Title: Touch
First published: 1995
Description: Rayna Sargent is a thirty-five-year-old artist who supports herself by working as a telephone crisis-line social worker for a local clinic. She finds it necessary, and even easy, to shut out the desperate voices on the other end of the line once she leaves work at night to return to her true love - painting. She has always managed to protect herself within a tight bundle of routine, buffered from the reality of others' pain.

It gets harder to turn off the voices, though, when Rayna finds out that an old friend with whom she has lost touch is now in the last stages of AIDS. Rayna knows she should reach out to him, but like most things out of her control, whether good or bad, AIDS is something Rayna wants to keep far away from.

Then she meets Theodore, a handsome, open-hearted man who seems to want to break through Rayna's protective outer shell. And it seems that this time Rayna might actually be ready to take the leap. But that was before everything fell apart. Before she got the diagnosis that she is HIV positive. Before she ended up one of the desperate people on the other end of the line.

Now nothing is protected and Rayna is forced to deal with love she has just come to want, with the man she has just come to love, and with the disease that threatens to take it all away.
Subjects: Patients, AIDS (Disease), Fiction, Aids (disease), fiction, Fiction, general
LC classification: PS3569.H415 T68 1995