“So now my family’s part of this too?”
“When’s the last time you saw your mother?”
Kate took a deep breath and lowered her face so Dr.Okafor wouldn’t see the flush.Kate was fair-skinned, a descendant of equally fair-skinned Europeans on both sides of her family, and she had a frustrating tendency to blush so deeply her skin was nearly the same shade as her bright auburn hair.
Except for a delicious, tense Thanksgiving dinner where both Kate and her mother had avoided broaching any subject that could be considered remotely difficult, Kate hadn’t seen her mother in over a month.After returning to Portland, Maine upon the conclusion of her last disaster of a case, she’d lived with Catherine for a while, but her mother’s incessant badgering about Marcus got to be overwhelming, so now she lived in her apartment again and barely talked to her mother besides the occasional good morning texts or lighthearted gossip, always from her mother to her and not the other way around.
“I…” Kate lifted her hands and let them drop.
Dr.Okafor leaned slightly forward.Her face took on an earnest expression.
Here we go.
“Kate, the symptoms you’re displaying are very concerning.You’re not sleeping well.You’re isolating yourself from your friends and family.You’re refusing protection despite the credible threat of danger.I’m worried that you feel you deserve for bad things to happen to you, and you’re using Cox’s escape as an excuse to leave yourself vulnerable while at the same time refusing to confront—”
Kate stood before Dr.Okafor could finish.She was seeing Dr.Okafor at Winters’ request, not her instruction, so she didn’t have to sit through this bullshit to protect her job.“Thank you, Doctor.I think we’re done here.”
“Kate, I’m not trying to—”
“I won’t be making another appointment.”
“Kate.Kate!”
But Kate was gone, storming out of Dr.Okafor’s office and past the surprised receptionist who stammered something she didn’t bother to listen to.She left the building—stormed out, of course—and jumped into the driver’s seat of an old, dented RAV4 with chipped paint and a wheezy engine that burned oil almost as fast as it burned gas.
Said engine wheezed to life with a cough and a puff of gray smoke—still from the exhaust and not the block, thankfully—and Kate drove out of the parking lot and headed home.She didn’t quite storm out of the parking lot.In its best years, the old four-banger couldn’t have stormed out of anywhere, and its best years were long behind it.The best Kate could manage was eventually cresting sixty a mile after merging onto US 302, a speed she maintained for exactly one more mile before exiting the highway onto Robin Avenue.Here, she slowed to the posted speed limit of thirty-five.She wasn’t angry enough to kill someone in a car accident.Not even her well-deserving self, so shove that trumpet up your ass and talk through it, Dr.Okafor.
She pulled off of the avenue onto Plain Street, a fitting name for a fitting street sporting run-down gray homes and three run-down gray apartment buildings, one of which sported the second-story one-bedroom unit that Special Agent Kate Valentine, FBI, called home.
With her wheezy old SUV safely parked in her assigned space and free to rest, Kate could storm once more.She didn’t, though.There was no point.No one was there to see her, and no one whocouldsee her would take time out of their working-class days to dwell on it.
Instead, she walked across the parking lot and the narrow courtyard with its double-bathtub-sized pool and precisely two stunted, leafless excuses for trees.It was November in Portland, and while there was only enough snow on the ground to make the gray look even grayer, it was still too cold for any of the deciduous trees in the area to sport leaves.These particular trees were barely leaved even in summer, though, so they were still crappy trees.
She continued walking, up the stairs to the second floor, and after an excruciating extra seven seconds fumbling with the damned sticky lock into her apartment.
She dropped her bag on the floor by the door and dropped her coat over the back of the couch.She walked into her kitchen, and, instead of contemplating the solitary, empty life the apartment represented, she looked through her kitchen window at the street below.The first tendrils of fog were beginning to creep up from the ground, but the bright white LED lamps didn’t even have the decency to soften that fog, instead glaring intensely off of it, like a false, toothy smile frozen on the face of a madwoman.
She missed the old sodium-vapor lamps.Those, at least, had the decency to admit when the world they illuminated was bleak.
Kate stared at those lamps until she felt her lips wanting to mimic that smile.Then she trudged (like walking but slower and more defeated) to the living room, plopped onto the couch, and ordered pizza.The one thing she could count on in life was that, fog of early winter and insane grin of LED lights notwithstanding, Pizza Express would have her pepperoni and cheese at her doorstep in thirty minutes or less.
While she waited, she stared at the flat black screen of her switched-off television.It was a fitting end to a shitty day.
Besides, nothing on television would do anything to stave off the nightmares when sleep finally came.
CHAPTER TWO
Tuesday, December 1st
In Kate’s opinion, Mondays got a bad rap.Sure, Monday was the end of the weekend, the beginning (for much of the population) of the workweek, and the day when people had to cope with the fact that eighty percent of their lives was spent with their heels dug in grinding away at the millwheel of life, leaving them too exhausted to enjoy the twenty percent of free time they were allowed.
But Tuesday was worse.Monday, at least, allowed the illusion of a new beginning.People could lie to themselves, convince themselves that this week would be different, better, more productive, less draining.
By Tuesday, those illusions were out the window, and since there were still four days before the freedom of the weekend, you couldn’t really even look forward to much either.You were just stuck in the same ol’ same ol’.
This particular Tuesday, Kate's same old was seasoned with newness, but not the kind of newness that brought excitement and wonder.It was more like the kind of newness that came when children inevitably decided to act on their curiosity and pour orange juice over their Fruit Loops instead of milk.
Marcus was here, but instead of joking around with him and making small talk like they used to, she stared at cold case records and listened to his heavy breathing, soft muttering and deliberate avoidance of any eye contact or verbal contact with a woman who three short months ago he had felt up in the front seat of his car.
