Her words tailed off as she opened the card and read the note inside. Nikki watched her reactions with a therapist’s trained eye. The fluttering hands, pressed against her chest. The nervous bite of her lower lip, followed by a smile that seemed to be full of both sadness and love.
Nikki felt her own chest tighten. ‘They’re from him, aren’t they?’
Anne nodded with a sigh. ‘They’re from my husband. He says he wishes he could be here. That he hears my music every day in his dreams, and carries it in his heart.’
Nikki rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a shame he didn’t “carry it in his heart” while he was keeping you prisoner in his house against your will and refusing to let you perform at all. For six years.’
‘I know,’ Anne admitted, still staring wistfully at the flowers. ‘But look. There’s a bloom for every day I’ve been gone. Ninety-six, he says here. You have to admit, it’s romantic.’
Nikki felt a rush of fury overwhelm her. How could women be so stupid? How could they allow men to manipulate and control them like this? To get away with it?
‘Romantic?’ she snapped. ‘For God’s sake, Anne, grow up! This isn’t some Harlequin romance. This is your future. Your life.’
Anne flushed, but this time it was with anger. She’d never lost her temper with Nikki before but her feelings came tumbling out now like water through a shattered dam.
‘You’re right, it is my life. Mine, not yours. So back off.’
‘I care about you, Anne,’ said Nikki, stung. ‘As your therapist—’
‘Oh, STOP IT!’ Anne shouted, the first time Nikki had ever heard her raise her voice. ‘This isn’t about you being my therapist and we both know it.’
Nikki stared back at her, stunned. An awkward silence fell, with neither woman knowing what to say or do next. In the end it was Anne who attempted to normalize the situation.
‘Look. I appreciate your advice. I do. And your support. You changed my life,’ she said. ‘But you don’t need to be so hateful about my husband all the time. Even when he does something nice, something kind.’
‘But it’s not kind. That’s the whole point. It’s controlling!’ Nikki couldn’t help herself. ‘It’s manipulative. And by the way, he’s your ex-husband. I’m sorry, Anne, but you have to ask yourself, just how blind are you willing to be?’
‘How blind am I willing to be? What about you?’ Anne snapped, fighting back tears. ‘How blind were you in your own marriage? Hm? Did you really not know about your husband’s affair?’
Nikki blanched. The world seemed muffled suddenly, as if she were having this conversation in a dream, or underwater. ‘How did you know about that?’ she asked Anne, her voice cracking. ‘Who told you?’
‘I think you should leave now.’ Anne’s voice was quiet but her resolve was clear. She wasn’t going to answer Nikki’s questions. A line had been crossed, and there was no coming back.
‘Fine.’ Nikki felt as if someone were pouring acid down her throat, right into her chest and then down to the pit of her stomach. ‘I’ll go.’
Turning at the door, she looked back at Anne.
‘He’ll kill you, you know. One day. If you go back to him. Men like that always do. It’s kill or be killed.’
Anne stifled a sob as the door slammed shut.
Driving through downtown, crawling towards the 10 freeway in gridlock traffic, Nikki felt sick to her stomach. It was that awful sour sickness, as if her veins were running with turned milk. Part self-pity, part shame, part anger, part regret.
She was right about Anne’s husband. He might be generous and charming, but he was also a bully, and bullies never changed. They both knew, deep down, that his ‘romantic gestures’ were really controlling gestures in a wafer-thin disguise. But Anne would no longer hear that from Nikki, because Nikki had stopped behaving like her doctor and started behaving like … what? Her friend? Her lover? Her stalker?
She was wrong to have spoken to Anne the way she did.
And now, finally, Anne had called her on it. Not just on her own inappropriate feelings – ‘This isn’t about you being my therapist and we both know it!’ – but on Doug’s affair. How on earth had Anne found out about that? Nikki had certainly never discussed it with her or alluded to it in any way. In fact, other than Gretchen, and Haddon Defoe, nobody close to her knew – or if they did, they were diplomatic enough never to speak of it.
The sick feeling intensified. Through her car window, Nikki saw four homeless men huddled together in a theater doorway. One looked up and right at her, with the wide, empty gaze of the hopelessly addicted. Nikki waited to feel something, the familiar stab of compassion she used to have when Doug was alive, before that Russian bitch destroyed everything Nikki held dear. But there was nothing. Something in Nikki’s heart, her soul if such a thing existed, had died. Or perhaps it hadn’t died so much as run out of gas. One day, maybe, her tanks of love and care and human feeling would be replenished and she’d be able to feel again?
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
At the freeway on-ramp, she noticed another desperate case, a middle-aged woman this time, like her, only this woman had the same revolting, scaly skin Nikki remembered from the boys at Haddon’s Venice clinic. Krokodil, he’d called it. The ‘new new thing’ that the cartels in LA were battling to control.
She’d felt sympathy back in Venice, for the two boys. But not now. Not tonight. Perhaps her shameful encounter with Anne Bateman had been the final straw, the last blow Nikki was capable of sustaining before total emotional shut-down.