Confidential(76)

I felt myself laughing, even as the tears rolled down my face. Like I knew anything about appropriate anymore.

What I knew was that I really, really wanted him to call me, but there was nothing in our contract that said he had to.





CHAPTER 61





LUCINDA


Love you! Hope you’re having a good day!

For weeks and weeks, my mother had refused to text me back. Now I couldn’t go more than a few hours without a text from her. She wanted me to absolve her, but I was in no position to absolve anyone.

I turned my phone off and got back to my work. In the office, I’d been trying to act normal, whatever that was. I’d planned to lie to Christine about writer’s block, only it had manifested. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, or perhaps a punishment. Without my novel, I was just a proofreader again.

I couldn’t afford to do a shoddy job or miss any deadlines, because Christine was watching me. About once an hour, she circumnavigated the cubicle area before returning to her office. She wanted me to feel her eyes on me. Then when she stopped by my desk, she made it clear that she expected a continuous IV drip of gratitude for not having fired me, saying things like, “Another manager might not have been so forgiving.” The groveling stretched out before me, a road to nowhere. But I couldn’t lose my job, since I didn’t have the wherewithal to find a new one in my current condition. My destabilization. Mood swings and impulse control issues, wasn’t that what Dr. Baylor had said?

Maybe I did need a psychiatrist and some medication. But what I didn’t need was a new therapist. The thought of starting all over was heinous. The thought of losing Dr. Baylor/Michael was worse.

Outside his office building, under the watchful gaze of his (ex?) girlfriend, he’d wooed me back. “I was wrong,” he said. “I make mistakes, too. Could you please forgive me?” He was so sincere, and I melted. He still wanted me.

Only I didn’t feel as secure as I once had. The fact that he could even talk about foisting me onto someone else was telling, regardless of how fervidly and convincingly he’d walked it back. He’d been ready to let me go. I couldn’t forget that.

I was hemorrhaging. Having sex with Michael last night temporarily stanched the bleeding. It was angry, and I’d pummeled him with my fists. He seemed to like it or, at least, feel he deserved it. The sex acted as a tourniquet, but the wound was still there. I felt it with each breath.

I was grateful for the proofreading—the commas, the semicolons, the minutiae, the complete insignificance of the manuscript. I couldn’t be a part of anything that mattered right then. But when I wasn’t working, my thoughts jumbled together, a discordant cacophony. I couldn’t quiet them; I could only try to drown them out. I wasn’t sleeping. I kept the TV on all night, Netflix marathons that were touted as 95 percent matches for me. Dysfunctional family dramas, one after the other. People breaking apart and coming back together. I lacked the volition to tell Netflix that was no match at all.





CHAPTER 62





FLORA


“Where’ve you been?” I snapped as I turned on the lamp beside me.

Michael blinked like he’d never seen his own living room before.

“You moved your key, but I found it under the mat. And you don’t actually have an alarm system.” It had occurred to me that after he ignored all my texts about Kate, he’d have to respond to Weymouth Security when told that he had an intruder. But they’d never shown up and neither had he. I’d been camped out in the living room in the dark for three hours, working myself up into a froth.

It wasn’t all his fault, what happened to Kate. I let him come between us. I defended him until the end. Until what might be her end.

“Why didn’t you answer my texts?” I said. Just ten days since the mugging, since we’d gotten close again, and now . . .

He closed the door behind him and sat down heavily on the couch opposite me. He looked terrible. Worse than exhausted, he was like a scooped-out melon. But this wasn’t the time for my compassion. It was his moment of reckoning. He needed to face what he’d done.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you said it was an emergency about Kate, but I just didn’t have it in me to—”

“My cousin, my best friend, is in a coma!”

“I didn’t know that. You didn’t say what the emergency was.”

“She relapsed. I deserted her, and she overdosed, and she’s in a coma. She might not wake up. She’s probably a fucking vegetable, and her parents will have to pull the plug, and you didn’t have it in you?” I thought I might honest to God smack him, at a minimum. I was up on my haunches, about to pounce, and he’d just collapsed into the sofa cushions, which infuriated me more.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“What do you want me to say?” He sounded truly defeated.

“You’re a therapist; this is a crisis! Say something that will help me!”

He shook his head. “I’m all talked out, Flora.”

I leaped up and moved in front of him, shouting into his face. “She told me you were a monster! I said no way, you’re a good man, you’re my man, but you know what? She’s right!”