_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

It wasn’t what I expected.
By the time I got to the practice, I’d worked myself up into a state of
complete and utter terror: I was convinced that he was going to look at
me and somehow know that I knew, that he was going to view me as a
threat. I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, that somehow I
wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying Megan’s name. Then I
walked into a doctor’s waiting room, boring and bland, and spoke to a
middle-aged receptionist, who took my details without really looking at
me. I sat down and picked up a copy of Vogue and flicked through it with
trembling fingers, trying to focus my mind on the task ahead while at the
same time attempting to look unremarkably bored, just like any other
patient.
There were two others in there: a twentysomething man reading
something on his phone and an older woman who stared glumly at her
feet, not once looking up, even when her name was called by the
receptionist. She just got up and shuffled off, she knew where she was
going. I waited there for five minutes, ten. I could feel my breathing
getting shallow. The waiting room was warm and airless, and I felt as
though I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. I worried that I
might faint.
Then a door flew open and a man came out, and before I’d even had
time to see him properly, I knew that it was him. I knew the way I knew
that he wasn’t Scott the first time I saw him, when he was nothing but a
shadow moving towards her—just an impression of tallness, of loose,
languid movement. He held out his hand to me.
“Ms. Watson?”
I raised my eyes to meet his and felt a jolt of electricity all the way
down my spine. I put my hand into his. It was warm and dry and huge,
enveloping the whole of mine.
“Please,” he said, indicating for me to follow him into his office, and I
did, feeling sick, dizzy all the way. I was walking in her footsteps. She
did all this. She sat opposite him in the chair he told me to sit in, he
probably folded his hands just below his chin the way he did this
afternoon, he probably nodded at her in the same way, saying, “OK, what
would you like to talk to me about today?”
Everything about him was warm: his hand, when I shook it; his eyes;
the tone of his voice. I searched his face for clues, for signs of the
vicious brute who smashed Megan’s head open, for a glimpse of the
traumatized refugee who had lost his family. I couldn’t see any. And for
a while, I forgot myself. I forgot to be afraid of him. I was sitting there