“Why, thank you. As a matter of fact, I do usually wear pin-striped suits. But I took the afternoon off to come and see you. So I came in my civvies.” He smiled at her. He was wearing gray gabardine slacks and a blazer. And he looked very handsome. “May I make a suggestion? Could we possibly stop calling each other Doctor? It's an awful lot of Doctoring.” He grinned and she smiled and nodded agreement.
“Call me Linda.”
“I'm Teddy.”
“All right.” She sat back in her comfortable black leather chair and looked at him directly. “Tell me about your niece. In detail.” He told her everything that had been happening, and she nodded. And when he had finished his recital, she told him gently, “Do you remember? I told you it could take months, or even years. There was a possibility, with the initial shock, that she might have been jolted into remembering the whole story. What seems to be happening instead is that it's leaking slowly into her subconscious. It could take a very long time, or it may all subside again. It's unlikely that anything would happen to shock her again the way that photograph did. That was kind of a fluke.”
He agreed. “But it was amazing how it struck her. She stared at it for about half an hour.”
Linda Evans nodded slowly. “She must have some awful memories of that man. It's not surprising that the photograph haunted her.”
“You don't think we should just tell her and get it over with?”
“No, I don't.”
“Do you think she ought to come to you?”
Linda thought about it for a moment and then shook her head. “On what grounds? Why would you be suggesting such a thing? You see, she has no idea what's happening yet. If she wakes up one day and wants to see a therapist, that's one thing, but if you suggest it, it may put her on edge. I think we just have to let her be for the moment.” Teddy nodded, chatted with Linda for a moment, and then shook her hand and departed. But a week later he was back to talk to her again, and eventually he became a regular visitor to her office. He no longer took the afternoon off to come to see her, he arranged it during his lunchtime instead.
“See, I told you. Pin-striped suits.” She laughed with him. There really wasn't that much to say about Vanessa, and after a month or two she began having fewer and fewer nightmares, but Teddy had come to enjoy talking to Linda Evans. They seemed to share a myriad common views and opinions, common interests and likings for many of the same things. Eventually he suggested that they spend the lunch hour in a restaurant instead of her office, and from there it was only a step to dinner. Normally she had stringent views about not going out with patients, but Teddy wasn't really a patient. He was the uncle of a patient she had never even met, but whose file she had inherited with the practice, and he was a fellow doctor. Besides, she was amazed at how much she enjoyed him. And Teddy was equally amazed at his feelings—lie wondered once or twice if, in speaking of Vanessa's past to Linda, he was somehow healing the ghosts of his own. For the first time in a long time he could speak of Serena without a stab of pain and it dawned on him slowly that he was falling in love with Linda. They went to dinner two or three times a week, occasionally went to the opera or the theater. He even took her to a hockey game with Vanessa, and was pleased at how well the two women got along. It also gave Linda her first look at Vanessa. She found her a delightful girl and saw no sign of inner torment.
By spring Teddy and Linda saw each other almost every night, and Vanessa had begun to tease them. Linda was becoming a regular visitor at the apartment, and Vanessa teased that if she was going to hang around as much as she was, she was going to have to start taking a shift for breakfast. It was also beginning to occur to Vanessa that she needed her own apartment. She didn't want to hurt Teddy's feelings, but she was twenty-three years old, she wanted to combine a studio with living quarters of her own, and it was obvious