There's No Place Like Here by Cecelia Ahern

doctor.”
    “Aren’t you a ‘doctor of the mind’?” I held up my fingers in quotation marks and rolled my eyes.
    Silence.
    “How do you feel when you are searching and searching but you still can’t find whatever it is that you’re looking for?”
    I could tell this was the weirdest conversation he had ever had.
    “Have you a girlfriend, Mr. Burton?”
    His forehead creased. “Sandy, I’m not sure that this is relevant.” When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “No, I don’t.”
    “Do you want one?”
    He was contemplative. “Are you saying that the feeling of searching for a missing sock is like searching for love?” He tried to ask the question without making me sound stupid but he failed miserably.
    I rolled my eyes again. He was making me do that a lot. “No, it’s a feeling of knowing something is missing in your life but not being able to find it, no matter how hard you look.”
    He cleared his throat awkwardly, picked up his pen and paper and pretended to write something.
    Doodle time. “Boring you, am I?”
    He laughed and it broke the tension.
    I tried to explain again. “Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favorite song that you knew by heart. It’s like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a television show you watched for years. It’s something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there’s an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can’t rest until I know the answers.”
    “I understand,” he said softly.
    “Well, then, multiply that feeling by one hundred.”
    He was contemplative. “You’re mature for your age, Sandy.”
    “Funny, because I was hoping you’d know an awful lot more for yours.”
    He laughed until our time was up.
     

That night at dinner Dad asked me how it went.
    “He couldn’t answer my questions,” I replied, slurping on my soup.
    Dad looked like his heart was going to break. “So I suppose you don’t want to go back.”
    “No!” I said quickly and my mum tried to hide her smile by taking a sip of water.
    Dad looked back and forth from her face to mine questioningly.
    “He has nice eyes,” I offered by way of explanation, slurping again.
    His eyebrows rose and he looked to my mum, who had a grin from ear to ear and flushed cheeks. “That’s true, Harold. He has very nice eyes.”
    “Ah, well then !” He threw his arms up. “If the man has nice eyes for Christ’s sake, who am I to argue?”
    Later that night I lay on my bed and thought about my conversation with Mr. Burton. He may not have had answers for me but he sure cured me of searching for one thing.
    11
    I went to see Mr. Burton every week while I was at St. Mary’s Secondary School. We even met up during the summer months when the school remained open to the rest of the town for summer activities. The last time I went to see him was when I had just turned eighteen. I’d finished my leaving certificate the previous year and I’d found out that morning I’d been accepted into the Gardaí Síochana. I was due to move to Cork in a few months to train at Templemore.
    “Hello, Mr. Burton,” I said as he entered the small office that hadn’t changed one bit since the first day we met. He was still young and handsome and I loved every inch of him.
    “Sandy, for the hundredth time, stop calling me Mr. Burton. You make me sound like an old man.”
    “You are an old man,” I teased.
    “Which makes you an old woman,” he said lightly, and a silence fell between us. “So”—he became businesslike—“what’s on your mind this week?”
    “I got accepted into the Gardaí today.”
    His eyes widened. Happiness? Sadness? “Wow, Sandy, congratulations. You did it!” He came over and gave me a hug. We held on a second longer than we should have.
    “How do your mum