Do Me Right

by Lisa G Riley

  “Anyway, after she finally succeeded in prying my arms from around her waist, she told me that she was sorry and that everything would be okay and that I needed to stop acting like a baby, because after all, I was twelve years old, and she wasn’t going to be with me forever.

  “Well, I clung to her a little while longer and then went to clean myself up. As I was showering, I decided that she was right and that I should never depend on her or anybody else for my emotional well-being again. I told myself to get strong and stop acting like a big baby. I couldn’t depend on my mother for anything except for food, shelter, and clothing. The rest was up to me.”

  “What made you tell me the story now, Kendra?” Dr. Pendegrast asked when Kendra fell silent.

  “I just figured it was time and that it would help you to understand things better.”

  “What things are you referring to?”

  Kendra shrugged. “Just this whole thing with Sloan; why it’s so difficult for me to forgive him. He’s a part of the problem now.”

  “Uh-huh. I don’t think I understand. Will you explain?”

  “I can’t, except to say that Sloan hurt me. I opened myself up to him, and he hurt me.”

  “This resolution that you made when you were twelve—why did you break it for Sloan?”

  Kendra smiled as she thought about it. “He wouldn’t let me do anything else. He was just so goofy and determined, you know? I tried to keep him at a distance, but he just wore me down.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, I couldn’t resist him. And it was weird, but there was just this connection right away, so I forgot my promise to myself and let him in.”

  “Let him in?”

  “I opened myself up to him. I trusted him.”

  “Do you regret doing that?”

  Kendra contemplated her answer. “No, actually I don’t. I loved being with him, and I was the happiest I’ve ever been.”

  “And how are things with your mother?”

  Kendra frowned. “Not good. I haven’t seen her since my wedding day, and I’ve barely spoken to her since then either.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it. I’m mad that she was right all along, and I don’t want to be around her when she gloats.”

  “Are you sure she would? Gloat, I mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Kendra sighed, and then was forced to admit, “No, she probably wouldn’t, not in front of me anyway. But she would be gloating privately, I think. She probably would empathize with me and try to take care of me, but she’d still be secretly happy that things didn’t work out.”

  “Believing this, how would this make you feel?”

  “I wouldn’t like it, of course. Her sympathy would almost be worse than her saying I told you so. It’s hard to explain, but her feeling sorry for me and being mad at Sloan when she’d been expecting failure the whole time would just be too hard to take.”

  “Are you mad at your mother, Kendra?”

  Kendra froze at the question. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because you picked today to tell me that story. A story in which you perceived your mother having abandoned you.”

  “I don’t want to answer that right now,” Kendra evaded as guilt took over. “All right, all right,” she said angrily. Forget feeling guilty. Instead she railed, “Yes, I am mad at her. I don’t think she should have left me like that when she knew how neurotic I was about my father leaving. So what if I was twelve? And I’m mad at her for indoctrinating me the way she did.”

  “Do you feel that it’s her fault now that you can’t forgive Sloan long enough to listen to his explanation?”

  Kendra deflated. “No, no. It’s all on me. I made that decision.”

  “Before we end this session, I’d like to tell you that it doesn’t matter that you were twelve when your mother left. With good reason, you were afraid, and your feelings were valid. You should never feel guilty about your feelings. You could have been eighteen, and the feelings still would have been valid.”

  “All right.”

  “You mentioned earlier that you were the happiest you’ve ever been when you were with Sloan. What are you now?”

  *

  The answer to that question gave Kendra pause enough to call her mother and ask her if she could come over to talk. She’d been studiously avoiding seeing her, and to say her mother was surprised at the request was putting it mildly. Kendra could hear the conflicting emotions in Camille’s voice: hurt, anger, disbelief. But she agreed to see Kendra regardless.

  “So, um, Mom, I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you all this time,” Kendra said as she made herself comfortable in one of the armchairs in her mother’s living room.

  “Uh-huh.” Camille sounded skeptical as she handed Kendra a bottle of water, then sat down on the sofa. “Why were you?”

  “Uh, well.” Kendra took a sip from her water. “Because I was mad at you because I blamed you for being right, and I blamed you for making me distrust men, in particular, Sloan.” She stopped and cleared her throat when Camille became poker straight and looked away from her. “And I thought that maybe you’d be happy that Sloan had left me.”

  Now Camille looked back at her with tears in her eyes. “What kind of person do you think I am? How could you think that I would be happy if you weren’t, Kendra?”

  Swamped with guilt again, Kendra resisted the urge to rush over and comfort her mother. “I just did because you were always warning me about Sloan, and you never seemed to care how unhappy it made me when you did it.”

  Camille’s sigh was tremulous. “Whether you believe it or not, Kendra, I’m not happy about Sloan’s not showing up for your wedding. In fact, if you had bothered to talk to me for more than two minutes over the past few weeks, I would have told you how sorry I am that things turned out this way.”

  “I probably wouldn’t have believed you, Mom. You never liked Sloan, and I feel like you want me to be alone.”

