30. Kai #3
For a second, I look around the room. Two hundred. Henry would have pretended the number didn’t affect him, then spent the rest of the evening finding something expensive to repair because that was how the old bastard handled emotion.
My throat tightens unexpectedly. “Do it.”
Renee smiles. “I was planning to.”
“Then why ask me?”
“I enjoy giving you the illusion of authority.”
“That seems to be a theme in my life.”
She studies me for a second before wisely deciding not to touch that one.
“They’re looking at next month, probably a Saturday. Their people will fly in from Minneapolis and help with everything. They’ve been good to us, Kai. A lot of the protective-order work and nonprofit stuff they’ve handled would’ve cost us a fortune somewhere else.”
“I know.”
I do, vaguely.
Renee has mentioned the firm before. I have seen invoices marked pro bono, correspondence and names I never retained because legal administration is one of the things I gladly leave to people better suited to it.
For half a second, Julia crosses my mind.
A law firm from Minneapolis. The connection is so broad that it barely qualifies as one.
There are hundreds of firms in the Twin Cities, and I cannot even remember the name of hers anymore.
I knew it once because it was in her intake paperwork, but I surrendered every copy of her file after the transfer and have made damn sure I never looked for another reason to access it.
Not that she actually needs any fucking excuse to appear in m thought anyway. She rarely leaves.
Renee hands me a tentative date. I put it into my phone.
My return flight lands early enough Sunday evening that I make it to Mara’s twenty minutes before the time she threatened to start dinner without me. Connor is at his father’s, which means the house feels oddly quiet when Mara lets me in.
“No tiny dictator?”
“Back tomorrow.” She smirks and takes the bottle of wine from my hand and looks at the label. “You know I already own alcohol.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then why do you keep bringing it?” The same reason she keeps taking it.
“Your food is free. I have manners.”
“You slept here often enough during your hoe era.” She wiggles her eyebrows.
I stare at her. “I did not have a hoe era.”
“You went out three nights a week to pick up women.”
“That was not an era.” I frown and the overly dramatic adjective.
“You threw up in my hydrangeas.”
“I had food poisoning and that was just the one time.”
“Well, that particular time you had tequila.”
“Allegedly.”
Her laugh follows me toward the kitchen.
Dinner is pasta, garlic bread and enough salad to preserve the illusion that either of us gives a shit about vegetables tonight. Mara pours herself wine and me sparkling water because I am riding, then waits until we have both eaten enough that her questions won’t feel like an ambush.
“How’s therapy?”
I glance at her over my fork. “Annoying.”
“Good, means it’s working.”
“That is an incredibly unsympathetic response.” I murmur because I hate when she’s being this perceptive. And being right.
“You spent years charging people to experience exactly this. I’m enjoying the symmetry.”
I smirk at that. “Bennett seems competent.”
“Wow, that sounded physically painful for you to admit.”
“It was.”
She takes another bite before her expression becomes more serious. “Anything from the Board?”
“The Attorney General’s investigator finished the formal interview last week. My attorney got notice Friday that the file is moving back toward the Board once they finish reviewing the records.”
“And then?”
“Complaint Review Committee.” I say.
Mara’s fork slows. “You have to appear?”
“Most likely. We’re expecting the notice within a few weeks.”
“Do you think they’ll revoke your license?” The question lands differently than Bennett asking the same thing.
Mara knows what the work means to me.
I take a sip of water before I reply. “They can.”
Her face tightens.
“They can suspend it, restrict it, condition it, require supervision or retraining. My attorney refuses to predict anything because sexual conduct with a current patient is one of the things the Board takes exactly as seriously as it should.” I rub my thumb against the condensation on my glass.
“I self-reported, I stopped practicing immediately, I’ve cooperated with everything they asked for and there’s no prior discipline, so maybe that matters when they decide what comes next. Maybe it doesn’t.”
“You want to go back.” It isn’t a question.
The admission comes easily. “Yeah.” “I miss working.”
I miss the office more than I expected. Not simply the room or the rhythm of my schedule, but the point of it.
Sitting with someone while they finally say something they have been carrying alone.
