Paige Lyman, an accomplished psychiatrist, feels dislocated when her husband suddenly dies and she discovers the startling truth about who he really was. The revelation destroys all her certainties and transforms her from psychiatrist to patient. Paige tells us about her life, in long flashbacks, starting with her atypical childhood with Bill, the young Irish boy who stole her heart, and then abandoned her for priesthood. As a heartbroken teenager, Paige is seized by an implacable passion. She seeks her proverbial pound of flesh in the beds of various priests in an orchestrated attempt to get back at priesthood for robbing her of the only man she ever loved.
Everything changes when she meets Stern W., a medical researcher, who sweeps into her life like a hurricane and marries her. Now, as ugly skeletons, long forgotten in the closet, begin to rear their heads, Paige is seared by a damning awareness that she had indeed had what she always yearned for without realizing it ... only now it is too late to come to terms with the heart-wrenching things she did for a reason that no longer existed.
CHAPTER 1
The door of the consulting studio swung open at 9.00 a.m. and Dr. Wilson, a slender, pipe-smoking clinical psychologist stuck his hoary head in the doorway. His face lit up at the sight of Paige sitting cross-legged in the cozy waiting room.
“Hello Dr. Lyman,” he smiled courteously, “I had no idea you were here already.”
Paige glanced up, her face a frozen scowl, and gazed at him. She had expected them to be on first-name basis this morning; the unexpected formality fazed her quite a bit.
“Good morning, Dr. Wilson,” she said wryly, “Sorry I’m early, a habit, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said quickly, the smile on his lips waning. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
She nodded and looked away as he disappeared back into the consulting room. Left alone, she gazed artfully across the lounge. The psychotherapist’s studio was illuminated by the sun’s rays through an opened venetian blind and the balmy sunlit ambience fascinated her.
“Like the cheery whisper of an admirer after a heartbreak,” she said wistfully and rose.
As she did so, echoes of distant traffic momentarily brought her to a curt state of mental alertness. Palms sweaty, Paige walked up to the window and opened it. She gazed, mesmerized, at the sun-drenched avenue on the breezy late September morning and noted that the peak time for fall foliage in New York was weeks away yet. She closed the window.
