It was long practice that had Tamara not choking on the last bite of her tomato and cheese sandwich.
“That’s a lot of money, Terry.”
“You can be a junior investment partner if you like. Come on, Tammy, where’s your sense of adventure? Don’t tell me you don’t have faith in my good judgment and my eye now. You remember my eye, Tammy. It saw you.”
It had seen her, when she’d been just twenty and so serious, so unsure of even the concept of fun. Terry had opened a whole world to her.
She could forgive all his flaws for that.
“Ten grand.”
“You’ve got ten grand in loose cash, baby, I know you do. You’ll get it back and more. A sure thing, remember? Trust me.”
There was bad history in that, but this was different. Separating situations was the key.
“All right, then. But I want paperwork for something this big, Terry.”
That laugh, hearty and full of life, that she’d always loved, that had always made her long for what they couldn’t have. They'd been right for each other until they hadn’t been. She should have noticed the signs, really. She should’ve noticed when they’d started drifting apart. She hadn’t, and he had noticed, but then he'd made poor choices. Instead of coming to her, talking to her, trying to find a way, he’d found that excitement elsewhere.
Knowing him, she'd finally learned to forgive him for that, too. He'd asked for forgiveness enough times.
“All the paperwork you want, Tammy! This is going to pay off so great for both of us. Now, you’ve got that session, don’t you? I’ve got a meeting so gotta run.”
“Right. I’ll send you the money as soon as you fax me what I need.”
“It’ll be done in an hour. It’ll all be with that girl of yours, the pretty one. I need it back by midnight.”
“You’ll have it,” promised Tamara and hung up.
She had one whole minute to gather herself before her next session with Andrea, a young woman who, at sixteen, had given birth and given up her baby for adoption. She resented her religious mother, her strict father, her fickle ex-boyfriend and the whole world for the misery she felt, and Tamara could hardly blame her.
It wasn’t her job to convince Andrea that she was wrong to feel such things. It was her job to help Andrea accept what she felt and find a way to work with it, work through it, and when she was ready to do so, to let go.
Anger, thought Tamara, could corrupt so much. That was why she chose to let go of it.
Taking a deep breath, she put her game face on when Georgina knocked on her door to make sure that she was ready for Andrea.
She nodded, and she set all of her troubles aside while she focused on her young client’s troubles.
That was her job.
She would do it well.
***
Dave looked at the bag of weed and sighed a little. He couldn’t judge, really. At fifteen, he not only had smoked a lot of weed, he’d also been dealing his fair share of it.
Ah, his shady beginnings! He couldn’t blame Abby’s parents for not wanting him anywhere near their daughter, their precious golden girl, all of twenty years old, her whole life in front of her. At twenty-seven, he’d been too old for her. He’d known that. He’d been too old, too rough, far too caught up in the hustle to spare time for love.
Even if he’d had time, the golden-haired, hazel-eyed young woman with that smile that could light up the whole world would’ve been so far out of his league that the very idea would’ve been laughable.
But then they'd met, and it was as if the whole world fell away. It was as if nothing else mattered. She'd sought him out, as much as he'd tried to stay away from her. Her parents had warned him off, threatened to ruin him.
The Douglases were an old name, and old family with influence. Maybe they could have, if they’d tried. Maybe they could’ve ruined him and everything he’d tried to build.
But Abby had had different ideas. She’d fallen in love with him.
The wonder of it, even now. Abby Douglas, the perfect girl, the most perfect girl the world had ever seen, had fallen in love with him. She'd turned him into a sentimental fool and he didn't regret a single minute of it, not a second of it. She'd teased him, and she'd loved him, and she'd taught him what it was like to love somebody with every fiber of his being, until nothing and nobody else mattered.
The Douglases would have put a stop to it. If they'd known before, as they saw it, it was too late.
He still remembered the day Abby had called him, asked him to meet her urgently. He remembered how she'd sounded—scared, excited, defiant.
Her eyes had been huge with wonder and uncertainty, shining with tears that frightened him when nothing much could scare him.
She was pregnant.
They'd made a baby together. They would soon have a baby together—in seven months, to be almost exact, as it turned out.
It had humbled him to know that the idea of having his baby, their baby, gave her such joy. It had shown him how to feel joy in it, too. All that terror, and all that uncertainty, but most of all, overriding it all, joy.
Dave picked up the photo he kept on his desk, and on his bedside table, and on his mantelpiece. Abby, laughing at the camera he’d been holding as he captured that moment after the day they’d first felt her kick. Their baby. Their daughter. Their Meghan.
Wasn’t he doing what he should for her?
“I miss you, Abby. It all seemed so easy when you were here. I knew what to do because you were there. You showed me.”
He sighed as he looked at the woman he still loved, the joy that had finally faded from her eyes as he held her hand, willing her to stay with him, willing her to stay if she loved him.
That was the first, last and only time Abby had ever given him real grief. Abby hadn’t stayed.
In that flipped car, trapped in the seatbelt that he’d tried desperately to cut loose, before the paramedics came, life fled from her eyes, from that face that had always been so full of life and love and laughter.
