Confidential(14)

“I get it. You took this job because you like damsels in distress. You like to dispense your nuggets of wisdom and save people. Well, I don’t need saving.”

“What do you need?”

I did something uncharacteristic: I squirmed under his gaze. I made my living staring down men, proving that I could hold my own, that I could find them the right person for their executive position; no man could do anything better, or be any tougher, than me.

“What do you need?” he said again.

The answer came disturbingly quickly: “Love.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

He might have thought so, and I might have feared so, but the clock said otherwise. It was time to wrap things up in a neat bow and send me out into the world.

“Next week,” he told me, “we’ll look more at the messages you received in your childhood about love, marriage, and parenting, and what you might have internalized that’s holding you back now.”

“Goody.”

“Next week, same time, same place?”

I assented with a marked lack of enthusiasm, and then I flew out of his office and through the waiting room. On my way down the flight of stairs, I stumbled. My ankle twisted, my purse went AWOL, and I glanced back up, relieved to find that he’d shut the door. He’d missed this little display, which meant he couldn’t psychoanalyze it.

I got to my feet gingerly, putting the slightest exploratory weight on my ankle. It wasn’t broken.

I felt a twinge of pain as I pushed the outer door open. It was lifted out of my hand. I recognized the woman from Dr. Michael’s waiting room last week. She was tall and blonde, an Uma Thurman type who clearly didn’t know how striking she was.

She recognized me, too, and said, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. Maybe she could see how I was favoring my leg, or maybe she could see what Michael had done to me in there, how discombobulated I’d become in only a month of sessions. Was this really how therapy was supposed to work? “Thanks for asking.”

I pushed past her, my ankle throbbing as it hit the pavement of College Avenue.

My plan had been to go to a café and work for an hour or so until the traffic subsided. Now all I wanted was to get home to my condo along the Embarcadero, sit outside on my balcony with a glass of Chardonnay, and watch the light fade over the bay. That was my happy place.

At least, I’d always told myself it was. What was this bullshit about needing love? It was a radical revision of my whole life story.

It couldn’t be true. I must have been under some kind of spell in there. Dr. Michael was doing a Jedi mind trick. Why else would I have made that weird Obi-Wan reference?

That wasn’t me. I didn’t talk Star Wars.

Was it possible that I didn’t need a baby, I needed a man?

No, it was not possible. Besides, I wasn’t into Dr. Michael. I couldn’t be.

We’re going there. You’ve got to trust me. You never want to get married. I wrote it down.

I hadn’t seen it in my first session or even my second, but he was absurdly cocky. Worse than any Silicon Valley exec, as he trotted out all his Zen koans and his bullshit about feelings being information and his presumption that I hadn’t been nurtured.

Nurtured, for fuck’s sake.

Terrified of intimacy, underlined.

That prick.

I wasn’t going back. Then he’d see how good of a therapist he really was. He couldn’t even keep a client past the fourth session. That would show him.

Besides, I didn’t need therapy. I’d find my answers somewhere else.





PRESENT DAY





CHAPTER 11

DETECTIVE GREGORY PLATH

This Flora—she’s a piece of work. You know those teenagers who were told that being sassy and sexy will take you everywhere?

She still believes it.

I tell her what I know, which is basically the names of all Dr. Baylor’s patients (current and former, he had them in different drawers of his file cabinet), though I haven’t been able to open the files themselves. I know Flora is a former, and that she met with another former by the name of Greer and a current by the name of Lucinda at a dim sum restaurant, and that the timing was curious, to say the least: the day of the murder. Greer left first, and Lucinda and Flora stayed for another hour, maybe.

“Who told you that?” she asks, all pissed off. “Greer?”

The way she says it, I know there’s no love lost between the two of them. I shake my head, but I don’t give up any details. It wasn’t Greer or Lucinda. It was Maureen Hillard, one of the women who filed a complaint and then withdrew it. She was the first former client I interviewed, the most obvious suspect, since the other complainant now lives across the country. Maureen had an airtight alibi, as did her husband, Cyrus, but she was quick to act as an informant.

According to Maureen, Flora had lain in wait by her car to invite her to the dim sum brunch. Maureen had asked who else was going, just out of curiosity, and Flora told her, and then Maureen said, “Sorry, I’m busy.” It was sort of a bitch move, from where I was sitting, a way to try to get Flora’s goat. So there was no love lost there, either, but after that, Maureen clammed up. She said that she assumed Flora wanted to talk about Michael, but it hadn’t been said directly, which stunk up my office, it was so much bullshit. After she fed me my three prime suspects, she got cold feet. She didn’t want to get involved. I see that all the time. People want to point fingers, but they don’t want them getting broken off. Who wants to be in the crosshairs of someone who’s murdered once? What they fail to realize is that homicide has the lowest recidivism rate of any crime.