The Good Listener (10 page)

And with that, he hung up.

Paranoia.

Trust issues.

I just kept right on adding to the list of things wrong with him.

At this point, even I knew that going to the police would be pointless.

Blake was entirely too smart, so I was sure that he already had a plan, but I really wanted to help him.

To be honest, I was just ready to help him and be done and over with it all already.

And he was trying to attach himself to the people around me so that he had some kind of leverage.

He was like my worst nightmare, and I hated myself for getting involved.

I really did.

Later that day, Summer headed out, and I stayed behind to catch up on a few more things and snoop on her computer again.

I didn’t find anything more, but I was curious.

I hadn't been able to stop thinking about the email all day.

There had to be a way to pull up deleted history, and if there was a way, I was going to work on finding it out.

Summer was my friend, and I couldn’t imagine a better assistant.

I trusted her to the fullest, and I hated that I felt like there was something more, but I did.

Had she mentioned the emails to me, maybe I would have felt different, but something just didn’t sit well with me about the whole ordeal.

Maybe it was because of all of the little proverbs about trust and lies that Blake was filling my head with every session.

Maybe it was just because I wanted to know if there had been something said that I could have used to help her.

Either way, I had to see what had been said, I didn’t think asking Summer about it was the best route to take.

I was going to have to call in some kind of computer technician.

I tried not to stay as late as I wanted to with all of the mysterious things happening, so only after about an hour, I headed out.

No one else seemed to care, but surveillance inside and outside of the office was now a must.

I headed towards my car, and just as I grabbed for the handle on the car door…

I tried to get away from them, but I couldn’t.

Someone had grabbed me from behind.

I dropped my purse and tried to turn around to protect myself, but somehow I lost my balance and fell to the ground.

“You think that you are just going to sleep with my husband and get away with it? You ruined my family! You ruined my life! My husband doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s all because of you! I sure hope you kept those roses because they would look nice on your casket at your funeral!” She screamed.

What?

I hadn't faced my attacker from the ground yet but hearing that it was a woman and everything that she’d said, I sat down on the ground and turned to face her.

She was holding a gun and instinctively, I held up my hands.

But as she studied my face she looked confused.

“I don’t understand. You’re not her. You’re not the woman that I saw with my husband.”

What did she say?

“You’re not the bitch that ruined my marriage.”

I looked at her as she stepped back.

“What? I have my own husband. I’m not sleeping with anyone else’s.”

She lowered the gun, and I became even more confused.

“I don’t understand. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else. I thought you were Hannah.”

What?

“I’m sorry. This is where Hannah works, and you were driving her car, and this car is always parked at her house. You even somewhat look like her, but you aren’t Hannah. I stared at her pictures in his phone for hours. I know every feature of her face. And you are not her,” she said.

Huh?

“But I am Hannah.”

“No. Not my husband’s Hannah,” she said and ran away.

Huh?

I watched her as she got into the black sedan that had been following me that day.

Confused and still in shock, I managed to stand up and get myself together.

I watched her speed away, and I felt as though someone had just played some kind of horrible trick on me.

What in the world just happened?
 

The police left, and China pulled up just as we were about to close the front door.

“What happened?”

“I was attacked at work.”

“You are not going back there,” Joel said.

“Yes, I am.”

“Who attacked you? And why?”

“I don’t know. She said that she thought that I was Hannah. She told me that I was sleeping with her husband and that he was in love with me. She said I ruined their marriage. She said that I drove Hannah’s car, worked where Hannah worked, and lived in Hannah’s house, but that I wasn’t Hannah. But I am. So instead of shooting me, she just ran away.”

Joel and I started to go back and forth about me quitting my job again and then China spoke up.

“What did she look like?”

“What?”

“What did she look like?”

I explained the appearance of the woman as she took a seat.

“Oops.”

“Oops, what?”

“Sounds like the wife of the married man that I was seeing.”

“What? Why would she think that your name was Hannah?”

“Because I told him that my name was Hannah.”

Both Joel and I looked at her confused.

“He was married, so I didn’t want to give him my real name. I didn’t want something to go terribly wrong where he came looking for me or stalking me or something. So I gave him a fake name.”

“It wasn’t a fake name China. It was my name!”

“I didn’t think of it like that.”

Unbelievable!

All of this mess had been because of China?

“He was from out of town, about an hour and a half away. He didn’t even know who you were or how popular you were for what you do.  When he asked for my name, your name just came out, and when I saw that he wasn’t familiar with you, I just went with it.”

“China, are you serious?” Joel asked.

“Most of the time I drove to see him. I just thought that it was easier that way. That’s why I would use your car. I didn’t want him to have my real license plate number or anything if he started acting crazy or something.”

“But you wanted him to have mine?” I said in disbelief.

“I wasn’t thinking about it like that.”

