Blinded by Stephen White Read Free Book Online Page A

Anything?
    I hated asking. She hated answering. I think I hated asking because of how much she hated answering. She hated answering because she believed that her chronic illness and its myriad symptoms constituted the most grievously tedious subjects in the world.
    “I just realized what I said about Sam and Sherry. Do you get angry with me, Alan? Because I’m sick? Do you think it’s my fault when I’m not feeling well? That I do something to… or I don’t do something that…”
    I sat back. “I get angry that you’re sick. But no, I don’t get angry at you for having MS.”
    “I do,” she said. “I get angry at me. I think it’s okay if you do, too.”
    No, it’s not,
I thought.
It’s not. You would like it to be okay, I know you would. But it’s not.
    Lauren sipped some wine. “Grace isn’t going to let us sleep tonight,” she warned, having successfully ignored my question regarding the current state of her health. “We can’t let her stay down too long.”
    “Let’s leave her down long enough to have dinner. We’ll get her up after. Maybe she’ll be in a better mood.”
    Lauren lifted a spoonful of soup. “Yeah, that’s likely to happen. So, is there anything new at the office?” she asked in a playful, I’ll-go-along-someplace-else-with-you voice.
    I surprised her. I said, “Actually, there is something that came up. I could use your advice.”
    Without using any names or revealing in what state, let alone in what city, the events had taken place, I gave Lauren the broad outlines of the tale of Gibbs and Sterling Storey. I included my suspicions about the psychological and likely physical abuse that were part of the fabric of their relationship.
    My indiscretion with Lauren was a gray area in confidentiality that I usually tried to avoid. These “I have a patient who…” conversations happen all too frequently between psychotherapists and colleagues or laypeople. Most mental health professionals engage in them with a rationalization that if they do not reveal sufficient details to allow the listener to identify the patient in question, then the letter of the patient’s confidentiality has not been violated.
    Lauren’s soup bowl was empty when I completed my exposition. I ladled her some more.
    “So what are you going to do?” she asked me.
    “Exactly what she wants me to do, I guess. As soon as I’m sure she has a safe place to stay, I’ll call the police in the town where she was living and tell them what she told me.”
    “Yeah?”
    “What do you think will happen when I do?” I asked.
    “Depends on whether or not the cops believe you.”
    “And what does that depend on?”
    “On whether she’s given you any information that coincides with what the local cops already know about the crime. If your client knows something that isn’t in the public record, I would predict that they would take you quite seriously.”
    “And then what?”
    “I’m speculating, okay? If they believe her story, they would either ask her to travel back there so they could talk to her, or they would send somebody out here to interview her. Maybe him, too-her husband-if he’s stupid enough to be accommodating. It all depends on what they’ve been able to develop at their end and how it matches up with what she knows. But it’s hard to predict. You know what these cold cases are like. Detectives lose interest. Evidence gets lost. Witnesses die or move away. People forget.”
    “She said she’d testify against him.”
    “Sorry,” Lauren said. “It’s not that simple.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Spousal privilege.”
    “So?”
    “Spousal privilege is a trickier thing than most people realize. Each spouse has a privilege not to disclose marital communications, and-this is the part that people don’t know-they also have a privilege to prevent their spouse from disclosing marital communications.”
    “Really? I thought spousal privilege meant that spouses couldn’t be compelled to