How had it come to this? There was an unwelcome Sophoclean intensity in discovering that a potentially hostile stranger turned out to be a close relation; to the possibility of his daughter meeting her mad brother for the first time as her father’s patient, or the possibility of his newborn grandchild provoking the anger and the envy of his gravely deluded uncle. A troubling entanglement of family and therapy was part of the foundations of Martin’s profession. Anna Freud, who was famously analysed by her father, remained unmarried for the rest of her life; no man could match up to the hero who had helped her to acquire the treasure of self-knowledge and see into the depths of her unconscious mind. The incestuous implications were clear, or at least should have been clear to a man so alert to incestuous implications, and yet who else could Freud have sent his daughter to see and how could he deprive her of the revolutionary benefits of the discovery he was in the course of making? Since those early untrammelled days, more and more boundaries had been put in place to protect the analytic process from the corruption of indiscretion, misuse of authority, countertransference, inadequate training and all the other difficulties attendant on forming a secure attachment to a therapist in order to turn that successful dependency into a successful independence for the patient. As one of the most careful guardians of those boundaries, Martin was disturbed to think that he might have inadvertently breached them, and yet the origins of all this explosive Arsenal-borne complexity were simple and well-intentioned enough: Martin had arranged to see Sebastian in his home consulting room because he felt he needed more sessions. His room had a separate entrance and usually the only other person at home was Lizzie, working with her own patients at the top of the house, with two entirely private floors in between. Olivia usually came to stay in the evening or at weekends, when the whole house was private. She was also the seasoned daughter of two psychotherapists, although Martin had only started working at home when the children went to primary school and Lizzie had waited until they had left home altogether. When he took Sebastian on as a patient, Francis had just been the rumour of Olivia’s new boyfriend, who Lizzie and Martin had yet to meet.