Chapter 3 Janelle
Janelle
The woman sitting across from me had been talking for eleven minutes straight about her husband’s emotional unavailability, and I was counting the seconds between her breaths because that was more interesting than anything coming out of her mouth.
“He just shuts down,” she said for the third time since she sat down. “Like, I’ll try to have a conversation with him about something real, and he just… checks out.”
I nodded. I wrote something on my notepad that looked like a clinical observation but was actually a reminder to pick up more zip ties on the way home. “And when he checks out, what does that feel like in your body?”
She pressed her hand to her chest like she was about to deliver a monologue. “It feels like I’m invisible. Like I don’t even exist.”
Girl. You have no idea what invisible feels like.
I gave her the face. The one I’d perfected over eight years of practice, the one that said I hear you, I see you, your pain matters.
It was a good face. Warm eyes, soft jaw, a slight tilt of the head that communicated empathy without crossing into pity.
I could do that face in my sleep. I had done it in my sleep, rehearsing sessions in my dreams, running through the therapeutic scripts that made people trust me with the ugliest parts of themselves.
“That’s a very real feeling, Amber. And I want to validate that for you.
” I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward half an inch, because people interpret forward movement as engagement and I needed her to feel engaged so she’d keep talking so the clock would keep moving so this session would end so I could get back to what actually mattered.
“Have you considered telling Keith exactly what you just told me? Using those same words?”
Amber’s eyes got wide like I’d just handed her the nuclear codes. “You think I should just… say it to him? Like that?”
“I think the version of you that just spoke to me was honest and clear. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do in a relationship is let someone see us without the armor.”
I almost laughed. The irony of me sitting here coaching this woman on vulnerability while I had another woman chained to a beam in a warehouse was something I could appreciate even if nobody else could.
People think therapists have it all figured out.
That we’ve done our own work, processed our own trauma, arrived at some elevated plane of emotional health that qualifies us to guide others.
That’s cute. Some of us just got really good at the language.
Amber kept talking. I kept nodding. My phone was face down on the side table and I could feel it pulsing against the wood every few minutes.
Clients, probably. Or my brother, who I’d been dodging for weeks.
I ignored it because I didn’t want to be distracted from the mission at hand.
I wanted to torture Mehar to death for taking what was mine.
I thought I was over it. I could’ve sworn I was.
Years had passed and I had moved on. I buried my son.
Went to school and became a therapist. I was helping people and living my life.
I traveled and shopped. I bought a home, decorated that home, then redecorated that home.
After years of not seeing him, I’d moved on, or so I thought.
It’s funny how that works. I knew he still lived in town.
I saw in the papers how he had grown Banks Reserve to new heights.
I’d read all about the new casino. I knew about his mother being arrested for murder.
I’d followed him closely, but hadn’t seen him up close in a while.
I’d heard through my brothers about his little poly relationship.
I knew that wasn’t anything serious. When he was with me, he was talking about marriage.
He was very much monogamous. Those two bitches he had weren’t a threat to anything.
I knew in my heart of hearts he wasn’t taking them seriously.
But when I saw him that day at the restaurant, something triggered me.
I was walking by, just minding my business.
I had just left the Chinese carryout that was on the same block as Ray’s.
As I was walking by, her outfit caught my eye because I recognized it from a previous session we’d had.
I slowed down. Looked through the window.
And there she was, sitting in a booth with him.
Comfortable. Easy. Looking at him like he was giving her something she’d been starving for.
And he was looking at her the way he used to look at me.
That focused, locked-in attention where the rest of the room disappears and there’s only one person worth seeing.
I used to live in that look. I used to be the reason for it.
I stood on that sidewalk with my Chinese food getting cold and understood, with a clarity that felt almost holy, that I had never been over this man. I’d just gotten better at pretending.
After that night, I couldn’t stop. I started following her between sessions.
Not every day, but enough. I learned her routines, her schedule, the places she went when she thought nobody was paying attention.
I stuck nails in her tire. And I found the things she’d never told me on my couch.
The storage unit. The man inside it. The cage, the destroyed knees, the water bottle mounted to the bars.
Her little dungeon in Dupont Circle where powerful men paid her to make them crawl.
The gun she carried. The brother she’d reconnected with.
And the more I learned, the more I understood why Quest was drawn to her.
He’d always loved women with something dark underneath the surface.
That was what pulled him to me when we were teenagers.
He saw something dangerous in me and it excited him.
Mehar had that same darkness but deeper, wilder, less controlled.
She was everything I’d been at nineteen except she wasn’t pretending.
She was the real thing. And Quest could tell the difference.
That made it worse. Because it meant he hadn’t just moved on. He’d upgraded.
I went to the cemetery on Quindon’s birthday because I knew he’d be there.
He went every year. I thought maybe after fourteen years, after all the time and distance, something in him had softened.
That maybe seeing me at our son’s grave would remind him of what we had before the lie broke it.
That he’d look at me and see the girl he loved at seventeen instead of the woman who betrayed him at nineteen.
He didn’t. He looked at me like I was a stranger he wanted gone.
There was no softness. No hesitation. Just cold fury and a warning that if I showed up again, his respect for Mekhi wouldn’t be enough to protect me.
I left that cemetery knowing two things: Quest would never forgive me, and he was falling in love with somebody else.
Real love. The kind he’d been refusing to feel for fourteen years. And he was giving it to her.
My jealousy grew into something I stopped trying to name.
I didn’t want to get him back anymore. I wanted her out of the picture.
I wanted to take from her what she’d taken from me, which was the possibility of being loved by the only man I’d ever wanted.
If I couldn’t have him, she wasn’t going to either.
Not peacefully. Not without paying for it.
“Janelle? Are you okay?”
Amber was looking at me with concern, which was ironic because she was paying me to look at her with concern and somehow we’d switched. I blinked and reset my face and checked the clock. Forty-one minutes. We had four minutes left and I hadn’t heard a word she’d said for the last ten.
“I’m fine, Amber. I was just sitting with something you said a moment ago. It resonated with me.” I smiled. “Let’s pick this up next week. I think you’re making really beautiful progress.”
She beamed. They always beam when you tell them they’re progressing. People will believe anything if you say it with enough warmth and a tilted head.
Amber gathered her bag and her jacket and thanked me twice on the way out.
I waited until the door closed. I checked the time.
I had exactly one hour before my next client, which was more than enough to get to the warehouse, check on things, and get back.
I grabbed my bag, locked my office, and took the elevator down to the parking garage.
I was putting my bag in the passenger seat when I saw the Maybach pull into the garage.
My body knew before my brain caught up. I dropped into my driver’s seat and stayed low.
Through my window I watched Quest park near the elevator, get out, and walk toward the building entrance.
His jaw was tight. His stride was fast and deliberate.
This wasn’t a casual visit. He was looking for something. Looking for someone.
Looking for me.
He disappeared through the glass doors and into the lobby and I didn’t waste a second.
I started the engine, threw it in reverse, and pulled out of my spot.
I kept my headlights off until I cleared the garage exit and hit the street, then I floored it heading east. My heart was slamming against my ribs but my hands were steady on the wheel because I didn’t do panic.
I assessed, I adjusted, and I moved forward. I’d been doing it since I was nineteen.
By the time I hit the first red light my phone was ringing. It was Mekhi.
I hadn’t talked to my brother in weeks. I’d been dodging his calls, letting the silence grow because silence was easier than lying to someone who knew me too well.
But he was calling now. Right now. While Quest was inside my building going through God knows what, and Mehar was in my warehouse, and everything I’d been carefully constructing was one wrong move from collapsing.
I answered.
“What the fuck did you do?”