Overheard in a Dream by Torey Hayden Read Free Book Online Page B

perceptions you don’t feel are wrong.” He smiled at her. “But that’s not quite what therapy is. It’s simply about fixing things that don’t work. Just as if your car stopped working. You’d take it to a garage and let a mechanic repair it. You wouldn’t expect him to do stuff you hadn’t wanted done or to customize the car to his liking and not give it back to you. You’d expect him simply to find out what’s wrong and repair it so that you can enjoy your car again. Same here, except that I work with people, not cars. Your relationship with Conorhas stopped working. So you’ve brought Conor to see if I can fix that. And because relationships always involve more than one person, I need to see everyone involved to do my job properly. I’m not going to make anyone think or do anything they don’t want to. I’m just going to try and fix what’s broken.”
    Her cheeks flushed. She ducked her head and James saw tears come to the corners of her eyes. He sat back in a casual manner to lessen the intensity of the moment, because this wasn’t the time or the place. Indeed, he was deeply relieved that the girls had remained occupied playing in Becky’s room.
    “Sorry,” Laura murmured. “I hadn’t meant it to get this far.”
    “Not to worry.”
    “I think it was the ‘relationships stopped working’ comment.” She was tearful again. “Sorry.”
    “Not to worry.”
    “It’s just … well … ‘relationships not working’ is a bit of an understatement,” she said wearily. “Because it’s not just Conor …”
    James knew he ought to stop her right there. The appropriate place for this conversation was the office. Here at his own kitchen table, with the girls chattering in the next room and apt to burst in at any moment, was most definitely not the place to encourage the conversation in the direction it was going. But James sensed a rare chink in Laura’s armour, and if he had learned anything from that whole tragedy in New York, it was to recognize that sometimes you had to break the rules. So he said, “What’s happened?”
    “Alan left me.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “It’s given me such a shock,” she said and tears thickened her voice.
    “So how did this come about?” James asked.
    “We had the stupidest argument. Over a lawnmower, would you believe?”
    James smiled sympathetically. “That must have been upsetting.”
    “It was so stupid. Al had been in town and found this lawn-mower on sale. It was a good price, but it was this huge, heavy thing and wasn’t self-propelled. I’m the one who cares for the yard, so any lawn-mower we get, I’m the one who’ll be using it. I wouldn’t even be able to push that beast. So I said he needed to take it back.
    “Al flatly refused. We’ve got this weird relationship regarding money. We always have. And that’s what this was about. He’d paid for it, so he wasn’t going to take it back, because then it was as if I’d said he made a bad choice with his money. It escalated from there, because I didn’t want to get stuck with this crap machine and he didn’t want to take it back. So in the end I just said, okay,
I’m
going to take it back. I went out and got in the pickup, because the lawn-mower was still in the back of it and I took off for town.
    “This isn’t like me,” she said and looked over. “I’m normally not at all confrontational. Before I even got into town, I was regretting I’d made a big deal out of it. I almost turned around then …” Her voice caught. “But I didn’t. I’d gone all that way, so I thought I might as well make use of it. So I went to the grocery store. When I got back to the ranch, he was gone. And, of course, he’d taken the kids.”
    Laura’s shoulders dropped. She let out a long, slow breath. “That was the very worst moment I’ve ever had.” The tearsglistened yet again. “Coming into the house, finding it empty, realizing they were gone.”
    “When did this happen?”