Confidential(59)

To win him back, I had to stop the crazy. Or at the very least, I needed to hide it better. For example, what would a sane person do after she couldn’t find the spare key to her boyfriend’s house?

She’d text him to say that she was going to sit on the front steps and wait.

That wouldn’t work for us. He didn’t want to advertise our love. It might take a while for us to declare ourselves a couple with the way things were going. But we’d get there.

We’d made progress last night, and I couldn’t afford any backsliding. Think, Flora. Think. What would a sane person do?

I did have something of an out. I’d undergone a trauma last night. Not wanting to be alone was a perfectly reasonable response. He’d said that he was going to support me through this, so there was that.

I could sit in my car in front of his house until he got home from work.

No, too much like a stakeout.

I could circle for the next half hour.

No. Too close to psycho.

I could go to the Safeway with its well-lit parking lot and kill some time picking up wine, cheese, and olives. Then all I needed to do was act totally normal when I saw him, but in a recently traumatized sort of way. Demure. Like I was scared but doing my best to overcome. That’s what bravery was: being afraid and doing it anyway.

And I was afraid. I was afraid of the Wednesday lineup and what kind of hold they might have had on Michael. The blonde giraffe with her trauma that was probably way bigger than a mugging. She’d probably overcome more and been braver, and he was her cheerleader now. I was afraid that I’d driven him into someone else’s arms by first betraying him with Kate, and then doing the kinds of things that could mistakenly be interpreted as psycho. I shouldn’t have stormed into his office that time, or texted him so much, or made that threat. I shouldn’t have been surveilling his clients.

No wonder he’d said we were unhealthy. He thought I was unhealthy. I had to prove otherwise.

I’d just apologize for all of it. A blanket apology, rather than itemizing, in case he didn’t know about my stakeouts. I’d tell him that the mugging had set me straight, that it had put everything into perspective. I was so sorry, my behavior had been out of control, but this could be our fresh start . . .

Yes, that’s what I’d do.

I didn’t love it, but it was my best play.





CHAPTER 46





GREER


“I’m moving forward with my sabbatical,” I said.

“Your sabbatical?” Dr. Michael tilted his head quizzically.

“That’s what Chenille called it. I like that term, though I’m keeping it open-ended. I’m not necessarily returning in a few months like a professor would.”

“You talked to Chenille about it?” He looked concerned, like he’d thought it was going to remain hypothetical for a while longer.

“You know I’ve been mulling it over for a while.” A week, actually. That wasn’t my usual timetable, but then, I was changing. Growing. Evolving. The woman I had been before wasn’t fit to be a mother. My own parents hadn’t been fit.

“Therapy is an ideal place to explore decisions before they’re made.”

Sometimes he could be so pedantic. It was a mildly annoying quirk of his. But then, that was what let me know this was a real relationship, as he’d said before. It was no fairy tale. He wasn’t my fantasy. But he was a good man, an interesting man, and the best I could do on the short notice that my ovaries were giving me.

“I’ve made a whole lot of decisions in my life before I met you, and I’m going to make a whole lot after,” I said.

“You seem a little prickly. What’s that about?”

I was prickly because of the tenterhooks. I was waiting for him to tell me his answer, but all through our last session and all through this one, he hadn’t even brought it up. “Have you thought more about what we talked about? The donation?” It was about the most delicate way I could put it, and still, I felt heat rising to my cheeks.

He shifted in his chair. Not a good sign. “Honestly, I thought that since you hadn’t mentioned it in the last session, you’d realized . . .” He looked away. “My answer has to be no.”

“Because of some handbook? Some ivory tower ethics committee?”

He sat bolt upright. “What about the ethics committee?”

“Whoa. Down, boy.”

“I take my profession—and its ethics—very seriously.”

“I never said you didn’t.”

“You implied that I shouldn’t.”

“What I’m saying is, you didn’t say no when we first talked about it, and now you are. I deserve to know why.”

“Once you breach certain boundaries, you can’t go back.”

“I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward. How about if this is our last session?”

He didn’t speak for a long minute. It was hard to wait, but I did it. I liked that this wasn’t a simple answer. Did he have feelings for me? It should have occurred to me sooner, but I’d been too focused on all the new and strange feelings I was having.

“You need a therapist,” he said finally.

“But it doesn’t have to be you.”