Mr. Nobody(102)
“Uh-huh. Yes, that’s okay. Don’t worry about that. Here, let me come around you.”
Sitting on the floor behind me, she pulls me up so that my shoulders and head rest against her chest. She slips her arms around me tight and holds me in a hug, safe and warm.
“Don’t worry about anything, Matthew. I’m right here,” she promises, and slowly, slowly I let myself relax.
49
DR. EMMA LEWIS
FOUR MONTHS LATER
I will attend to my own health, well-being, and abilities in order to provide care of the highest standard.
As new mantras go, it’s not a bad one.
I watch her drum her tastefully manicured fingers on her Givenchy midi skirt as warm sunlight streams in through the window behind her, her long dark hair shining in the light, pulled back today in a low sleek ponytail. She taps the stiletto heel of her thousand-pound boots against the thick cream carpet of the consultation room and sighs.
“I don’t know,” she says finally, her beautiful features puckering into a well-groomed frown. “I don’t know how that makes me feel, Emma. Should I?”
I shift in my seat, crossing my legs the other way now, rearranging my notepad.
“That’s okay, Bahareh.” I let the rich sound of her Iranian name roll off my tongue. “Honestly, sometimes it’s okay not to know. That’s why we’re here today, after all.” I pause. “Why don’t you just tell me what happened at your mother-in-law’s this weekend. How did all of that go?” I urge her on.
She stares out of the window for a moment, her wedding rings sparkling in the refracting light as she takes a deep breath, and then she continues to tell me her problems.
People are endlessly fascinating. Bahareh’s been coming to see me for six weeks now. Her husband is cheating on her. But that’s not the problem as far as she sees it; the problem for her is that she doesn’t care about his infidelities—that’s what bothers her more than anything else. She’d said that in the stillness of our first session together. “Surely I should care, shouldn’t I?”
My private practice opened two months ago on Harley Street. It’s small but perfect, a beautifully furnished consultation room in buttery creams and taupe with state-of-the-art tech and an imposing marble lobby. I have twelve regular weekly clients already and my hourly fees are high, so I can pick and choose. And I only work nine to five now.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the money I received from Peter and the government after Matthew’s death. The compensation money I got. Gratitude money. Hush money. Call it what you want.
It was four months ago that Matthew died cradled in my arms.
I look down at my hands resting on the notepad as Bahareh tells me about her nephew’s birthday. My right hand and wrist have permanent nerve damage. I’ve tried to hide the burn marks, the slashes of silvering scar tissue that loop my wrists, with bracelets and the sleeves of my cashmere sweater. I needed minor operations on both hands to remove the fused plastic from my burnt flesh. The joints in my right hand, though reset, ache at night, and when I grip anything too hard these days the pain sears right through me. It always will. A fitting reminder never to hold on to anything too hard in the future, I suppose—people, places, the past.
Bahareh lifts her low ponytail off one shoulder, smooths it onto the other, and pauses. No, she doesn’t want to talk about the conversation she had with her mother-in-law before the cake came out.
“It’s okay. This is a safe space,” I reassure her. “She’s not here. This is your time to talk about whatever you want. About how you feel.”
She nods, and her beautiful eyes continue to play across the London rooftops beyond my windows.
I fell asleep holding Matthew that day. Exhaustion, shock, adrenal fatigue. When I woke up, his body lay cold and heavy in my arms. I don’t know how long we’d been like that, his thickened blood pooling out around us, framing us against the snow in a circle of blazing red. The light was fading when Peter finally arrived, but the police who arrived with him weren’t any I recognized.
Chris was nowhere to be seen. Later I’d find out that he’d been searching for me for hours, along byroads and lanes; he’d even headed back to Cuckoo Lodge, checked the house. My phone was full of missed calls from him. And missed calls from Peter too.
Peter had been trying to track me down since that morning when I’d first left the hospital in the car with Rhoda. He called and called, my phone still on silent, and when he realized he couldn’t get hold of me he’d instructed the hospital to page me immediately. But that page came too late.
Richard Groves had alerted Peter to Matthew’s identity that morning. Richard had called Peter highly concerned; he’d finally had a free moment to look at the medical report that I’d emailed him two days before, my report on Matthew. At first, Richard assumed the CT scans I sent him were some kind of joke—that I’d sent him old scans of one of his own previous patients, the Unknown Young Male case. He recognized the placement of the pituitary tumor immediately and checked his old records: the scans were an exact match two decades apart. And that is when he’d realized that I hadn’t sent the scans as a joke at all, that I must not be aware, that I had no idea who my patient really was. And, given the unstable nature of the patient Richard knew twenty years previously, he’d called Peter immediately to warn him that I might be at risk.