Lorna felt a quake so deep she feared she would explode in his office. Those emotions, those thoughts around her so-called regrets, and her mother, and Kristen, were packed tightly away, and she didn’t think it was a good idea to get them out.
“Lorna?”
She frowned. “I have let go of the past, Micah. I never think about it.”That’s a lie, a little voice inside told her immediately. She slammed her bomb-shelter door shut on her conscience. “But I’ll consider exploring it.” She was not going to explore it. Get out of here with that “opening herself up” crap. Every time she did, something terrible happened.
Micah smiled. “I think we’ve made progress.”
“I’m not making any promises, so don’t get too excited.”
“I understand.” He looked almost smug, like he’d won something.
“I might not even come back to this stupid place,” she added.
“Not even for a sound bath?”
“Especially not for a sound bath.”
“I’ll schedule one for you after our next session. It should help you down the path of reframing all your negative thinking and self-talk,” he said with cheerful confidence.
“You seem awfully sure there is going to be a next session,” Lorna said, and rolled off the damn beanbag onto all fours. “And for your information, I feel like an idiot sitting on beanbags.”
“Thanks for the feedback.”
She made it to her feet, but her yoga pants felt twisted around her legs. She started for the door, pausing there to look back at him.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said, and went out the door, nearly colliding with Montreal in her haste to get out of there.
Chapter 8Lorna Now
Well, now she felt bad. when she reviewed her tone and demeanor in Micah’s office on the drive home, she could see she’d been very prickly. That damn codicil was going to be the death of her.
The rage she’d felt leaving Bodhi had dissipated, and now she felt sheepish for leaving in a snit and flouncing out of Micah’s office. He was just trying to help her. Why couldn’t she have left in a dignified manner? Despite the beanbag, things had been going well. Until he brought up that “face yourself” business and defended her mother’s motives.
Everything about that trust and her mother was mixed in a thick, tar-like morass of feelings that she’d quit trying to sort out a long time ago. She couldn’t just pull out a few bad feelings, have a look at them, and think,Okay, everything’s probably fine now. It didn’t work that way, so she’d just allowed the toxic brew of feelings to simmer deep in the pit of her.
She probably owed Micah an apology. Too bad Deb wasn’t here to confirm. She sincerely wished Deb were here—somewhere along the way she’d lost the ability to gauge when she was being obnoxious. Deb was just... comforting. A solid person.
She took the third slot in the gravel patch. The new guy’smassive truck was missing, but it looked like everyone else was home. Fabulous. Lorna’s head was pounding with tension and Martin probably had a marching band coming over later to stomp around overhead.
She got out of her car and went inside. She paused at the mail table. Something felt off. She realized that she’d usually hear music coming out of Martin’s apartment, but the lobby was strangely silent.
She picked up the mail someone had stacked for her and went to her apartment door, expecting to hear Agnes whimpering on the other side. She heard nothing.
Inside her apartment, she dropped her purse and mail on the console and whistled for her dog. Agnes did not come. She walked to the back of her apartment, where she could hear voices slipping in from the dog door into the backyard. Agnes was with the boy, of course. They’d probably dug tunnels to go with their massive hole or built a spaceship out of the wooden fence. It would cost her a small fortune to return the backyard to an oasis when she owned the house.
She opened her back door and stepped onto her small landing and, surprisingly, saw a crowd gathered—Martin and Mrs. Foster had joined Bean. Agnes was on her back, her legs in the air, and Martin was rubbing her belly.
“Hi, Lorna!” Bean waved at her from his spot between the adults. Mrs. Foster and Martin looked up, both smiling. “Oh, hey,” Mrs. Foster said with a wave of her own. “Come join us!”
Lorna almost checked behind her to see if someone had followed her out, but no, they were clearly speaking to her. She moved hesitantly toward the edge of her landing, unconvinced they really wanted her to join them. “What’s going on?”
“We found some cool rocks,” Bean said. “Want to see?”
Lorna spotted a pile of seemingly ordinary rocks. Heaven only knew where they’d come from—probably shoring up the corner of the house. She walked down the three steps into the yard, and Agnes, having finally turned from the sea of adoring faces, trotted over. At least that was an improvement from other times Lorna had found her with Bean. But after touching her snout to Lorna and accepting a head scratch, she trotted right back to the group of fun people.
Even her dog was choosing other people over her.
