Page 67 of The Therapist
‘I’ll be with you,’ he says.
My heart is racing, adrenalin flowing through my body. It’s not fear. It’s excitement, an excitement that was unlocked the moment we met, the moment we recognised each other. There is nothing more glorious than this.
He never gave me any therapy, not the way my husband thought he would. Instead, we spent the hour we were together indulging ourselves. And when I told him my plan, he thought I was brilliant because I am. But he had a better idea, one that involved Lana, sweet, gullible Lana. I could see her jealousy of me, of my beauty, written across her face whenever she looked at me. I wouldn’t need to kill ‘the husband’. Lana would do it for me. It was perfect. She would do it to save a battered woman. I knew she would. She likes to rescue lost souls.
The corridors are empty, nurses in other rooms speaking with hushed voices.
I push open a door and there he is, still in a bed, the man I’m here to kill.
I should never have married, never had children but I didn’t know there was an option. I didn’t know that someone else like me existed.
And tomorrow, I will return from my break and I will be shocked at what my therapist has done, heartbroken over the loss of my husband who I tried so hard to help become a better person. Poor Mike. He was never going to change.
‘Ready?’ Ben asks me.
‘Ready,’ I say.
THIRTY-FIVE
Mike
He wants to sleep but he can’t seem to let go. He can’t allow himself to fully relax. His children are with a stranger. They must be so scared. Have they let them share a room, a bed even? They’re so little.
With some effort, he grabs his phone from the side table, opens it and checks for messages.
He and Lana had a plan but he wasn’t supposed to fall over and hit his head. The sound the gun made shocked him, causing him to stumble back. It sounds different up close and he can’t help thinking it was a stupid idea to go through with the whole thing. He should have made sure the garden was clean, everything cleared up. But he hadn’t expected to have to go into the garden.
He hasn’t been thinking straight since his call with Lana, since the call he made after he got the message:There’s something you need to know about your wife. Please contact me.He couldn’t believe it was Lana who answered the phone, and he was going to hang up but she said, ‘You need to listen, listen to what I have to say.’ And then there were a lot of thingshe couldn’t believe but that actually made perfect sense. The cookie jar was on his mind the whole time. Sandy had planned it all so carefully.
In the many hours since then, he has spent the time going over every moment of his relationship with Sandy. How long had she been planning on using him for life insurance money? What kind of a human being had he married? How had he not seen through to the core of who she was from the beginning? And more importantly, how can he ever trust himself again?
In truth, he and Lana had no idea how it would unfold. They suspected but they didn’t know what was going to happen. The scream from the garden was clever and it turned the whole thing on its head.
‘Ben has given me the gun for a reason,’ Lana told him on the phone. ‘He wants me to hurt you. They want you out of the way. But if I can get Ben to your house, maybe we can get him to confess.’
The phone call comes back to him in snatches because he was in shock, because it was so hard to take it all in.
It had all been a set-up.
‘How long have they been together?’ he asked Lana.
‘How long ago did she have her first therapy appointment?’
‘Months,’ he replied and shock was replaced by other emotions – humiliation and anger, fury actually – and he knew that if Sandy had been standing in front of him, he would have lashed out, would have finally given back what he had been getting for years.
‘I need you to focus here, Mike,’ she said, dragging him back into what felt like the worst conversation he had ever had in his life as she explained what the private detective she had spoken to had found out.
The idea of a two-million-dollar life insurance policy was almost laughable. How had she been paying for it without him knowing?
‘We need to tell the police,’ he said. ‘I’ll call them now.’
‘Maybe, but Detective Franks said he heard from Sandy so they are unlikely to believe you or me.’
‘They couldn’t have heard from her. She left her phone here.’
‘Oh…oh,’ she said and he could feel her mind turning.
‘I haven’t hurt her, you know that, you know that’s the truth.’
