She would bet that when Patrick was out on a job, leaning over to peer into his theodolite, lifting one arm high, he never felt a moment of self-consciousness. But it was different in a “soft” profession like hers, where there were still some people who thought she was akin to a magician, or a faith healer, or a fraud. She remembered meeting an old friend who said, with genuine surprise, “You’re not still doing that hypnosis stuff, are you?” as if it had just been a funny little phase. “It’s my career,” Ellen had told her, but the friend, a corporate lawyer, thought she was joking, and laughed politely.

In fact, it was more than a career. It was her passion, her calling, her vocation.

The recliner was still warm from the last client who had sat there: Deborah Vandenberg, the woman who suffered from unexplained, debilitating pain in her right leg if she walked for more than ten minutes. Before coming to Ellen, she’d tried physiotherapists and chiropractors and sports doctors; she’d had X rays and MRIs and exploratory surgery. There appeared to be no physical reason for the pain. The medical profession had basically shrugged their shoulders and said, Sorry, we don’t know.

“I was very active,” she’d told Ellen. “I loved bushwalking. Now, some days, when it’s very bad, I find it hard to shop. This pain has changed almost everything about my life.”

“Chronic pain does that,” said Ellen.

She’d never experienced it herself, but over the years so many clients had brought her stories of how pain was a corrosive presence that cruelly ate away at all the simple pleasures of life.

“But I may be able to help,” she’d said.

“Everyone thinks they can help.” Deborah gave her a politely cynical smile. “Until they give up on me.”

She reminded Ellen a little of Julia. She was tall and confident, with short dark hair and a tomboyish grace as she sat back in her chair, one long black-jeaned leg entwined about the other.

She had mentioned that she enjoyed cooking, so at their previous session Ellen got her to imagine a stove dial she could use to turn her pain down. Today, as soon as they sat down, Deborah told Ellen that it was “possible” she’d turned her pain down one notch while walking through a car park that morning.

“But I probably imagined it,” she said, as if suddenly doubting herself. She had made it clear from the beginning that she was a skeptic. At the end of her last session, she said, with some pride, “You didn’t put me under; I was fully conscious the whole way through.” “That’s fine,” Ellen told her. (She got that a lot, and often from clients who had just moments ago been drooling and slack-jawed, quite clearly in deep trances.)

“We’re going to work on another dial today,” Ellen told her. “I think we’ll call it your ‘Good Energy Dial.’”

Deborah’s lips pulled back in a slight sneer. “That sounds very … cute.”

“I think you’re going to like it,” said Ellen firmly, ignoring the sneer. Negativity hid fear.

She used a quick, simple induction that involved feeling a deeper sense of relaxation with each step taken down a flight of stairs and watched as Deborah’s sharp features relaxed. She looked much younger when she was in a trance (and in spite of her skepticism, Deborah most certainly did go into a trance). The lines on her face smoothed out, and there was a vulnerable, naked look about her, in contrast to her conscious edgy confidence. It made Ellen feel motherly toward her.

“I want you to think of a time when you felt filled with confidence or joy,” she said. “Sift through your memories until you find that one perfect moment. Nod when you’re there.”

Ellen waited and watched, and as she did, she traveled back through time herself to her own perfect moment, when she had first practiced hypnosis. She was eleven, sitting in this very room, with her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who believed that everything Ellen did was spectacular. Ellen had just finished reading a book she’d found at the library, How to Hypnotize Anybody, and her grandmother had agreed to be her first patient. She’d used a necklace as a pendulum and watched her grandmother’s shrewd brown eyes follow it, back and forth, back and forth.

“You’re very good at that,” her grandmother said afterward, blinking with what Ellen could tell was genuine surprise: It was quite different from her generous clapping after Ellen played her the recorder. “I think you might have a gift.”

I think you might have a gift …

The sweetest, most surprising words imaginable. It was like that moment in the movies when superheroes discover their powers, or perhaps it was how nuns felt when they first heard the spooky, charismatic voice of God whispering in their virginal ears.

Deborah, her eyes still shut, her cheeks slightly flushed, nodded to signal she had her moment. Ellen wondered, briefly, what Deborah was remembering.

“That feeling you’re reliving right now, that’s the feeling that I want you to be able to call upon, whenever you need it. Whenever you press your thumb into your right hand, you can generate that feeling. The harder you press, the more you can increase the feeling, until it’s flowing like electricity through your body.”

Ellen let her voice rise with the vigor and power she wanted Deborah to feel.

“So next time you feel pain, this is what you can do. First you can use the pain dial to reduce your level of pain, and then you can use your energy dial to recreate that feeling of power.”

She saw a flicker of hesitancy on Deborah’s face and immediately switched to a more authoritative, paternal tone. “You have the ability to do this, Deborah. It’s all there, inside you. You are going to excel at these techniques. You can be pain-free. You can be pain-free.”

A few minutes later, Ellen brought Deborah out of her trance. She blinked in a disoriented, bleary-eyed way, like a passenger waking up on a plane, before quickly checking her watch. Then she ran both her hands through her hair and said, “I didn’t go under again,” and briskly pulled out her wallet from her handbag.

Ellen just nodded and offered her the bowl of chocolates, but later, as they were standing at the front door and Deborah was putting on her coat, she said slowly, without looking at Ellen, concentrating on doing up her buttons, “You know, you might actually cure me.”

“I’m not curing you,” Ellen reminded her. “The physical cause could still very well be there, whatever it is. I’m just helping you find a way to manage the pain.”