Was she getting sick? It was late September, and the fall had come in wet and chilly. As thin as she was, as constantly chilled, and as badly and little as she ate, it wouldn’t surprise him if she caught every bug in Providence during the cold months.
Trey tried to make a little more noise in the room as he put his suit pants on and unwrapped a fresh shirt from the laundry, but she didn’t so much as twitch. She was tucked all the way under the covers, just some of the blonde silk of her hair peeking out, spread over the pillow. A weird, irrational worry overtook him, and he went to the bed and pulled the cover off her face.
Only sleeping. He let out a breath. Of course she was only sleeping. What—he thought she’d died in the night? Idiot. Still, he laid his hand on her forehead, to check her temperature. She was a little warm, but not in a feverish way. In a cozy, tucked-all-the-way-under-the-covers way. He bent and kissed her head, and still didn’t get any reaction.
Okay, actually, he was still worried. He shook her shoulder. “Hey. Lara, hey. Wake up, babe.”
She groaned and pulled away from him, but now that the worry had its teeth in the base of his skull, he wanted her to wake up and talk to him, so he shook her a little harder. “Come on, Lara. Wake up.”
Another groan, but this one was followed by a grouchy, “What?”
He crouched at the side of the bed. “Open your eyes, babe. I want to talk to you.”
A single irritated, bleary blue eye glared at him through a blonde curtain.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m tired, which is why I was sleeping.”
“The last few days, you’ve been tired a lot. More than usual. You sure you feel okay?”
Enough consciousness broke through to turn down the grump in her mood. She rolled to her back and took the question seriously. Trey brushed her hair from her face.
“I guess I have. I don’t feel great. Tired and a little shaky. I get sick a few times in the winter, usually. I might be getting an early start.”
“Don’t you get a flu shot?”
“I don’t like shots.”
“I know, but it’s better than the flu.” She didn’t reply, so he relented. “Okay. Sleep is good, if you’re sick. But call me if you start feeling worse. I think I’ve got a light day, so I can get back if you need me.”
“I have Dr. Rosen today.” She saw her therapist once a week—which was, he guessed, a possible complication to her moving to the Cove. He needed to think about that.
“I thought that was tomorrow.”
“He’s going out of town for a conference, so it’s today. And I can’t reschedule.”
“Your dad’s taking you?”
“Of course. He always does.”
“Okay.” He kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep. You want me to set an alarm so you’re up in time for your appointment?”
“It’s at one o’clock in the afternoon.”
Trey cocked his eyebrow at her. “What do you think, Sleeping Beauty? You need an alarm?”
She gave him a small, conceding smirk. “Okay, it’s not a bad idea.”
“I’ll set it for eleven. You call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay. I love you.”
He kissed her forehead again. “I love you. Feel better.”
“It’s strange,” she said muttered as he went back to dressing.
“What’s that?”
“How normal your life is. You go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. I’ve never really seen the inside of a Pagano Brothers life before, and it’s very … sane.”
The inside of the Pagano Brothers wasn’t normal at all, whatever that was, and Lara still had not seen it—and never would, even though she knew all its secrets. But he understood her point. It had a rhythm, this life. A sense. It was sane, yes. Even when he had to wash blood from his hands, it was sane. “How do you feel about that?”
“I like it.” Her eyes drooped shut. “It makes sense.”
~ 18 ~
“Lara? Sweetheart, wake up.”
Lara brushed the offending hand from her head and tried to roll over, but another hand had a grip on her shoulder. Resentfully, wanting to be left alone to sleep, she cracked open her eyes—and saw her father hovering over her. Was she at his house? She’d thought—no, the light was wrong. This was her apartment.
She woke all the way up—carefully, though, worried that she’d set off the headache and dizziness again—and blinked her eyes clear. “Dad, what?”
“You’ve got therapy this afternoon, Lara.”
“I know. Trey set the alarm before he left.” When he’d left, fussing about whether she was sick, she’d felt pretty terrible, like the bed spun beneath her. It was too early in the year to start her stupid cycle of a cold or flu every few weeks. Normally, she got at least until the end of October before all that started.
“And I turned it off when I came in. It was blaring here by the bed. It’s past noon.” He set his hand on her forehead. “You’re a little warm. Do you want me to call Dr. Rosen and cancel?”
“No, no. Starting tomorrow, he’s gone for ten days. I don’t want to miss two sessions.” Learning to be in love with Trey and more or less live with him required constant calibrations to her sense of order. Simply having another human being sharing her space meant that she had no space that was exactly as she liked it, and finding compromise with him about what they wanted or needed or even how they would spend an evening took work Lara had never done before. Her father had always shaped himself to her needs.
Her entire life, before she’d been taken in April, had been shaped to her needs, and for the first time, she felt those boundaries as limits rather than protection. She needed to work through all that with her therapist to have the energy to keep working through it with Trey.
