply that,” said Patrick. His hand tightened on her knee.
    “I know you didn’t.” Ellen put her hand over his, and wondered if he was seeing his wife’s face right now.
    She didn’t tell him that she
did
believe that the mind had miraculous untapped powers.
    Show me the empirical evidence
, said Jon in her head.
    They didn’t speak. The sound of a ferry horn floated across to them from the other side of the harbor. There were footsteps behind them. They both turned to watch a woman wearing a dark business suit and white sneakers walking down the path toward them.
    “That’s not—” said Ellen.
    “No,” said Patrick, his face clearing as the woman was illuminated by a streetlight.
    They were silent. Ellen thought about how she’d closed off such a huge part of her identity during her years with Jon. If this relationship was going to work, she needed to throw open those doors! Let in the light! The air! The— OK, Ellen, enough with the house metaphor.
    “I really love what I do,” she said to Patrick. That defensive tone was still there. She made a conscious effort to let it go, to just
be
. “I’m quite good at it too.”
    Patrick gave her an amused sidelong look. “Are you the queen of hypnotherapists?”
    “I am.”
    “What a coincidence. I am the king of surveyors.”
    “Really?”
    Patrick sighed. “No, not really. I’m more like the yesterday man of surveyors.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m not fond of all the new technology. I still prefer to do all my drafting by hand. So that makes me slower. Not as efficient. It’s a competitive disadvantage, as my younger brother likes to remind me.”
    “Is he a surveyor too?”
    “No, he’s a graphic designer, but he’s very techy. Are you techy?”
    “Not really, but I do like to Google. I think I Google every single day. Google is my oracle.”
    “What did you Google today?”
    Today she’d Googled “dating a widower: avoiding the pitfalls” and “stepchildren—disaster?” followed by “cures for broken capillaries around the nose.”
    “Oh, I can’t think.” She waved her hand vaguely. “Something trivial.” She changed the subject back. “Why did you decide to become a surveyor?”
    “Maps,” said Patrick immediately. “I’ve always loved the idea of a map, of knowing exactly where I am in relation to everything else. I had an uncle who was a surveyor and when I was a kid he said to me, ‘Patrick, you’ve got good where-ability, you’d make a good surveyor.’ I asked him what a surveyor did and he explained it like this: He said a surveyor determines the location of things on the earth’s surface in relation to every other thing above or below that surface. Those were his exact words. It stuck in my head. And for