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“Big enough for two is what it is,” I said with a grin.
He sighed. “I’m serious, Diana. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I don't need the extra trouble. Promise to leave this one alone?”
He was right next to my door now. He really did look tired. I’d never seen dark circles under his eyes before. They bothered me. Storm shouldn’t have dark circles. Whatever the hell was on his mind was really getting him down. He had taken an unexpected week off work and the rumor was that Storm never took his holidays unless the chief forced him to.
It was too bad that I was the last person he wanted to share his troubles with.
I went over to him until I was close enough for a hug, but I didn’t hug him, much as I thought it would do him good. I placed my hand on the door handle behind him, not seeing that his hand was already on it until my hand landed on top of his. Something flicked through his eyes. Fear? It was gone so quickly that I could not be sure. He jerked his hand away from under mine.
“A problem shared is a problem halved,” I said, offering my services one last time. .
He shook his head. If his back wasn't already up against the door he would definitely have taken a step back.
“Okely dokely. It’s your funeral.”
I opened my door for him, since that was what he so clearly wanted. He exited like a shot. No pretense of anything else. The Diana of three weeks ago might have felt the urge to cry, but not this new Diana. I stayed watching him as he descended the steps outside my apartment without even looking back.
When he was out of sight I flung the door shut. Two minutes later was in my shower singing a song that I’d heard on the radio. “Ready or not, here I come. You can’t hide…”
Chapter 3
DIANA
My therapist’s name was Roopamala. I had googled it, not that I would admit to her that I had taken such an interest in her life. She would have been far too pleased — or far too offended — that I had wanted to check out anything about her. I could never tell with her what her mood was going to be. The name meant ‘blessed with beauty’, which had actually made me laugh. Because I couldn’t tell whether her parents had jinxed her with that name or not. Roopa was all sorts of contradictions rolled into one.
She had agreed to see me on Sunday and Thursday mornings, and as today was Sunday I had been sitting in the room that she referred to as her office for half an hour, saying words without saying much of anything.
Really I couldn’t wait for this session to be over. What I hadn’t told Storm was that I had already taken a photocopy of all of the files that I had snitched from Agency Headquarters. I had planned to take the originals back asap before their absence was noticed. My secret copies were waiting for me at Grimshaw’s magic shop, where I would be going to next, as soon as this early morning inconvenience of a so-called therapy session was over. Storm’s insistence that I must not look into the Ronin case had me even more determined to do so.
Roopa had assigned me a very specific chair. It was one of those office chairs that swiveled around. She had gotten it second-hand off the internet. I liked it a lot. It let me fidget to my heart’s content, and fidgeting was all I felt like doing for the excruciatingly dull hour I had been coming here twice a week for the past three weeks..
The so-called office was Roopa’s smaller lounge. She had two, but I was not allowed into the second larger one that led through to the rest of her small house. I was not allowed to even use the bathroom here, because it would mean going outside of this ‘office’. It seemed that Roopa thought I was not to be trusted.
The first time I had visited she had opened her front door wearing a loose tent-like outfit. She had said, “I must apologise for my attire,” and then she had laughed. It turned out she was wearing her habitual attire. Clearly she didn’t give a damn about what I thought. I liked that a lot too.
Roopa was ignoring me. Her head was bent over her coffee table where she was scribing painfully small patterns onto a two-inch square of very thin paper. The intricate patterns were of her own invention Theo had told me, and they were pure magic, somewhat like the sigils of the magical language. Whatever she was doing took great concentration because the tip of Roopa’s tongue had been trapped between her teeth for the past thirty minutes.
She applied one final squiggle and then heaved a massive sigh and sat up to rotate her shoulders rather vigourously. She didn’t care that I was watching her squirming and wiggling as she tried to work loose the kink in her shoulder that was bothering her. When she was satisfied that the ache was sufficiently gone, she picked up her little piece of paper and squinted at it. She nodded her head in satisfaction.
“You need spectacles,” I told her.
“Nonsense,” she said. “My eyes can see perfectly fine.”
“You can see fine with that thing right next to your nose. But if you had specs you wouldn’t need to bend down so close to the paper.”
“Do you know me or do I know me?” she said tartly.
“In this instance I know you better than you know me.”
“I don’t know why I bother with you, girl,” she huffed. “You’re full of troubles and now you’re bringing me troubles. You speak endless nonsense about your own self and now you have started speaking nonsense about my own self. I can only pray that it won’t be endless too.” S
he brought the palms of her hands together in a gesture of prayer and lifted her eyes heaven-wards, beseeching her God to listen.
“Whatever. If you won’t listen to me then you should go to an optician and listen to her.”
“Am I here to help you, or are you here to help me?” she said sharply. Her singsong English made me smile. Roopa had been living in London for decades, but she was born in Bangladesh and raised by traditional parents. She had an accent and the manner of speaking that took the edge off everything she said no matter how harsh she meant it to be.
“Now I am finished with my work and you can tell me the real things and I will sign your paper and you can go,” she said, not bothering to make me feel that I was any sort of valued client.
