The Hypnotist's Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

again, please? I think you’ve got me hypnotized!
    Which was cheesy. But extremely lovely.
    So it looked like it was happening. She was at the beginning of something new.
Here we are again.
She took a deep breath of salty air and it caught in her throat. For a moment she felt the weight of all those previous disappointments.
    Please let this one work, she thought pathetically.
    And then, with more spirit,
Come on now, I deserve this!
    Ellen had been in three long-term relationships: Andy, Edward and Jon. Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.
    Andy was a freakishly tall young banker. Their three-year relationship always seemed vaguely fraudulent to Ellen, like they were just pretending to be in love and doing a really excellent job of it. When Andy got an overseas posting, neither of them even mentioned the possibility of Ellen going with him. The whole affair left her with the same sense of grimy regret she felt after eating McDonald’s.
    Edward was a sweet, sensitive high school teacher. They fell deeply, profoundly in love and became one of those couples with a clear path aheadof them incorporating children and pets. And then, for complex reasons that were still not clear to her now, and to everyone’s shock, the relationship suddenly imploded. It was quite exquisitely painful.
    She met Jon on her thirtieth birthday. So OK, she thought,
this
is the one. The real grown-up relationship. He was a smart, articulate engineer. She adored him. It wasn’t until after he’d pulverized her heart that she finally noticed he’d never actually adored her back.
    She’d always thought of these failed relationships as, well, failures. But it occurred to her now that perhaps they were actually essential steps in a predestined journey leading to this very moment on this very beach. To a green-eyed surveyor called Patrick Scott.
    She thought of Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, his stalker. Saskia. An unusual name with its hard, spiky little syllables. Ellen rolled the name around in her mouth, like a strange new fruit. Saskia would not appreciate knowing that Ellen’s heart was filling with tremulous hope right now.
    Ellen kicked out at the water in front her, sending up a spray of icy droplets. Well, really, what sort of person was this girl? Had she no pride at all? Ellen cringed at the idea of her ex-partners knowing she ever spared them a thought.
    When, in fact, the three of them were always lolling about in the back of her mind. Every time she got out of the car she automatically slid the driver’s seat back for Andy’s long legs, a habit left over from the years they’d shared a car. Every time she cut a tomato she thought of Jon, because he’d once told her cutting crossways made it juicier. Every Boxing Day she remembered it was Edward’s birthday.
    Of course, it was to be expected that she thought of them. For a while each had been the person who knew her best, who spoke to her every single day, who knew where she was at any particular time, who would have sat in the front row at her funeral should she have tragically died.
    It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up withhim, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know his telephone number, or where he’s living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.
    Ellen watched a giant wave on the horizon curl and crash with a distant boom.
    That’s why breakups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that
more
people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well behaved and dignified about it.
    “Good morning!” An elderly couple walked by from the opposite end of the beach at a brisk pace, elbows pumping. Ellen picked up her own pace so as not to be outdone by