Chapter 3

Emma

“Morning sweetie!” My head was pounding with the need for coffee, but somehow, I kept my voice cheery as Nick shuffled into view in his footie pajamas. He blinked up at me sleepily, coal-colored hair askew on his head, like it had been combed with an eggbeater. He gave me a muzzy little smile and came for a hug.

I hugged back. “Did you sleep okay?”

“Mm,” he managed a second before a giant yawn. “Uh-huh. I need the bafroom.”

“Go on, I’ll get breakfast started.” My shower could wait. So could dressing. Better to cook in something that wouldn’t be ruined by my getting egg or coffee on it anyway. I was clumsy in the morning.

The day had dawned clear, bright, and drippy after two days of rain. Weird, getting rain in LA in June. I couldn’t tell if it was climate change or just randomness, but it had taken the yellow out of the air, and the morning pain out of my sinuses. The smog break wouldn’t last even half a day, but I was glad for it anyway.

The smog was one of the few things I didn’t love about Los Angeles. Everyone I cared about lived here, every happy event in my life had happened here. I had even gotten my doctorate through UCLA. I wanted to travel eventually, once Nick was old enough. But this was home.

I got the coffee brewing, the griddle heating, the pancake batter mixed up and the fruit and yogurt into the bowls. Nick squeaked his way to the kitchen in his new blue and white sneakers, his shirt misbuttoned. I wiped my hands carefully before helping him fix it. “There we go. How hungry are you this morning?”

“Really hungry,” he said with his big-toothed grin. “I want a hundred pancakes!”

“A hundred, huh? I don’t think I have that much batter.”

“Can I have a hundred little ones?” He gave me the puppy eyes. Oh boy.

“How about ten little ones? That’s what you had last time. And we’re having fruit and yogurt too.” Nick was growing so fast it was ridiculous, it felt like I was buying him new clothes and shoes every few months.

“Okay!” He hopped up onto his seat at our blond wood breakfast table, squinting a little in a sunbeam coming through the windows. “The rain went away. Can we go to the park?”

“After I pick you up from kindergarten, sure.” I had gone back and forth with Uncle Charles about putting Nick in a regular school, even a nice one. He had tried to insist on a nanny and private tutors, but I wanted Nick out there making friends and doing normal kid things. He had already lost so much already, he didn’t need to miss out on that too. Isolated rich kids were almost always the most badly adjusted, along with traumatized kids. I didn’t want Nick to be both.

I made little stacks of silver-dollar pancakes for him and for myself. Breakfast and dinner were my only chances to have a sit-down meal with him on weekdays, and I always tried to make it a little special. Besides Uncle Charles, I was all Nick had now, so everything was up to me. His health, his happiness, his safety.

“So can I play Minecraft when we get back from the park?” His voice was high with excitement at the prospect. He loved to build anything, both in the game and with the model sets I got him. Just simple ones now for his little fingers, but he was improving fast.

“Sure, kiddo. You can play while I’m making dinner. Maybe a little after. But we still need to work on your reading tonight, so not all night.”

Negotiating with a five-year-old was its own unique skill. I was just glad that I’d had some experience before ending up with my own to raise. I had seen too many kids hurt by their parents’ and guardians’ mistakes, even some well-intentioned ones. One of my greatest fears these days was messing up myself, but I was starting to gain more confidence.

I brought the food over to the table after turning off the burner and leaving the griddle to cool before I cleaned it. My mind kept jumping ahead to my day’s schedule, which patients I had, how much paperwork was due and to whom, and what errands I could squeeze in on my lunch break. It was going to be a tough day—but the life I led was exactly what I had signed up for, so I could hardly complain.

“And here are your pancakes,” I said as I set down the plate with the small pancakes in two stacks on them.

He set to work at once, layering them with sloppy scoops of yogurt and fruit in little towers, like an architect’s idea of a parfait. He then made one of the towers disappear much faster than he’d built it. “Yum,” he declared, and went back to work.

This kid is either going to be a master chef or build skyscrapers. I hadn’t ever met a kid who liked order as much as this one. His room wasn’t immaculate, but the little guy tried. I knew it was a way of coping, and he’d relaxed on it a little in the last year, but even when he was feeling better, it was a good habit to have.

And one I didn’t have. The top of my desk in my home office was a disaster, even if the spaces I shared with Nick were tidy. I lost my car keys, or the remote, or left a book I was reading in some weird place when I got distracted by something.

I had spent most of my life being trailed around by nannies and maids at Uncle Charles’s sprawling penthouse and had gone from that to living on my own, and then looking after Nick. Only once I was responsible for cleaning up my own mess had I realized just how terrible I was at it. I was a lot better than I had been in college, but as I looked at the relative chaos on my own plate, I knew I was being outmatched by a five-year-old.

Now that will keep you humble.I thought to myself.

