"No." This time the silence was longer.
She was afraid to put it into words, afraid to bring the reality out into the open. "People around me...seem to die."
If he was taken aback, he did not show it. "And you believe that you're the cause of their deaths?"
"Yes. No. I don't know. I'm...confused."
"We often blame ourselves for things that happen to other people. If a husband and wife get a divorce, the children think they're responsible. If someone curses a person and that person dies, he thinks he was the cause of it. That kind of belief is not at all unusual. You..."
"It's more than that."
"Is it?" He watched her, ready to listen.
The words poured out. "My husband was killed, and his...his mistress. The two lawyers who defended them died. And now..." Her voice broke. "Kirk."
"And you think you're responsible for all those deaths. That's a tremendous burden to carry around, isn't it?"
"I...I seem to be some kind of bad-luck charm. I'm afraid to have a relationship with another man. I don't think I could stand it if anything..."
"Catherine, do you know whose life you're responsible for? Yours. No one else's. It's impossible for you to control anyone else's life and death. You're innocent. You had nothing to do with any of those deaths. You must understand that."
You're innocent. You had nothing to do with any of those deaths. And Catherine sat there thinking about those words. She wanted desperately to believe them. Those people died because of their actions, not because of hers. And as for Kirk, it was an unfortunate accident. Wasn't it?
Alan Hamilton was quietly watching her. Catherine looked up and thought, He's a decent man. Another thought came unbidden into her mind: I wish I had met him earlier. Guiltily, Catherine glanced at the framed photograph of Alan's wife and child on the coffee table.
"Thank you," Catherine said. "I...I'm going to try to believe that. I'll have to get used to the idea."
Alan Hamilton smiled. "We'll get used to it together. Are you coming back?"
"What?"
"This was a trial run, remember? You were going to decide whether you wanted to go on with this."
Catherine did not hesitate. "Yes, I'll be back, Alan."
When she had gone, Alan Hamilton sat there thinking about her.
He had treated many attractive patients during the years he had been practicing, and some of them had indicated a sexual interest in him. But he was too good a psychiatrist to allow himself to be tempted. A personal relationship with a patient was one of the first taboos of his profession. It would have been a betrayal.
Dr. Alan Hamilton came from a medical background. His father was a surgeon who had married his nurse and Alan's grandfather had been a famous cardiologist. From the time he was a small boy, Alan knew that he wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon like his father. He had attended medical school at King's College and, after graduation, had gone on to study surgery.
He had a natural flair for it, a skill that could not be taught. And then, on September 1, 1939, the army of the Third Reich had marched across the border of Poland, and two days later Britain and France declared war. The Second World War had begun.
Alan Hamilton had enlisted as a surgeon.
On June 22, 1940, after the Axis forces had conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and the Low Countries, France fell, and the brunt of the war fell on the British Isles.
At first, a hundred planes a day dropped bombs on British cities. Soon it was two hundred planes, then a thousand. The carnage was beyond imagination. The wounded and dying were everywhere. Cities were in flames. But Hitler had badly misjudged the British. The attacks only served to strengthen their resolve. They were ready to die for their freedom.
There was no respite, day or night, and Alan Hamilton found himself going without sleep for stretches that sometimes lasted as long as sixty hours. When the emergency hospital he worked in was bombed, he moved his patients to a warehouse. He saved countless lives, working under the most hazardous conditions possible.
In October, when the bombing was at its height, the air-raid sirens had sounded, and people were making for the air-raid shelters below ground. Alan was in the middle of surgery, and he refused to leave his patient. The bombs were coming closer. A doctor working with Alan said, "Let's get the hell out of here."
"In a minute." He had the patient's chest open and was removing bloody pieces of shrapnel.
"Alan!"
But he could not leave. He was concentrating on what he was doing, oblivious to the sound of the bombs falling all around him. He never heard the sound of the bomb that fell on the building.
He was in a coma for six days, and when he awakened, he learned that, among his other injuries, the bones of his right hand had been crushed. They had been set and looked normal, but he would never operate again.
It took him almost a year to get over the trauma of having his future destroyed. He was under the care of a psychiatrist, a no-nonsense doctor who said, "It's about time you stopped feeling sorry for yourself and got on with your life."
"Doing what?" Alan had asked bitterly.
"What you've been doing - only in a different way."
"I don't understand."
"You're a healer, Alan. You heal people's bodies. Well, you can't do that anymore. But it's just as important to heal people's minds. You'd make a good psychiatrist. You're intelligent and you have compassion. Think about it."
It had turned out to be one of the most rewarding decisions he had ever made. He enjoyed what he was doing tremendously. In a sense, he found it even more satisfying to bring patients who were living in despair back to normal than to minister to their physical welfare. His reputation had grown quickly, and for the past three years he had been forced to turn new patients away. He had agreed to see Catherine only so that he could recommend another doctor to her. But something about her had touched him. I must help her.