Watching the moment a person realizes a pattern isn’t a personality flaw carved permanently into them.
The ordinary sessions nobody would ever write about because nothing dramatic happens and somebody still leaves an hour later a little more capable of living inside their own life.
I was good at it. That’s not arrogance, it is one of the few facts about myself I still trust. I was good at my job, and then with one patient I allowed wanting her to become more important than the responsibility I had to her.
“If they let me practice again,” I tell Mara, “it won’t be the way I did before. I know that.”
She watches me quietly. “You’d accept supervision?”
“Yes.”
“Restrictions?”
“Yes.” Each one comes more adamant than the previous one.
“Someone looking over your shoulder for a couple of years?” She tests me anyway.
“If that is what it takes.”
Mara nods and reaches for her wine. A minute passes before she asks the other question.
“Anything from Julia?”
I look down at my plate. “No.”
“Have you contacted her?”
“No.” There is no need to tell Mara how many times I have thought about it or how often her name still sits behind my teeth.How easy it would be to type an email I would never send or ask a question Mara would answer if I pushed hard enough.
I haven’t. I won’t.
“She asked me to disappear,” I say. “So that’s what I’m doing.”
Mara’s expression softens. “You think she’ll ever forgive you?”
I lean back and stare toward the dark window over her sink. “I hope she does.”
“For you?”
“No.” The answer comes before she finishes asking. “For her.”
Mara waits.
“I don’t expect her to speak to me again. I’m not sitting around thinking forgiveness means she eventually comes back.” I look down at my hands. “I just don’t want what I did to become another thing she has to carry forever.”
“And you?”
A humorless smile touches my mouth. “What about me?”
“Do you think you’ll forgive yourself?”
That one takes longer.
“No.”
Mara sighs softly. “Kai.”
“I’m not trying to be dramatic. Maybe that changes eventually, but right now I don’t particularly think it should.”
She reaches across the table and covers my hand briefly. “That’s what therapy is for.”
“Apparently everyone is committed to making sure I continue paying Bennett.”
“Consider it reparations to the profession.”
That actually gets a laugh out of me. It feels strange enough that I stop afterward. Mara notices but doesn’t say anything.
We finish dinner talking about safer things. Connor’s newest obsession. A parent-teacher conference. The fact that Mara has apparently agreed to foster a dog for two weeks despite having previously claimed animals make her house smell like a barn.
When I finally decide to leave a little after nine, she follows me onto the porch. “You’ll tell me when the Committee date comes?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you say the safe-house thing is?”
“Next month.”
“You going?” Her eyebrow shoots up.
“I have to.”
She shakes her head. “No, you don’t.”
I look back at her.
Mara folds her arms against the evening chill. “You founded the damn thing, but you’ve spent years making sure it doesn’t depend on your face being in every photograph. Renee can handle an anniversary event.”
“She can.” I agree but that doesn’t change the fact that I want to be there.
“But?”
I think about the number she gave me. Two hundred women. More than three hundred if we count the children. Henry’s house filled with people who were given somewhere safe to land because one man once gave my mother and me something similar without expecting either of us to repay him.
“I want to go.”
Mara nods. “Then go.”
I pull on my helmet.
She waits until I swing onto the Kawasaki before adding, “And, Kai?”
I lift the visor.
“You are allowed to have something in your life that isn’t punishment.”
I stare at her for a second. “Chanelling Bennett?”
“No.” She smiles. “Some of us are naturally gifted.”
I close the visor before she can see me roll my eyes.
The engine catches beneath me, filling the quiet street with its familiar growl.
I ride home through Minneapolis without taking a single road that leads toward Julia.
I don’t know where she is tonight, whether she found another therapist she likes, whether she still keeps the lamp next to her couch on, or whether the sound of a motorcycle makes her look toward the window before she remembers Ghost isn’t coming back.
I don’t know because she told me I was no longer entitled to know. For once, I let that be enough.
A month from now, I will stand in Henry’s old house and celebrate the women who were given the chance to build something after a man convinced them that their choices no longer belonged to them. I understand the irony. Maybe that is another consequence I deserve.