Chapter 9 #2
"There's an SUV out front with two guys in it," Brady said. "Everybody's saying it's about you."
And Laura, who had held it together on a sidewalk and in a phone call and in a parked truck, felt her eyes go hot in front of a teenage boy in a school hoodie.
"Get on the table," she said.
He got on the table. She worked his knee and made him do his eccentrics and counted out loud, and by the end of it her hands had steadied and her voice had come back and the boy was cussing at her comfortably.
At the door he stopped.
"My mom says people are being ugly about you again. On the internet."
"They are."
"She says you don't read it."
"I don't."
"Okay." He shifted the crutch he no longer needed and carried around out of habit, which she was going to take off him next week.
"'Cause I told a guy at school today that you're the only reason I'm gonna play, and he said something, and I told him to say it again.
" He looked at the floor. "I'm not supposed to tell you the rest of it. "
Laura stood in the doorway of her clinic.
"Brady."
"Yeah."
"Don't get suspended over me."
"No, ma'am," he said, in a way that meant nothing at all, and went out into the street past the black SUV without looking at it.
Tammy found her at nine that night at the kitchen table with the ledger printouts.
"There's a car at the bottom of the hill."
"I know."
"Honey, is that—"
"They work for Gary Stern," Laura said.
Tammy sat down. She looked at the printouts, and then at Laura's face, and for once in her life said nothing at all.
"Ask me," Laura said.
"Are you safe?"
"Safer than I was on Tuesday. That's what makes it so—" Her voice cracked, once, and she put it back. "That's the part I can't get past. It's working. There are men out there and I will sleep better tonight than I have since the spring, and I would rather have gone another year the way I was."
"Why?"
Laura looked up.
"Because I didn't ask for it," she said.
"Because he decided. Because for ten years everything in my life happened in a room I wasn't in, and I got out, and I built one single thing that was mine, and the minute I let him hold one end of one thread he went and got the machine out.
" She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
"And every person in this town is going to tell me how lucky I am. "
Tammy reached across the strawberry cloth and took her wrist.
"Then send them home," she said.
She sent them home in the morning, and it was not satisfying at all.
The polite man was professional about it. He said he'd need it in writing to the firm, and she wrote it in the clinic on a prescription pad, and he took a photograph of it with his phone and thanked her and drove away, and the whole thing took no time at all.
Then she called Susan Reeves and revoked the fraction of access she had given.
"No direct contact of any kind. No calls.
Nothing through Kevin Barnes, nothing through Carol, nothing through the sheriff's office, nothing through anybody who has ever taken money from Stern Sports Management.
Anything he wants to say to me, he says to you, and you decide whether I need to hear it. "
Susan wrote for a while.
"Do you want me to tell him why?"
Laura thought about that for a long time — long enough that the line went quiet and stayed quiet.
"No," she said. "Tell him I said thank you for the answer to the question."
"That's crueler."
"Yes," Laura said.
There was one more call, and she made it standing up, because she did not trust herself to make it sitting down.
Gary Stern answered on the second ring, warm as a bath. "Laura. I heard you sent my guys home."
"Your guys."
"Firm we use. Best in the state." A chair creaked.
"Listen, that was not me going around you.
Jake called me at nine o'clock this morning in a condition I have not heard from that man in seventeen years, and he said do something, and doing something is my job.
If you want them gone, they're gone. You want a different firm, I'll get you three names by lunch. "
"Gary. What did he tell you?"
"That somebody's been bothering you since the spring." No pause at all. Perfectly smooth. "Which — Laura, I have to say this and then I'll drop it — is something you should have brought to me in April."
"To you."
"To me. That's what I'm for." He sounded genuinely wounded. "Eleven months. In my house. And nobody told me."
Laura stood in the clinic with the phone against her ear and looked at the two black-and-white photographs of a treatment room on Depot Street reflected in the dark front window.
"Did he give you a name?" she said.
"A name?"
"Did Jake give you a name. Of who it might be."
"No," Gary said. "Is there one?"
And there it was — the tiny extra beat before the question, the same quarter-second she had seen on the sidewalk in February, when a man who was never surprised by anything had to decide how to be surprised.
"No," Laura said. "I was hoping you'd have an idea."
"I'll put people on it."
"Don't put anybody on anything."
"Laura—"
"Goodnight, Gary."
She hung up and set the phone face down on the treatment table and stood there breathing for a minute.
In my house. That was what he'd said. Not in his house.
She stood in the middle of her own clinic with two treatment tables and a pencil column of measurements on the wall by the door, and understood that she was entirely on her own now, and that she had chosen it, and that she had been right to.
Which did not stop her, at three o'clock in the morning, from lying in her mother's bed with her eyes open, listening for a car.