“It didn’t end well with Van. He got angry.”
“How angry?” Finn’s mind whirls with this new information. A bad breakup. A jilted lover. And Autumn, wrapped in Tori Price’s pink kimono. He can see it in his mind, like a movie. An enraged Van showing up at the house, maybe drunk, seeing the kimono shimmer in the dark hallway. Making a mistake. “Was he angry enough to become violent?”
“You don’t understand,” she says, her eyes filling with fresh tears that spill over onto her cheeks. Her hands tremble as she reaches for another tissue. “I had no idea Autumn would get hurt. You have to believe me.” Desperation bleeds through her words, begging for absolution he cannot give.
Finn leans forward until he’s perched on the very edge of the sofa, his entire body tense with anticipation. “Is it possible that Van came to your house that night looking for you? And that he mistook Autumn for you and shot her instead?”
Tori looks up at him, her eyes glistening with tears.
“You have to swear that you won’t let them know you heard it from me.”
TEN MONTHS AGO
Tori awoke the day after the bathtub scene to ten missed calls and a dozen text messages from Van, apologizing, groveling really, and begging her to respond.
She knew what it meant.
If it weren’t happening to her, if it were happening to a patient, she would describe it as textbook controlling behavior. The kind that seemed to come out of nowhere, like a light switching on. How many times had she sat across from women in her office who were dismayed that the sweet guy they had been dating had seemingly changed overnight, had hit them, or stalked them, or raged at them? How sure she had felt, counseling these women, that she, Tori, would have noticed the red flags. Would have seen the jarring shift coming a mile away.
Well, she hadn’t. And now she had a potentially explosive situation on her hands. She needed to tread gingerly.
Her ex was dropping Leo off right after noon, so she wanted to get to the grocery store to pick up his favorites. She liked to have the fruit washed and sliced, the cheese cubed, and little cracker sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly waiting on the counter when he returned. It was her ritual, her way of telling Leo that even when he was gone, she had been thinking about him.
After some deliberation she decided to answer Van’s many texts with:I’m with my son today. I’ll call you tomorrow.
Monday came and she didn’t call.
When she awoke, she saw that Gil, the hiring partner at the mental-health group she worked for, had put a last-minute meeting on her calendar. This was not a good thing. She knew she hadn’t been the most attentive therapist this past month. A few of her patients had complained, and one had caught her checking her phone.
Van was waiting for her outside her office building. As soon as she turned the corner of Bethesda Avenue, she caught sight of him and almost stopped short. Instead, she kept walking, fixing a smile on her face.
“What are you doing here?”
“I went up to see you but they said you hadn’t come in yet, so I waited outside.” He had his hands shoved deep into his shorts, flip-flops on his feet. What must her colleagues have thought?
“You went inside? Who did you talk to?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Who cares? I’ve been trying to reach you. Did you get my texts?”
“Morning, Tori.” She looked up to see another therapist in the practice opening the glass door to the building.
“Oh, hi!” She gave a chipper smile and a wave. Once the woman was inside the foyer, Tori turned back to Van. “You can’t be here.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Later.” She forced herself to smile and soften her tone. “We can talk later, ’kay?”
By the time she got to the fourth floor, where the administrative offices and group therapy rooms were, she had sweat through her blouse. She pushed open the glass door of the room the practice used for intake with patients to find Gil sitting at one end of the long conference table, squinting at his phone, his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
He looked like a professor in his rumpled sports jacket, his curly hair springing from the sides of his head to compensate for his receding hairline. But she knew he was a capitalist at heart. A psychiatrist, he had stopped practicing years ago, and ran this lucrative mental-health group with the marketing and business savvy that rivaled a hotel chain.
“Sit down, Tori, this won’t take long.” He proceeded to inform her that he had received a complaint about her. “The patient said you’ve been distracted in sessions, looking at your phone, staring off into space. They’ve reached out because they want to change therapists.”
“Who is it?” Tori ran through her clients, but none stood out as noticeably upset with her.
“We are going to accommodate their request, of course,” he said, lifting his chin and peering down at her. His distaste could not have been more apparent had he held his nose. “Once we do so, which should be by the end of the day, you’ll know their identity. But, Tori, I urge you not to focus on them, but on your own behavior. This is not the first time we’ve received complaints about your lack of professionalism. It’s just the first time someone has asked to see another therapist.”
“I had no idea.” Her body felt instantly hot. He thought she was a screwup and had for a while. All those friendly hellos and chitchat in the break room, it was all fake. She felt herself shrink in her swivel chair.