Confidential(58)

Maybe it was because of the talk with Dr. Baylor about the abuse, and the empathy I was rediscovering for myself as a former victim, twinned with the newfound assurance from my lovemaking with Michael. But suddenly, I really wanted this woman, whoever she was, to know she was stronger than whoever had done this to her. She deserved better.

I approached her car and knocked on the passenger side window. She looked skittish, like she might just bolt. Her hand reached for the gearshift. “No, please,” I said loudly. “Wait. I need to talk to you.”

She hesitated and then rolled down the window, but she stayed in profile, like she didn’t want to be seen. She must have been ashamed. I related.

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

She was still facing forward. “What isn’t?” Her voice vibrated with nerves.

“Whatever he did to you. To your face.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I need to leave now. Could you step back from my car?”

I didn’t move. “I know what it’s like. Lots of women do.” No one had ever hit me, but there were other ways to be demeaned and made to feel like nothing. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Just step away from my car, okay? That’s all the help I need.”

I did as she’d asked, and she peeled out. She was lucky not to hit or get hit by another car. I watched her go. There was a woman who didn’t yet recognize her full power. Dr. Baylor could have done wonders for her.





CHAPTER 45





FLORA


I needed to stop this. The stakeouts, the getaways. One of these times, I was going to rear-end somebody or worse. But for now, I had to get out of there.

The blonde giraffe actually pitied me. I saw it in her face. And speaking of her face—up close, it was beautiful, like some sort of Scandinavian goddess. Those cornflower-blue eyes and that perfect pale skin without any makeup whatsoever. She was the anti-me. And I couldn’t get over how she’d walked right up to my Lexus. So bold, like she’d become a different creature entirely. A gazelle, maybe.

Michael had to be fucking her. That was how a well-fucked woman walked. I used to walk like that. How did I look now?

Like an object of pity.

I told myself it was just the bruise. Also, I was dressed to obscure. If she could have seen me properly done up, it would have been a totally different exchange. I would have intimidated the hell out of her. But what had just passed between us was a Freaky Friday moment, a role reversal. I was mousy and meek, and she was so full of herself that she could just stride right up and ask if she could help me.

She said that she knew what it was like. That meant she was one of Michael’s trauma victims. Effortlessly beautiful and newly confident—I couldn’t compete with that. I wondered what precisely she was being treated for. How she was being treated—that might have been the better question.

But Michael wouldn’t be fucking her while she was still his patient. He’d have to stop the therapy and then wait two years, or pretend to wait two years. That was, unless his MO had changed.

I drove to his house, pulling into the space right in front. It wasn’t quite eight yet, and he’d said eight thirty. I’d just get the spare key from under the flowerpot in his backyard and make myself at home.

Only it wasn’t there.

He used to like it when he came inside and found me in my negligee, tidying up or putting takeout in pretty bowls. Back then, he liked being surprised.

No, he liked me as his geisha. Now that I was trying to be more, he was locking me out, literally.

What was he hiding?

I lifted every one of the flowerpots. Nothing. Then I looked under the hedges and under rocks. I was on my hands and knees feeling alongside the hot tub, like one of the contestants on Survivor searching for a Hidden Immunity Idol. An unsuccessful contestant, who was about to get voted out at the next Tribal Council.

I walked to the front of the house and, on a whim, lifted the mat. Oh, Michael. I never knew you were so unimaginative.

I was about to put it into the door lock when I noticed a sticker in the corner of the window, facing outward: Weymouth Security. As in, the house was guarded. Booby-trapped.

The sticker was new; I was sure of that. Property and personal crime had been on the uptick in Rockridge—case in point, last night—but it was hard to imagine that Michael just happened to take security precautions around the same time we broke up. Sort of broke up. He’d been too ambivalent to make it official.

Was Michael scared of me? Did he think I was some kind of psycho?

I had bashed my face in for him last night. Maybe I was some kind of psycho.

Consider the evidence: I’d been digging up the backyard to find my sorta-boyfriend’s spare key. I was basically about to break and enter. I’d been stalking him outside his office.

Ohhhhhhh . . .

He’d seen me sitting in my car. I’d been assuming that if he knew, he would have confronted me, but if he really thought I was crazy, he wouldn’t.

But he’d been so tender toward me last night and this morning. He wanted to go to the police station with me. He wanted to keep me safe (and he’d wanted to make sure the texts and pictures we’d exchanged over the past two years were safe, too).

There’d been no sex, though. I thought it was because he was being my caregiver. It could be that he’d just lost interest. He’d replaced me with the blonde giraffe.