Lara sat up and cautiously tested the world around her. It seemed steady, no more spinning. She was still tired, really tired, and felt like she could sleep for another full eight hours. But she’d been asleep for fifteen already. Yes, she was getting sick. But she could get through this day, or at least through her session with Dr. Rosen.
She pushed the covers back. “Okay, I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Her father was manifestly unconvinced. “Are you certain, Lara? You’re pale.” He put his palm to her forehead again.
Lara took hold of his hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’m okay, Dad. Promise.”
~oOo~
Her father took her to her appointments, and anywhere else she needed to go, because Lara didn’t drive, and never would. There were simply too many uncontrollable variables—i.e., other drivers—on the road. If everybody followed the rules, she might have been able to manage it, but nobody seemed to follow the rules. Even as a passenger it made her anxious, trying to read the mind of every driver in sight, trying to anticipate what they might do, how they might deviate from expectation, and when she was anxious, she hyperfocused. Counting the broken yellow lines on the street as they rolled by the car was not a safe way for a driver to devote her attention.
So she didn’t drive, and never would.
In College Hill, she could walk everywhere she wanted or needed to go on almost any day. Dr. Rosen was the one part of her routine that wasn’t within walking distance, and until recently, she’d seen him only occasionally.
Trey wanted her to move to Quiet Cove with him, to live in his cottage on the beach with him, and he’d taken her for walks through his town, showing her how much would be within her reach by foot. Shopping and restaurants. His family. The beach. A quaint park. A little movie theater. A small town library.
But not Brown University’s libraries. And not her father. She’d never lived more than a mile from him.
“Have you examined your feelings about that?” Dr. Rosen asked.
“About living fifty miles away from him?” The doctor nodded. “Yes. It’s about an hour, less or more depending on traffic. Trey drives it back and forth almost every day.�
��
Dr. Rosen made a note but didn’t offer another verbal prompt. Whenever he asked a question, he was quiet for a long time, letting her fill in the silence on her own. Sometimes, when she felt resistant or simply lost, he’d eventually offer another question to push her along.
“I like Trey’s house. A lot. It reminds me of the cabin. It’s not anything like the cabin, but I just … I feel like I did there. Quiet. And safe. I think I like his family, too. I like the ones I’ve met, and they don’t seem to hate me. His mother made me feel safe at her house. But … “
A block rose up in her thinking. She didn’t quite know how to feel the next thing, much less how to say it.
The block grew and grew until Lara ran from it and shifted her focus to stare at the weave in the arm of her chair.
Then Dr. Rosen said, “Lara. Look at me.” She looked up. “You feel safe in Trey’s house, and in his parents’, with his mother—which is a major step for you, to feel safe with a woman. You even let her cook for you. And yet you hesitate. So let’s think about the but. But what?”
“But my dad. He saved me. I need him.”
“Why do you need him?”
It was an excellent question. She was a thirty-four-year-old woman who was afraid to leave her father. Yes, she had post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety; yes her psyche had been scarred by what her mother had done to her; yes, her hyper-stimulated brain had been pre-wired not to work like other people’s even before her mother had gotten her selfish hands on her. But still, she wasn’t an invalid. She was a grown woman, brighter than most, who hid in her tiny world and let her father take care of her—and she knew he would for as long as he drew breath.
But Trey would take care of her, too. He already was. In fact, he’d taken over primary responsibility for her.
“I don’t want Trey to take care of me.” The words came out while she marveled at them, at the shape of their truth. She’d never had that thought before, not clearly.
“Play that out, Lara. What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I love him. I don’t know why I don’t want him to take care of me.”
Dr. Rosen waited, and Lara sorted out the pieces of this new puzzle. Her heart raced. Every piece was the same—black, indeterminate, impossible.
“He’s only twenty-six.”
“You’ve said the age difference doesn’t bother you. Has something changed?”
“He’s strong and vibrant. He’s active, and he’s … he’s just … he’s more.”
“More than what?”
“More than me.” The words landed on her heart with a thump.
Dr. Rosen waited.
Lara focused her mind on the black pieces and tried to understand the picture they made. “Everything about me is small, and everything about him is big. I’m not enough. He’s going to see that. It’s only a matter of time before he sees that and understands that his life should be more.”
“Has he given you indications that he feels constrained?”
“He wants me to move to Quiet Cove.”
“Do you think that’s a constraint he feels between you, or is that an external feeling?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“As you understand his desire for you to move, does he want it because of the distance, or is there more? Is it that he doesn’t like being part of your life here in Providence?”
