“Did you murder your mother, Sophie? Is that why you went to prison?”
She gasped. “No! I told you I went to prison because of Logan Barberi.” Looking wounded, she inquired, “Do you think I’m actually capable of murder?”
“Of course not, Sophie. I said that to shake you up, to show how preposterous it is for your father to blame you for your mother’s death.”
“But she had a heart attack because she was so devastated that I went to prison!”
“I see. And how exactly was her devastation your responsibility? How were you supposed to control her emotional reactions? I’m still waiting to hear how you killed her.”
Sophie gaped at Hunter with a bewildered expression. “But … but my mom wouldn’t have had a heart attack if I hadn’t totally screwed things up by going to prison.”
“How do you know that? How do you know it wasn’t some inevitable heart defect? Maybe her heart would have given out even sooner, but she stayed alive to help you through your sentencing.”
Sophie felt utterly flummoxed. All those years, she’d just wanted her parents to be happy with her, to be proud of her. She was good at taking care of them, she thought. Her attempts to make them happy, to take care of them—had those efforts been misdirected? It had been so awful when her father screamed at her to leave home and never come back. She looked away as tears began to fall.
Hunter watched her and took a deep breath, wanting to give her some time. They were finally getting somewhere. He prompted gently, “You’re feeling sad about your mother?”
Sniffing, Sophie replied softly, “I miss her.”
“What was she like?”
She wiped tears from her cheeks. “She was pretty complex. She could be a lot of fun, but she could also be exhausting. My mom had a rough childhood, and she definitely had some Axis II thing going on,” Sophie explained, referring to the diagnosis for personality disorder. “I couldn’t pinpoint if she was avoidant or paranoid. At times she had major depression, and she met criteria for alcohol abuse.”
Hunter sighed. “Instead of diagnosing her, how about you tell me what she was like as a mother?”
“Not very good,” Sophie immediately responded, followed by a guilty grimace. “Oh, God. That’s not a nice thing to say about someone who died!”
“It’s okay to feel anger, Sophie. Naturally your mom wasn’t perfect.”
“She and my dad fought a lot. My mom would come to me and complain, and I hated it. But I tried to listen and help because my mom didn’t have any other friends.”
“So your mom, who was an adult responsible for taking care of herself, did not have any friends.”
She looked at him blankly. “What’s your point?” Hunter did not answer, but continued to gaze at her kindly. Sophie chewed her bottom lip and asked, “You’re saying it’s not my fault my mom didn’t have friends? That I shouldn’t have had to listen to her complain about my dad if I didn’t want to?”
“Exactly!” He let that sink in and then inquired, “How did you feel inside when your mother criticized your father?”
“Anxious. My stomach would get this knotted-up feeling, all tight and tense.”
“Did you ever tell her that? That you felt sick to your stomach when she complained about your dad?”
“No.” Sophie glanced at the fish swimming in the aquarium. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She needed me.”
“And what did you need?”
Getting no answer, Hunter continued. “You and your client Lauren are two peas in a pod, Sophie. Can’t you see that? You take care of everybody except yourself. Lauren benefitted from learning how to put herself first. Do you think you can do that too?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “I still feel so guilty about my mom dying. I don’t think that’s going to fade anytime soon.”
“Change definitely takes time. Give yourself some time.” They both sat contemplatively for a few moments. “Maybe it was a good thing you lost your psychologist license,” Hunter said.
She stared as if he were crazy. “What?”
“Sophie, you cannot be an effective therapist until you work through your own issues. We hear awful stories all day long in our jobs, and we absorb a lot of our clients’ pain. If we don’t know how to take care of ourselves, then we become overwhelmed—anxiety, insomnia. I think you would have burned out quickly if you hadn’t lost your license.”
“We’ll never get to know that now, will we?”
“You haven’t fully answered your own question yet,” Hunter said. “Do you believe people can change?”
“I used to think so. When Logan told me about his father beating him, about his failure at protecting his brother, I could almost see the hardened man become softer before my eyes, like he was healing from that childhood trauma. I thought he could escape his negative family influence. I thought I was helping him. I thought he really trusted me.” She exhaled derisively. “But then he killed that trust in one fell swoop. He’d been trained to be a criminal by his family, and he couldn’t change.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not really. I don’t want to burden you with the sordid tale.”
“After all this discussion about caretaking, are you trying to take care of me, Sophie?”
She dropped her mouth open to protest, but she realized he was right. She was incorrigible. She smiled. “Touché, Dr. Hayes. You’ll get the whole damn story. Just remember, you asked for it.”
She had been just zipping her skirt, her face flushed with a post-coital glow, when there was a soft rapping at her office door. Thinking Logan must have left something behind, Sophie grinned as she waltzed to the door, teasing in a sing-song voice while she twisted the doorknob, “What did you forget—”
She stopped immediately once she opened the door. Instead of looking up at the six-foot-one Logan, she found herself looking down at her five-foot-two colleague, Jacki Fernandez.
“Oh! Um, hi, Jacki. What’s up?”
The dark-haired woman seemed to study Sophie curiously, and Sophie began feeling self-conscious about her untucked and wrinkled silk shirt, disheveled skirt, and bare feet. Jacki looked up at her friend and pouted, “What, no Jaquita Chaquita?”
Sophie laughed, hearing her refer to her nickname. “Sorry,” she apologized, opening the door wider and gesturing for Jacki to enter. “Bienvenidos, Jaquita Chaquita.”
Jacki tentatively entered, followed by Sophie, who crossed the room and slipped her feet into her black pumps, which made her tower over the diminutive Mexican. “What can I do for you, Jacki?”
“I won’t stay long—I have a client coming in five minutes. I just wanted to give you the heads-up that some of us are having the cleaning company deep clean our offices this weekend.”
“Deep clean?”