He’d never forgive the fates for that.
“Our baby girl, Abby. I promised to do my best for her. I’m trying my best,” he told her photo, but he didn’t feel her presence with him.
That usually happened when he wasn’t being completely honest.
Maybe... Maybe he wasn’t.
Chapter 3
Tamara let the girl set the pace, trying to keep the anger from spilling over and showing.
How could he not have seen that this young woman needed therapy? That she needed help? That she wasn’t magically going to get better on her own, find her way on her own?
What had he been doing when he should’ve been parenting?
Oh, she didn’t care just how rich and important he was.
Meghan was running on empty. How could anybody not see that? No wonder Chrissy Benoit had decided that she needed help, badly enough to try and bully that bullheaded father of hers into getting it for her.
Bullheaded was putting it kindly.
But her anger was for her to deal with. She wouldn't let it interfere with her clarity when she needed it, when she owed it to Meghan.
“Everything I say here is confidential, right?” asked the young woman, finally, still avoiding Tamara’s eyes.
Tamara smiled, nodded.
“Of course. That’s a legal requirement no matter what you say, unless I have a credible reason to believe that you're about to cause harm to somebody else. Or yourself.”
“So, like, if I were suicidal, you could call the cops on me?”
Tamara considered.
“Well, legally I could, I suppose, but I wouldn’t. Can you imagine what my reviews would be like if I called the cops every time a client said they didn’t see the point of living in this world?”
That snapped Meghan’s eyes to hers.
“So you’d just let them do it?”
Tamara shook her head.
“Those aren’t my only two option
s. I can’t talk to you in specifics because of confidentiality, obviously, but when I have been faced with the prospect that somebody might really harm themselves, my preferred way of handling the situation is to keep them safe, not hand them over to the cops.”
Meghan’s posture changed a little bit. She’d been sitting uncomfortably on the edge of her comfortable chair, leaning against the armrest just a little bit instead of against the backrest. She sat a little more firmly in the chair, as if she wasn’t marking time for when she could flee.
“What’s your preferred way?”
“Well, everybody, every person, has value, Meg. All of our organs are supposed to help us live our best lives, but the brain can be, well, a bit of an asshole. It can malfunction. Now, the world isn’t exactly in its best place right now, but I’d say that means the brain’s job is to give us the best ways to make things better. Instead, some brains will try to get us to give up, and that’s usually because we don’t believe we’re worth the effort. But we are, all of us. Every single one of us has the potential to be happy. Not happy always, all the time, of course, but have moments of happiness that we can remember and hold on to, until the next moment, which will come. It will always come. If I have a patient who wishes to hurt themselves, it’s their brain sabotaging them. Nobody wants to just succumb to sabotage, not once they realize that there's more to life than what their thoughts are trying to insist in that moment.”
Now she did look interested.
“So it’s our brain against our brain?”
“That’s how I see it sometimes. Once that crisis is over, you can deal with it more methodically, there are treatment plans and coping mechanisms. But during that crisis, I try to get my patients to trust me enough to recommend a healthcare institution that will let them check in voluntarily, and I will see them every day until they feel they’re in a better place. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of days. When somebody tells you that they’re suicidal, it’s a request for help. There's no reason to let anybody know at all if you didn’t want help.”
Tamara let Meghan absorb this and waited. She didn’t ask.
“I’m not suicidal. I just got caught with weed, that’s all.”
Tamara nodded.
“I didn’t think you were suicidal. But you're here because your father asked you to come here.”
Meghan chuckled. It wasn’t a happy sound but it was a sign of real life.
“Dad doesn’t ask me to do stuff. He tells Martha, our housekeeper, what my schedule is and it’s Martha’s job to make sure I follow it, apparently.”
“I see.”
“So Martha told me this morning that I would have therapy today in the evening. I wasn’t even copied on the email that said how long I’m suspended for. I don’t even know how long I’m suspended for.”
“Have you asked?”
“Why should I ask? Shouldn’t I be told this? I have a right to know what’s going on in my life, don’t I?”
Tamara nodded.
“You do. But you're also free to ask. There's no reason not to ask, is there? You could ask, and you could say what you told me—that you must know how your life is scheduled because it's your life.”
“They wouldn’t give a fuck.”
Tamara didn’t pretend to be shocked. She had to fight to keep from grinning, though.
“You can’t know until you ask, Meg. Sometimes you have to tell that part of your brain to fuck off.”
Meghan glanced up, a little shocked.
Christ, the kid was fifteen. Was she treated like she was still five?
“Maybe.”
Tamara let that go for the moment.
“Of course, we do have to talk about the weed.”
“I’m not going to tell you how I got it.”
“I’m not asking. I don’t need your dealer’s name, I have my own connections, Meg. Your school counselor told me about the oregano.”
Meghan grinned.
“Can you believe it? Dad said that. You should’ve seen her face. Ms. Donovan, not Ms. Benoit. Ms. Benoit is okay. I thought she was going to explode.”
