Karin nodded. “Enough for a month’s rent would be great.”
“But I feel I should tell him I’m going, not just disappear. After fifteen years of marriage, I think it’s the least I owe him. If I had somebody there with me…”
Karin straightened in her chair. “You know how dangerous confronting him could be.”
Lenora bit her lip. “Yes.”
“Why do you feel you ‘owe’ Roberto?”
Lenora floundered, claiming at first that owe probably wasn’t the best choice of word.
“Since I’ve never worked, he has brought home all the money.”
“You’ve talked about how you would have liked to work.”
She nodded. “If I’d had a paycheck of my own…”
Karin finished for her. “You would have felt more independent.”
Lenora gave a small, painful smile. “He didn’t want me to be independent.”
Karin waited.
“You don’t think I should tell him face-to-face?”
Usually, Karin let clients work their way to their own conclusion, but in this instance she said, “No. I don’t think Roberto will let you walk out the door. If you have someone with you, that person will be in danger, as well. And where will the children be? What if he grabs Anna and Enrico and threatens to hurt them?”
Just audibly, Lenora confessed, “I would do anything he asked me to do.”
Karin waited again.
“Okay. We’ll sneak away,” Lenora said.
“I really believe that’s smart.”
The frail woman said, “He’ll come after me.”
“Then you have to make sure neither you nor the children are ever vulnerable.”
“I wish we could join the witness protection program or something like that.”
“Just disappear,” Karin said. The ultimate fantasy for a woman in Lenora’s position.
Lenora nodded.
“But then you’d never see your aunt and uncle or sister again,” Karin pointed out.
“They could come, too.”
“Along with your sister’s children? And her husband? What about his family?”
Lenora’s eyes filled with fears and longings. “I know that can’t be. But I wish.”
“You realize you’ll have to stay away from your family and friends for now. He’ll be watching them. But if you can stay safe long enough, he’ll lose interest.”
Lenora agreed but didn’t look convinced. And as scared as she had to be right now, who could blame her?
When the hour was over and Karin was walking her out, Karin asked, “Will you call me once you’re at the safe house?”
“Of course I will.” In the reception area, furnished like a living room, Lenora hugged her. “Thank you. You’ve helped me more than you can imagine.”
Touched, Karin hugged her back. “Thank you.”
Lenora drew back, sniffing. “I can keep coming here, can’t I?”
“As long as you’re sure he’s never known about A Woman’s Hand. Remember, you can’t do anything predictable,” Karin reminded her.
“He’s never heard about this place or about you.” Lenora sounded sure.
“Great. Then I’ll expect you next Tuesday. Oh, and don’t forget that Monday evening we’re having the first class in the women’s self-defense course. It would be really good for you.”
They’d talked about this, too—how the course wasn’t geared so much to building hand-to-hand combat skills as it was to changing the participants’ confidence in themselves and teaching preparedness.
Lenora nodded. “I mentioned it to the director at the safe house, and she said she’d drive me here. She told me I could leave Enrico and Anna there, that someone would watch them, but I think I’d rather bring them. You’ll have babysitting here, right?”
“Absolutely.” Karin smiled and impulsively hugged her again. “Good luck.”
She stood at the door and watched this amazing woman, who had defied her husband’s efforts to turn her into nothing, hurry to the bus stop so she could pick up her children and be home before he was, ready to playact for three more days.
Karin seldom prayed—her faith was more bruised than her most damaged client’s. But this was one of those moments when she gave wing to a silent wish.
Let her escape safely. Please let her make it.
The blue-and-white metro bus pulled to a stop, and Lenora disappeared inside it. With a sigh, Karin turned from the glass door. She had five minutes to get a cup of coffee before her next appointment, this one a fifty-eight-year-old rape survivor who’d been left for dead in the basement of her apartment building when all she’d done was go down to move her laundry from the washer to the dryer.
In the hall, Karin slowed her step briefly when she heard a woman sobbing, the sound muffled by the closed door to another office. Maybe they should have called the clinic A Woman’s Tears, they ran so freely here.
Sometimes she was amazed that of the five women psychologists and counselors in practice here, three were happily married to nice men. She was grateful for the reminder that kind, patient men did exist. They might even be commonplace and not extraordinary at all. In the stories—no, the tragedies—that filled her days, men were the monsters, rarely the heroes.
She shook her head, discomfited by her own cynicism. This path she now walked wasn’t one she’d set out on because she’d been bruised from an awful childhood or an abusive father. True, her parents had divorced, and she thought that was why she’d aimed to go into family counseling, as if the child inside her still thought she could mend her own family. But her dad was a nice man, not one of the monsters.
She couldn’t deny, though, that the years here had changed her, made her look at men and women differently. She dated less and less often, as if she’d lost some capacity to hope. Which was ironic, since she spent her days trying to instill hope in other women.
In the small staff lounge, she took her mug from the cupboard.
Shaking off the inexplicable moment of malaise, she thought again, Please let Lenora make it. Let this ending be happy.
“MAN, I WISH I could shoot from the free-throw line.” Grumbling, the boy snagged the ball that had just dropped, neat as you please, through the hoop.
The net itself was torn, the asphalt playground surface cracked, but playing here felt like going back to the roots of the game to Bruce Walker, who waggled his fingers. “Still my turn.”
Trevor bounced the basketball hard at him. “It’s not fair.”
They argued mildly. The game of horse was as fair as Bruce could make it, handicapping himself so that he shot from much farther out. He pointed out that he was six feet three inches tall and had been All-Southern California in high-school basketball.
“Whereas you,” he said, “are twelve years old. You’ve developed a dandy layup, and you’re quick. One of these days, you’ll start growing an inch a week. Kid you not.”
“An inch a week!” Trevor thought that was hysterical.
Bruce