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“The newspaper?” I repeat dumbly.
She nudges her chin toward the coffee table.
Huh.
I’m on the front page.
“You don’t have to guess, then,” I say with a sigh, shifting in the overstuffed chair. There’s a box of tissues on an end table to my right, and another, larger box on the coffee table between us.
Not that I ever needed a tissue.
Two years, no crying.
They ought to give out awards for that.
“I don’t have all the details. Why don’t you tell me?”
I predict she’ll shift her position next, just enough to trigger some primal instinct in me to fill the silence.
She does.
I stay quiet.
I stay quiet until it eats away at me.
The anticipation, that is.
Not the anticipation of what’s coming next in this session, this room, this conversation.
But the burning anticipation of how close my own secrets are to being revealed to the world.
Lindsay’s not the only one with a past she wants to bury. But she trusts me now, and I can’t live with myself if I keep the truth from her.
That’s a more brutal form of betrayal.
“I’m back together with Lindsay.” The words aren’t the first ones I want to say. But they’ll have to do.
Salma doesn’t really react. Her eyes stay on mine, the skin underneath crinkling up, a non-reactive reaction.
The look encourages me to talk more.
“They let her come home. They made her stay at that mental institution for four years. Harry Bosworth called me and hired my company to be her security detail. Yesterday, Blaine appeared at Harry’s big announcement. It sent Lindsay into a tailspin.”
“Only Lindsay?”
I give a half shrug and say nothing.
“How does it feel? To be around her again?”
I can’t talk. The room fills with air, like a balloon being inflated. My eyeballs float in my head, my scalp rising up to meet the ceiling. My fists close and my thighs tense.
I have no control over my body’s reaction to Salma’s question.
“Great,” I rasp. It’s hard to choke out the word.
I tell the truth.
“You still love her.”