“How come we never go to the park after dark?” Nick asked me suddenly, catching my attention.

“The park closes at sunset, honey.” And with good reason. The local park was maybe five years old, with a large play structure, swings, and a small dog park—which was what always drew Nick the most.

“Yes, but why do they close it?”

“They decided to do that because it’s not as safe there after dark.” I softballed the truth, but I gave it to them. “People can’t see to play safely, and sometimes there are crimes.”

“They could put big lights in,” he said, surprising me. “Then bad people couldn’t hide, and kids could see.”

I wasn’t sure how to explain to him that the Parks Department budgets had been cut multiple times in the last five years, How his idea would work, but still would probably never actually happen. And even if it did, these days, nowhere was entirely safe, even with bright lights and cameras. Unless you were Uncle Charles in his guarded tower, of course.

“It’s a good idea. It really is.” I smiled at him. “Maybe you’ll design a park someday, where kids can go and be safer.” And knowing Los Angeles, and how bold the local criminals were getting, that place would probably need armed guards.

My uncle thought I was crazy, moving away from his castle in the sky to my own home, to work and earn my own money. He thought I worked too hard, and unnecessarily. I had my trust fund to live off. I could have retired at any time, stayed nestled in the lap of luxury, where nothing took any effort and we mixed constantly with the kind of people he thought were beneath us.

Uncle Charles was a dinosaur, and overprotective. I’d made my peace with it. As I finished breakfast and brought Nick a little more yogurt, I wondered what kinds of experiences had led him to become quite so cloistered and paranoid, and to want the same for me. Maybe I would never know. My uncle wasn’t the talkative or the emotional type. He had been there for me constantly after my parents’ deaths, and I owed him a lot. But sometimes I really wondered what was going on in his head.

I was cleaning up from breakfast and planning the day’s wardrobe when a sudden chill touched the back of my neck. The hairs there prickled. I looked around instinctively, eyes flicking first around the room and then to each of the windows in the bright kitchen.

Someone is watching me.The feeling hit me right in the gut, an instinct with no evidence, as I nervously looked everywhere I could think of. The hill above our house. The trees across the street. The van with darkened windows parked in their shade. The sedan driving by.

What was this feeling?

I was no stranger to fear. Some patients got violent—even adults. Some misfortunes could hit out of nowhere—like car crashes. But I wasn’t used to this.

I found myself trembling as I went around checking doors and windows, making sure they were all locked. It could have been nothing. Just my imagination getting stirred up. But it had happened absolutely out of nowhere, and that made no sense at all.’ I hurriedly finished up with the dishes and went to hop in the shower.

I didn’t quite relax again until we were in my royal blue Volvo and safely underway. Even then, I kept an eye out for anything strange as we headed for Briarcrest Day School. I had learned early that no one was ever truly safe. That was just an illusion we convinced ourselves of to keep from being afraid.

That knowledge never really went away once you had it.

“So how come we don’t get snow in Los Angeles?”

I smiled as Nick’s chatter snapped me out of my dark thoughts. “Because it never gets cold enough to slow. It’s colder at the tops of mountains and in places farther north. But not here. We’re pretty much in a desert, honey.”

Gardening fanatics called it a Mediterranean climate, but I didn’t know anywhere in the Mediterranean that had dealt with droughts this routinely. Unless it kept raining, water restrictions would turn every front lawn in the city brown by mid-August.

“Is that why the canals bring the water?”

“That’s right, we get some of our water from up north.” And a lot of it went to agriculture, not the city. But somehow, we still had golf courses and fountains everywhere.

“How come they didn’t make the city where there was water?”

“Too many people lived up there already. And lots of people like the sun and the dry weather here. People have big farms nearby too.”

“Oh.” He went quiet as I fought traffic, but piped up again after about a minute. “Do you like it better at the house, than at Uncle Charles’s place?”

“Well, yeah, I do. You know I love Uncle Charles, but I always wanted my own house. Do you like it better?”

“Sometimes I like it better. But I like living up in the clouds too.”

Up in the clouds. Above everyone else, like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. It was where my uncle was most comfortable. In fact, the older he got, the less he liked leaving his fortress.

“Yeah, it’s fun sometimes. But I’d rather be down here with people.”

“Me too. I hope Billy’s back today. He had a cold.”

I listened to him chatter happily about his friends in kindergarten and their plans for this summer. “Billy’s parents have a big boat and they’re going up to San Francisco. Can we get a boat?”

“I don’t know, honey. I’d have to find someone to pilot it. It’s not like driving a car.”

“Oh. Can I drive it?”

“You have to be grown to get your license, honey, but if you still want to, then sure.”

Nick’s school had tall iron gates like an old-fashioned estate, drop-off happened right out front, with a gaggle of parents saying their daily goodbyes as he and I walked up hand in hand. “Okay, honey, you know the rules. You want to tell them to me?”