“Apparently that might have improved the decor.”
Meghan snorted a little unexpected laugh.
“I guess. Everybody knew it was weed, though.”
“Your father was doing what came naturally to him, I’d say—protecting you.”
Meghan shrugged, shutting down a little bit.
“When he can be bothered to remember my existence, sure.”
Meghan fidgeted with the armrest, picking at it a little.
“I know I don’t really have problems. Other people have problems. I’m rich, I can have whatever I want. This is all stupid. I was just stupid enough to get caught with the fucking weed, that’s all.”
Tamara leaned forward.
“Well, I have you twice a week for at least three months, so if nothing else, you can have a two-hour break from your life every week. I know it’s asking a lot to just trust a stranger like this, Meg. But whatever you say here is confidential, and I can promise you that it would take a lot to shock me. I want you to know one thing, though. My priority is to give you whatever tools I can help you find to make you happy. Your father might be paying for these sessions, and Ms. Benoit might have recommended them, but it’s not my job to give them the results they want, whatever those might be. It’s not my job to make their lives easier. My job is to give you tools to feel better and do better, for you. If you decide that what you want to do with your newfound sense of self is to graffiti all their walls as a form of self-expression, for instance, I can’t help them. I’d talk to you about why you felt that you needed to take those risks, but I’d be happy you were using art to express yourself freely.”
That seemed to get through to Meghan a little bit, at least.
“And I don’t have to talk about mom if I don’t want to?”
Tamara thought her heart might break for this young woman.
“You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. But if you're having trouble dealing with that, then you can talk about it, and I'll help you find ways to deal with it. I promise you that, Meg.”
“It’s not like you can bring her back. Nobody can bring her back. She’s dead. You know, that really burns my dad? He has all the money in the world and he can do whatever he wants, and he can buy whatever the fuck he wants, but he can’t have mom. He can’t bring her back.”
A hint of bitter satisfaction that even her father could be defeated by something, even if that something was death.
Tamara couldn’t begrudge the girl that. Her fifteen minutes with the man had infuriated her some. She couldn’t imagine what living with him must be like.
“No. I wouldn’t have a clinic and be trying to pay the bills if I could bring the dead back. I’d be minting money on a reality show.”
Another startled laugh.
At the end of the hour, Tamara was hopeful. She could help this young woman. She was dealing with a lot, and she needed help coming to terms with so much, but she could help her.
But she was beginning to come to the conclusion that her father needed just as much help.
Well, that wasn’t her job, and that wasn’t her problem. But the man was going to have to remember what she’d told him—she couldn’t wave a magic wand and fix his daughter for him. He would have to change her environment the way she needed it changed.
And that meant he needed to change a few things about himself, and how he interacted with his daughter, and how he structured her life.
He wasn't going to like hearing it. But she was damn well going to tell him, and he was damn well going to listen to her, because she was the expert. He would accept that and respect it.
He wouldn’t have a choice, not when she was determined. And she was.
But not that day. That day, she had something else to do. Something far more unpleasant, and just as unavoidable.
***
“Happy birthday, mam
a!”
Tamara had a bright smile on her face when she walked into her mother’s home. It was a beautiful home, beautifully kept, her mother’s pride. The gardens were gorgeous, there were people spilling out, all there to celebrate Leticia Jackson’s birthday, the day she was turning sixty-three, though anybody who mentioned it would be in trouble.
Age was not mentioned at Leticia’s birthday.
Leticia didn’t show her years as she sat on her couch—the one Tamara had bought—no, the one her mother had exchanged the one Tamara had bought for—and held court.
“Mara, you’re here! I was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten. Where’s my gift?”
Tamara smiled, hoping she’d made the right choice. She’d spent a lifetime trying to keep her mother happy. She'd never felt like she’d completely succeeded in that.
Yes, she knew how futile an endeavor that was, but what did that matter?
“I got you a weekend of pampering at your favorite spa. How does that sound? And this.”
Of course, without a gift to unwrap, no matter what else she did, it wouldn’t be enough. She knew that.
Her mother opened the box, considered the vase—a beautiful sculpture, handmade and hand painted by a local artist that she knew her mother appreciated—and nodded, to Tamara’s relief.
“Everybody, look at what my Mara got me! You all should be lucky enough to have a daughter like her.”
Tamara hated how her mother’s approval could still make her feel as if she'd been given the whole world. It shouldn’t matter that much. And yet, she basked in it.
She wandered into the kitchen, where she found Felicity Timm, as expected. Felicity looked around, made sure there was nobody in earshot, and gave her the news in a whisper.
“Thank heavens you’re here. Your dad has a new girlfriend.”
“Oh God.”
“Oh God is right, though I don’t know if even God would stand a chance once your mama finds out. Apparently, she’s almost half our age.”
“Oh dear Lord,” whimpered Tamara.
“And she used to be a stripper. Retired now, from what I hear.”
“Strippers are fine people.”
Over 40 And Head Over Heels: BWWM, Over 40's, Billionaire Romance (BWWM Romance Book 1) Page 3