Page 96 of Haunted

His mother. I stood in a room and said those things about a woman who has been dead for ten years, to the son who buried her. Parentification. Free childcare. Elliott. I said the word abuse to him about his own mother.

I think about how I’d feel if a man said that about my own mother. Somebody standing in my kitchen taking her apart, telling me what she really was, explaining my own childhood to me with his hand on my arm.

I would put him through a wall.

I’m a horrible person.

When I get to work, Joe looks pointedly at the clock.

“Has he noticed?” I whisper.

“Not yet. But I wouldn’t push it.” He looks me up and down. “You okay?”

“Bad headache.”

He looks like he wants to say more. He doesn’t. I slide past the desk into my office and close the shutters against the light. Two pills, dry-swallowed. Today is going to be a slog.

But there is something I have to do first.

I spend the best part of an hour on it, which is fifty-five minutes longer than I have ever spent on anything to do with my own head. Most of what comes up is useless—wellness centers, life coaches, a man with a website in three shades of lavender who wants to talk about my inner child.

Then I find one. Gregory Elion. Office on Third. Combat trauma, complex PTSD, some combination of EMDR and other things I don’t understand yet. I read every review twice.

I pick up the phone and put it down again. Then I pick it up and dial before I can stop myself, and a receptionist answers.

“I need to talk to somebody,” I manage. “I hurt a man last week and I’m not sure I could have stopped.”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “When would you like to come in? We have a cancellation on Thursday.”

“I’ll take it.” I don’t ask for a time that works for me. All times work for me. I don’t care.

I write it on the back of my hand like a coward, where I can’t lose it and can’t pretend I didn’t.

There’s a knock on my door. Rex Harlow peers in without waiting for an answer. I pull up a spreadsheet.

“There you are, hard at work,” he says. “May I?”

He settles into the chair across from my desk and folds his hands across his chest. “I wanted to discuss that nasty business over the weekend.”

“It was pretty bad,” I say carefully.

“But your quick thinking averted a serious problem. If there had been an incident concerning Mr. Bishop, especially after the warnings we were given—”

“Warnings, sir?”

He looks at the closed door. “Confidentially, there was an anonymous tip-off from a friend of Mr. Nash’s in Asheville who said he’d formed an unhealthy fixation on Mr. Bishop. We passed it along to campus security, but—” He spreads his hands. “These things are hard to act on preemptively.”

I stare at him. Seven minutes. That’s how long it took from the moment Jonny disappeared behind that curtain to when the police arrived. Seven minutes in which, if I hadn’t followed him, Nash would have had Jonny alone, backstage, with no witnesses.

“You knew,” I say. “And nobody told us.”

“It was a possibility, not a certainty,” Rex says smoothly. “Nevertheless, you were cool under pressure. I’m really proud of you, son.”

Son. There’s that word again. The same word he used with Jonny in the classroom. Just a verbal tic, I tell myself. Some men call everyone son. I keep my face still so that I don’t betray my rage.

“Has anyone told Mr. Bishop about the tip-off?” I ask.

“I don’t think so. That would be a matter for the police, not for us.” He straightens. “Are you ready for our lunch? In the light of everything that happened, we have a lot to talk about when it comes to your future here.”