  Camille drank deeply of her own water and sat contemplatively for a while. “Ever since the whole thing happened, I’ve been thinking about myself and the role I may have played in the fiasco. Your distancing yourself from me forced me to.”

  “And?” Kendra fought to remain patient when her mother fell silent.

  Camille looked uncomfortable. “And…I realized that what I had been doing to you all these years was unfair.”

  “Just like that?” Kendra’s voice was filled with disbelief. “You suddenly came to that realization out of the blue?”

  “It wasn’t sudden, Kendra, and I’ll thank you to watch your tone—and stop rolling your eyes. I can see you, you know.”

  “Oh please,” Kendra said with disgust. “This is not the time to pull out the Mom card. Will you just please finish?”

  Camille pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, showing her displeasure. “As I said, it wasn’t all of a sudden. However, what brought it on was seeing you. I was downtown last week, and I saw you coming out of a building, and you just looked so… Well, you just looked so shattered. And you’re too thin. It made me sad to see you like that—so sad that I couldn’t even call out to you. I imagined that you looked like I used to when your dad would leave. I would stop eating too. It hit me then that the last thing I wanted was for you to go through what I had and for you to be as miserable as I was. And that’s what made me start thinking about what I’d been doing to you all these years.”

  Kendra was quiet for a moment. She didn’t know if she should be grateful for the revelation or angry that it had taken her mother so long to have it. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, just listen.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Sloan looked up from his computer screen when he heard noises outside his door in his secretary’s area. He sat up in his chair. He could have sworn he was the only one left on their floor. The cleaning crew had already been through. Who the hell could be out there? He supposed it co
uld be the security guard, but he immediately thought of the thief. He heard a file drawer open and rose to walk stealthily over to his door. He pulled it open.

  “What the hell are you doing, Emily?” he demanded of Peter’s secretary. So, she’s the one. The thought gave him grim satisfaction. He watched her jerk around, dropping the file she held in her hand in the process.

  Emily pressed her hand to her chest and quickly bent down to stuff scattered papers back into the manila folder. “You startled me, Mr. Johnson. I didn’t know you were still here, sir.” She looked behind him at his office. “Oh! No wonder I didn’t see a light under the door. You’re working in the dark.”

  “I only need the light from the computer screen,” Sloan replied as he studied her. “What’s in the folder? Why are you going through Mrs. Cantera’s files?”

  “Oh, Mr. Taylor asked me to pull some stuff from your case—the very first one you ever had or won.”

  “The Tobias case? Why would Peter need that file?” The Tobias case was largely responsible for his firm’s rapid growth. An old college friend who owned a small software company had been sued by a former employee for illegal termination and sex discrimination. The plaintiff had claimed that she’d been fired because she’d complained of sexual harassment. The case had been in the news constantly because she came from one of the country’s wealthiest, most famous political families. After he’d won the case against a cadre of high-powered lawyers, Sloan had filed a defamation suit on behalf of his friend and had won a huge out-of-court settlement. Business had been booming ever since.

  “Mr. Taylor says it has a lot of similarities to a current case—the Childers matter?”

  Sloan nodded. “Yes, I can see that. But why didn’t you just get the information from the shared drive?”

  Emily swallowed loudly, making Sloan’s already quivering antennae shiver even more. What is she so nervous about? He stepped closer to read the name on the folder.

  Emily cleared her throat. “Well, I’m summarizing everything, and I like to have the actual hard copy in front of me, so I thought it would just be easier to retrieve the original instead of printing everything out again.”

  “All right, but that’s a huge case file, and most everything is in storage. Will you be visiting the off-site facility?”

  Emily laughed lightly, apparently catching Sloan’s mild sarcasm. “Uh, no, sir. If I get that desperate, I’ll print it out instead of traveling twenty miles. For now I just need Mrs. Cantera’s files that have her notes and things.”

  “Don’t stay too late,” Sloan said and went back into his office, shutting the door behind him.

  Twenty minutes later Sloan heard noise in the outer office again. He sighed impatiently. “Is that you again, Emily?” he called without rising.

  “No, it’s not Emily; it’s me,” Connor said as he walked in and sat down. “George told me just to come on up after I signed in downstairs. Who’s Emily?”

  “She’s a secretary here and one of my suspects. I caught her rifling through the files a little while ago and thought maybe I’d caught the thief.”

  “I take it you hadn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Sloan muttered. “If she is the thief, she wasn’t stealing anything tonight.”

  “No luck in identification yet, huh?”

  “Nope. Every time I think I’m close, I get fooled. There are just far too many suspects.”

  “I think you might need to count this one as a loss, my friend,” Connor said.

  Sloan threw him a look of disgust. “Would you if you were me?”

  “I might seriously consider it, especially since the FBI and the state’s attorney have relieved the pressure.”

  “They only did that because I replaced the stolen funds.”

  Connor nodded. “That, and Mrs. Patterson is alive and well on that cruise ship, and she isn’t making a big deal of the theft. They’ve got bigger fish to fry. Your case is kind of small potatoes now.”

