It had taken a long time with Karen, but gradually over the sessions the source of her disquiet emerged. It was her sexuality. As a teenager, she had felt drawn to her own gender but, coming from a very traditional middle-class West Sussex family, she had not allowed herself to give such feelings any expression. They were schoolgirl crushes, just a phase she was going through. Marriage and the demands of children had kept the feelings at bay, but with the departure of the youngest for boarding school, she had been forced to face the reality of her situation. And the conflict between the way she was expected to behave and her real instincts was what had crippled her.

Having identified the problem, it certainly wasn’t part of Jude’s remit to make recommendations as to what her client should do next. The last thing she wanted to do was to have any part in a marriage break-up. But Karen, having had her own suspicions of what was causing her debility confirmed, felt strong enough to stop having her sessions with Jude and to sort out her own future.

At that stage, there was no female lover in her life, not even any woman who she wished was her lover. But when she finally confronted her husband with the truth, she found there had been a lover in his life. He’d been having an affair with his receptionist at the office for some years.

This made their separation and subsequent divorce easier. And their children welcomed the move. They had been getting increasingly stressed by their parents bickering at each other. Their father married his receptionist and imported her into the family home. With her divorce settlement, Karen bought a smaller house in Fethering, and the children cheerfully divided their holiday time between the two parents.

Karen, away from the stifling conformity of the Shorelands Estate, blossomed. With guidance from Jude, she developed her instinct for healing. It was at a healing conference in Bristol that she met Chrissie, a forty-year-old reiki practitioner from Yorkshire, and from that moment the two were inseparable. In her early fifties, for the first time, Karen knew what it was to love someone.

For a while it was a long-distance romance. They met a lot during term-times, but Karen wanted to be in Fethering for the children during their holidays. Then, when the youngest was settled at university, she and Chrissie pooled their resources to buy a cottage in Ilkley, where, with their different but complementary skills, they ran a thriving alternative health clinic. Soon after Karen moved up north, they got married. All of Karen’s children, with their various appendages, were present at the ceremony, and it had been one of the most joyous occasions Jude had ever attended.