“Um… don’t talk to strangers, don’t leave with strangers, and eat all my lunch. Do I have to eat the carrot slices?” He pulled a face.

“At least half of them, okay?”

He nodded grumpily. “Okay.”

I leaned down to kiss his cheek and shoo him through the gates to where his classmates and teacher were waiting in their little cluster. I was glad that she came out to walk them in. I always felt a little shaky leaving him, even behind a locked gate and with a security guy.

As a psychiatrist, I knew where my nightmares about him disappearing from school or home came from. I was no stranger to suddenly losing loved ones. But then again, neither was he. Like peas in a pod, but in the worst way, I thought as I watched the teacher usher the kids inside.

“He’ll be okay,” I told myself as I made myself turn and walk away. I had to get to the clinic. Today was my day for seeing adult patients. They wore me out a lot more than the little ones. You could pretty much always get kids to listen to you if you knew the right tricks. But at least three of the patients on today’s roster were convinced they knew better than I about everything, including, in one case, doing my job.

Dealing with closed-minded, stubborn patients with big egos was the toughest part of my day-to-day job. They went to therapy to get help, but then they pulled their heads into their shells and refused to budge, the moment I talked about changing their habits or ways of thinking.

How could you even get through to someone about what was bothering them if they insisted that they were perfect, and nothing was wrong? How could you get them to make needed changes if they couldn’t understand the need? How could you show someone that their pride was holding them back? I had great training, but with people like that, I had to be creative and persistent, and burn so much energy that I would come home exhausted.

But that was the battle, same as when I had to explain death to a five-year-old or listen to a tween talk about her parents’ divorce. They all deserved good care. And I aimed to provide it.

When I slid into my parking space at the medical center in Santa Monica where I saw adult clients, I was surprised to see a tall figure standing outside the glass door that led to my waiting room. The building wasn’t open yet, but he stood placidly, leaning against the handrail that led from the sidewalk up to the door.

The stranger didn’t look like he was from Santa Monica. His suit was elegant and dark, with the faint sheen of a silk blend. As I got out of the car and got a better look, I realized the fabric was a very dark purple. The man wearing it was imposing in more than height, he had the jawline of a Roman hero, prominent features, intense, sunken blue eyes, and a neatly trimmed beard. His hair was black and backswept, his shoulders broad, and his stance confident. He looked like he owned the whole street.

I didn’t impress easily, or attract easily. In fact, I had always been picky about my men. But this stranger with his brooding good looks ticked all the boxes for me, at least when it came to appearance and style.

He pushed away from the railing as I drew near, looking over at me with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation. I wondered what in the world this polished man could be here for.

“May I help you?” I asked as I approached. He towered over me. I quashed a bout of nervousness and looked him in the eyes.

“Dr. Martinez?” he asked, in a deep, silky voice that made my toes curl.

I swallowed and nodded. “Yes. And you are?”

“My name is Viktor.” His gaze swept over me, neither leering nor entirely dispassionate. My pulse picked up, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from fear, or just from him. Those burning eyes. The dark silk of his voice. The way he took up space, not quite looming over me, The spicy musk of his cologne. “I have come here seeking a professional with openings for new clients.”

I hesitated, eyebrows rising. He was nothing like my other clients. No hesitation, no discomfort, none of the embarrassment that I usually saw with new male clients who sought me out. Men weren’t encouraged to get therapy, that was too much like asking for help with a problem they were somehow expected not to have. They were always at least a little awkward about approaching me for therapy.

Not this man. He was as cool and in control as if he was my landlord coming for the facility’s rent. No awkwardness. No hints of vulnerability in his cold blue eyes.

Something was wrong.

My gut started jumping around. As attractive and charismatic as this Viktor was, as sincere as he seemed to be, as much as my body was responding to him out of nowhere… my instincts would not stop screaming at me. No. Don’t agree to it. Don’t even go inside with him.

“I’m sorry,” I said before the tension could rise any further. “At the moment, I am not taking on new clients. I could make a referral for you if you like?”

My face felt cold. I knew I had gone pale, and prayed he didn’t notice.

Instead of looking disappointed, he lifted an eyebrow slightly, as if he knew that I was lying. The silence between us stretched out unbearably before he finally said, “Ah I see.”

He was wearing black leather gloves despite the warm morning and fished a very plain business card out of his wallet. He handed it over. “Then I should give you this, so that you may contact me when you do have an opening.”

I took the card. It had only a phone number on it, no name, address, or any other information. “If you insist. I do have several colleagues who could help—”

“Have a good morning,” he said curtly, and turned on his heel to walk away. I watched him cross the small parking lot and get into a fancy black coupe. As he drove away, I stared down at the card, wondering what in the world that was about.