Patrick had listened to her story carefully, and at the end he’d said, “Good for your mum, but I’m sorry you missed out on having a father.”

“You don’t miss what you don’t have,” said Ellen, which wasn’t something she really believed at all, but she certainly hadn’t spent her childhood sobbing into her pillow for “Daddy.” “Maybe it would have been different if I’d been a boy.”

“I think daughters still need their dads,” Patrick had said gravely, and his seriousness had made her fall a little bit further in love with him, and imagine him tenderly holding a baby girl (yes, all right, her own baby girl) like a man in a baby powder commercial.

And now he was saying, “And your dad wasn’t ever in the picture?” as if he hadn’t really concentrated on the story properly, as if he’d heard her story at a dinner party many years ago and couldn’t quite remember the details. It was so disappointing. Ellen felt that nauseous, anxious feeling again. What if she just wanted to be madly in love with this man? What if it was all a gigantic self-delusion? What if he was actually a superficial, selfish prat?

Would she have been better equipped to pick out the good men if she’d grown up with a father? Probably. In fact, almost definitely. After her mother had called her bluff about contacting her father, she’d researched the psychology of fatherless daughters and left photocopies around the house for her mother to find with particularly damning sections marked in yellow highlighter. “What exactly do you want me to do about this?” her mother had said. “Go back in time and never conceive you?” “Feel guilty,” Ellen had answered.

Anne had laughed. Guilt wasn’t in her emotional lexicon.

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, as the light changed to green and the car inched farther forward. “I know your dad wasn’t in the picture. I’m just nervous. I’ve got that job interview feeling. I’m not great at job interviews, especially when I badly want the job.”

She glanced over at him and caught an expression of almost terrified vulnerability cross his face. For an instant he looked exactly like his son.

“When I’m nervous I just start coming out with all this crap that doesn’t even make sense.” He frowned as he looked in the rear-vision mirror. “Also, I’m sort of distracted because our friend is back.”

“Friend?” said Ellen.

“Our bunny-boiler friend. Behind us.”

“Saskia is following us again?” Ellen swung around in her seat and scanned the cars behind them. “Which one is she?”

“Yeah, that’s great. That’s fantastic. That’s one thing you really need, your ex following you to meet your girlfriend’s family for the first time,” muttered Patrick.

“Yes, but where is she?” The seat belt pulled hard across Ellen’s neck. Directly behind them was a man in a truck, his eyes closed, thumping his hands against the big steering wheel, his mouth moving as he sang along to an unheard song.

“She’s in the lane next to us, a couple of cars back,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry. I’m going to lose her.”

He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. Ellen turned around in time to see the lights change from orange to red. When she looked back, they were crossing the intersection, leaving a bank of stationary cars at the lights.

“What color?” she said desperately. “What color car?”

“Lost her,” said Patrick happily. “Look. We’re moving again.”

“Great,” said Ellen, and rubbed at her sore neck.

I lost them at the lights and I couldn’t guess which way they were going.

Maybe they were meeting up with friends of hers. Patrick doesn’t know anyone down that way.

I saw her turning around in her seat. I wonder if she was trying to see me. Patrick probably knew I was behind. I know when he knows I’m behind him. He drives faster than usual, erratically. Sometimes he sticks his finger up at me. Once I saw him getting a ticket for doing an illegal right-hand turn trying to get away from me. I felt bad about that because he’d always been proud of the fact that he’d never got a ticket in over twenty years of driving. I sent him a bottle of wine to his work to apologize. I picked it out especially. A Pepper Tree white. We’d discovered that wine on a trip to the Hunter Valley during our last summer together. We bought a whole case and we got addicted to it. I don’t see how he could drink that wine without thinking of me. But I waited outside his office that night, and I saw one of the girls he worked with walking to her car carrying my bottle of wine. I recognized it because I’d wrapped it up in blue tissue paper. He didn’t even bother to open it. He just handed it to that girl.

I try to imagine how he describes me to the hypnotist. To Ellen. I guess he tells her I’m “psychotic.” He yelled that at me once. I was walking behind him at his local shops, when he suddenly swung around and walked straight back toward me. I stopped and waited for him, smiling. He was smiling too. I thought we were finally going to have a proper conversation. But then, when he got closer, I saw it was a sarcastic, angry smile. He stuck his finger in my face and yelled, “You’re a psychotic lunatic!”

Which … you know, might have been funny in other circumstances, except that I was worried he was going to hit me.

He was so angry he was shaking.

Actually, I sort of longed for him to hit me. I needed him to hit me. If he wasn’t ever going to hold me in his arms again, at least he could hit me. There would be a connection once more. Flesh against flesh.