She thought of their time together in her apartment, and around her neighborhood. Trey was on a first-name basis with the baristas at The Ground Floor, and with the clerks at the market and the bookstore. He knew her neighbors. He’d even helped the couple in the apartment just below hers, Dan and Justine, move a new set of furniture into their house, going so far as to take the frame off their door when the sofa hadn’t fit through, and putting it back on perfectly, with a craftsman’s attention to detail.
“I think he likes my life.”
“Do you think he’s honest about his feelings for you? Do you believe him?”
“Yes.” She felt his love. She thought she’d felt it before he’d ever said the words aloud.
“But you don’t trust its longevity. Is that an accurate observation?”
She couldn’t answer. She didn’t know.
“What, or who, is it you don’t trust, Lara?”
Except for the steady tick of the kitchen timer, Dr. Rosen’s office was silent. The thick textiles in the room, and the cases full of books, and probably insulation between the walls, made the space impenetrable to sounds beyond. She’d always liked that cushioned feeling in the air here.
Lara focused on the timer. She matched her breathing to its rhythm—six ticks in, six ticks out. Dr. Rosen waited, as still and quiet as everything else in the room but her own worried mind, which riffled through these new thoughts and the frightening emotions hanging off their ends.
What didn’t she trust? Or whom?
“Me,” she said as the answer occurred to her. “I don’t trust myself.” Her doctor made a note but didn’t speak. “I want something I don’t know if I can do what I need to do to have.”
“What do you want?”
“To be normal.”
He cocked his head, like half of a denial, and Lara knew what he was thinking. It was a stupid thing to want, and an impossible thing to have. Normal wasn’t a goal, because it had too many definitions. It had no place to land.
“I want things to work with Trey. I don’t want him to have to change for me. Then he won’t be the same. I need to stop making him come to me. Not just the drive. In everything, he comes to me. That’s how he takes care of me. I don’t want that, because he’ll resent it eventually. And I will, too. I want to take care of him, like he takes care of me, but he’s not broken. I am. It makes me feel like I’m less than he is. So I don’t know what I can do.”
“We’ve talked several times about compromise in relationships,” Dr. Rosen said. “You’ve made accommodations for him in your life, so he has a place he can be comfortable there. What’s the next step?”
She studied that question and saw that the next step was the obverse. “To find my place in his life. His life is in Quiet Cove.”
That was it. Once it was clear in her head, it should have been obvious from the start. She needed to try. Not to simply react, but to act. To move forward. To move beyond what she knew.
~oOo~
Her father was waiting in the building’s first-floor lobby when Lara came down from her session. Usually, he dropped her off and found something interesting to do with his hour, but today was rainy and cold, with a swirling, fitful wind, like winter was sneaking in a season early and autumn did its best to hold it off. The leaves hadn’t even changed yet, but the wind was trying to yank them off their branches anyway.
“Are you all set?” he asked as he stood up. “How are you feeling?”
“Yes. I think I worked some things out. And I feel better. Still tired, but not so shaky.”
“Good. Anything you’d like to talk about?”
After a session, her father always asked if she wanted to talk about it. Normally, she said no, and he accepted that without judgment or resistance. But sometimes, there were things she needed to talk out. Today was one of those times. “Yes, actually, there is.”
He put his hand on her elbow and nodded at the little restaurant at the back of the lobby, which was set up like a diner, with counter seating and booths. Over her years seeing Dr. Rosen, she and her father had shared a meal there several times. “I’m hungry, and I know you haven’t eaten yet today. I have some time before my meeting with Nick. Does a grilled cheese and a vanilla cabinet sound good? We can talk while we eat.”
It did sound good. She was, in fact, hungry. “Okay.”
~oOo~
“So what do you want to talk about?” her father asked after the server took their order. They’d taken a booth in the back corner. Lara could see, through the diner windows and across the lobby through the building windows, the grey bl
uster of the afternoon.
She had learned a very long time ago that when she had something big and unwieldy in her head, she did better to jump in right away, rather than lead up to it slowly. So many people wandered to a point, came at it sidelong, as if they were afraid it might attack. As the speaker or the audience, she got more anxious the longer the suspense built. She could see it coming and wanted to get it out, where it could be dealt with.
“Trey wants me to move to Quiet Cove,” she blurted.
Her father took the news without much fuss. “I’m not surprised. His family is there, and his home, and his work. How do you feel about it? Does he want you to live with him?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s start there. Living with someone, officially—are you ready for that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to know.”
“But you love him, and you want to be with him?”
“Yes. But Dad, I just did fifty minutes of Socratic questioning with Dr. Rosen. I don’t want to do it with you, too. I just want to talk.”
Her father chuckled. “Sorry, sweetheart. So talk to me.”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Am I the reason you’ve been alone all these years?” She had never asked him that before. She’d noticed, obviously she’d noticed, but until today, when she’d begun to think of all the passive, unintentional, incidental demands she made of Trey, she’d never thought of her father’s aloneness as the result of his care of her.
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