“No, because you were only thinking about yourself!”

I screamed at her, but she finished explaining herself.

“He only came here a few times. She must have followed him. Not wanting him to know where I lived, I would have him meet me here; and then I would allow him to follow me to a hotel.”

Whatever she said at this point really didn’t matter.

“Apparently, I should have been more concerned about his wife than I was with him. I’m not sure how she found out where you worked. Maybe he followed me one day, to drop off your car. And maybe she was behind him, or she could have followed me from the hotel. I’m not sure Hannah. I stopped talking to him few days after our talk. I stopped answering his calls and his texts. I ignored all of his begging and his pleas. I knew that he didn’t know how to find me so I wasn’t worried about it. I knew that finally, he would stop calling, and one day he did. He just stopped. I thought whatever we shared was a thing of the past. I didn’t know that his wife even knew about me or that she would try to attack you. I’m sorry.”

I was furious with her.

“So, this was her first time seeing you?” Joel asked me.

I shrugged.

“People always say that we looked alike. If she was far enough away or only got a glimpse of you from behind, of course, she would have thought that we were the same person.”

She was right.

People always said that we looked alike.

But screw that.

Her reckless ways could have gotten me killed.

She’d had me stalked, and almost had me gunned down by an angry wife, all because she opened her legs to a married man.

“She could have killed me China!”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? What if she had shot me one day as I was leaving work without fully getting a glimpse of my face? What if she hadn't played around, or wasted time and killed me instead of leaving the roses for me to find over and over again? What if she had run me off of the road the day that she followed me? How could you have been so stupid?”

“I said that I was sorry Hannah.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough China. Or would you prefer if I called you Hannah too?” I screamed behind me as I stormed down the hallway to my bedroom.

How could she have been so stupid?

~***~

“You can’t stay mad at me forever Joel.”

“Watch me.”

He got into his car and drove away.

Joel was so mad at me, for so many different reasons that I couldn’t keep up.

He was mad because I wouldn’t quit my job.

He was mad that I didn’t tell him about the random roses that were being left at the house or on my car.

He was still mad about the fact that I didn’t want a baby.

And the list goes on.

Yet he didn’t seem to be mad at China for almost getting me killed.

But I still wasn’t over it.

I hadn't spoken to her since that day, and I wouldn’t answer any of her calls.

Joel told me that she had gone to the police station to give them the name of the married man so that they could locate his wife, but even that wouldn’t fix it.

She was reckless, careless for what she’d done and I was going to need some time to get over it.

Finally pulling off, I headed towards the office in one hell of a bad mood.

I surely hoped that Blake was going to keep his word and take our conversations to the next level because I wasn’t in the mood today for his reindeer games.

My marriage was falling apart, again, simply because I was so consumed with helping him rather than being worried about my safety and making my husband happy.

The only person that could probably talk some sense into him and persuade him to see things my way was China or his mother.

But since I wasn’t talking to China and because his mother had been pressuring us to start a family too, I couldn’t turn to either of them for help on this one.

This time, I was on my own.

And I prepared myself for Joel to be sour until he got over it.

But he’d put his foot down.

No more working late for a while, and I could understand that much.

I didn’t have to work at the office…I could just bring it all home with me.

At the sight of the office, I shifted my focus from myself to my patients.

Just as I parked, to my surprise, I noticed Blake was sitting in the parking lot.

It was hours before his scheduled appointment, so I could only guess that maybe he wanted to talk about something important.

Joel told me that China had told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, so maybe he wanted to talk about that.

And then again, probably not since he probably didn’t really care anyway.

I put my dummy face on in preparation to pretend as though I didn’t know what had happened.

He approached me as soon as I got out of the car and leaned up against the hood of my car.

“One day she was perfect. The next day she was depressed, strung out and I no longer mattered to her.”

Nope.

This wasn’t about China.

“Your real mother?”

He nodded.

“What changed?”

“Everything”

“Where was your father?”

“Gone. He couldn’t help her. And no one could help me.”

I noticed my first scheduled appointment pulling up, but they were just going to have to wait.

Blake was talking, and I couldn’t stop him now.

“At first, she was so fun and so beautiful. I was proud to have her as my mother. It was something about her smile and her touch. And circumstances took it all away from her.”

“What kind of circumstances?”

“Life. She was never the same. Finally, she did us both a favor and overdosed.”

So that’s how she died.

“I knew that she was going to do it. It was the way that she hugged on me that night. It was the way that she kissed on my face and cried. I knew that she was going to be gone when I woke up in the morning. And I was glad. I wanted her out of my life. Surely life without her would be better. The beatings would stop. The emotional abuse would stop. At least that’s what I thought.”

“They didn’t.”

“No. They got worse. Much worse. Every home I went to was worse than the last.”