  “Yeah, kind of,” Sloan muttered. “That doesn’t keep them from investigating my firm and barging in here anytime they want. I could lose out big on this one, Connor. If the thief isn’t caught, I could lose my license. I’ve already had to inform my other clients about the theft and the investigation.”

  “Have any of them left you?”

  “No, not yet, but that doesn’t mean some won’t. And who says Mrs. Patterson’s alive?”

  Connor sighed. “You’ve talked to her, Sloan. Besides that, you’ve seen the proof in the money paid to the cruise line, the ship’s manifest, and the picture.”

  “The picture was grainy, and just because money was paid doesn’t mean she’s on the ship. You already know how I feel about the manifest.”

  “I don’t get why you refuse to believe she’s alive.”

  “Because that nephew of hers practically oozes menace, and I know he’d kill for the money.”

  “I suppose you told Vernita all of this.”

  “Oh yeah, a while ago. She sent a couple of cops over to talk to him. Unfortunately Barlow has the receipt showing that she had purchased the trip. He’d pulled it up online. He also called Mrs. Patterson. Of course it could have been anyone on the phone, and the receipt might just be for show, but it was enough to get the police off his back.”

  “If you’re not careful, you might get sued. You’ve got nothing but your suspicions, and those aren’t enough. You need to stop before you get accused of harassing him. But, if Sims is involved at all, the visit from the police tipped him off that you know about the theft and that you suspect him. If it makes him feel desperate enough, you might be in danger. But I suppose you thought of all of that, right?”

  “Of course I did,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “If things go as I’d like, at least it might get me closer to his accomplice. Anyway, is that why you came—to talk about the case?”

  Connor nodded. “That, and because I knew I’d find you here working yourself to exhaustion, you’ll be too tired to think about Kendra and actually get yourself some sleep.”

  Sloan said nothing. It was true. He didn’t want to talk about his failed relationship. He couldn’t afford the energy. Every time he thought about what had happened, he got furious, and fury was an emotion he couldn’t afford. Besides the theft, he had a huge court case coming up and needed to focus all of his energy on that.

  Connor looked at the couch. A blanket was folded neatly in the corner of it. “So you sleep here too, huh? Have you got extra suits here?”

  Still, Sloan said nothing. Connor didn’t need to know there were extra suits in his office closet and that he used his private bathroom to clean up on those nights when he did sleep in his office.

  “Come on, Sloan. It’s been—”

  “It doesn’t matter how long it’s been,” he cut Connor off, unable to let that comment go. “I can’t stop loving her on a timetable.”

  Connor sighed. “I know you can’t, and no one’s expecting you to. If you had let me finish, you would have heard me ask when you were going to tell Kendra and other people what happened that day.”

  Besides Kyle, Connor was the only one who knew anything about the fiasco in the hotel room. Connor had been the only one to ask him what had happened. Sloan knew Connor well enough to know that he wasn’t going to give up. “I’m not going to tell her.” He was adamant. “I tried to, and she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Yeah, but you also left her a message that morning saying that you were having second thoughts—”

  “I know that!” Sloan interrupted impatiently. “And that’s why I tried calling her again the next day and the next. She wouldn’t take my calls. And then I thought about it. Why should I keep trying? I did nothing—absolutely nothing—wrong. But she chooses to believe that I can’t be trusted, so there you have it.”

  “But you’re miserable—both of you. Kendra walks around the office like some sort of wraith, and all she does is work too.”

  “I don’t know what you want me t
o do, Connor. I’m furious with her. As much as I love her, I’m not going to beg. If I had actually done something wrong, then I would consider it, but the fault is not mine. And so what if I had a single lapse in confidence about our relationship? Aren’t I entitled? Hell, our entire relationship has practically been one big lapse in confidence for her. And my slip was a direct result of her neurosis, not something outside the relationship that she had nothing to do with!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No! Kendra has to trust me. If I keep trying to explain and she finally listens, then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sloan pressed his fingers to his temples. He’d had a headache for days. “Say we get back together and everything is hunky-dory because I explained. What’s to happen the next time there’s a misunderstanding? Will I have to go through this again?”

  “Sloan, it was her wedding day. Plus, she’s neurotic about trust, and you knew that going in.”

  “Yes, I did,” Sloan agreed, but then his effort to stay calm became a complete failure, and he pushed back from the desk and stood to pace. “Damn it, Connor. She condemned me the first time something went wrong. I don’t want a marriage like that. I’d be a fool to want it.”

  Connor watched him for a long moment. “Then why don’t you just tell her that, Sloan? Just tell her.”

  “No. I want her back, Connor, believe me, I do, but I can’t keep giving in to this fear she has of my leaving. She has to fix this herself.”

  “So what’s your plan, then?”

  “I don’t have one. The only thing I can do is hope and pray that she realizes what we had and that I would never do anything to hurt her on purpose.” He shrugged and sat back down. “She has to come to me, or we’ll never work.”

  “She’s moved out of Mozell’s place. She found a nice apartment just a couple of blocks away from yours. She’s subletting it until she finds something more permanent.”