He looks down at a file sitting on his desk, and I follow his gaze to a photo of me and Hope, both of us smiling on a blanket on the beach. It’s torn down the middle, and taped back together. I know who taped it. And I know she’s gone now, never to return. Like a pencil in a wood chipper, irreparably damaged.
All my fault.
I gulp and sit down on the hard wooden chair across from Dr. Brasher’s desk. My eyes veer away from the photo and right into a pink notebook. Hope wouldn’t use a black and white speckled composition book, no. She made mom buy her a special English journal, with sparkly bling and a splashing dolphin. Sometimes she acted like she was nine years old.
My heart stutters. Why does Dr. Brasher have Hope’s stuff? Did the judge send it here? My fingers itch to reach for it, but nothing I do seems to go right, so I force my hands into fists at my side.
This has to go right.
“Ah, I see you’ve caught me,” Dr. Brasher says. “I was just studying up on your case, a little last minute maybe.”
I start to speak, but I can’t quite get words past the frog lodged in my throat. I cough to clear it and then force myself to croak a few words. “Why do you have Hope’s journal and that photo?”
“Please,” he says. “Sit down.”
I do, but I can’t help another pointed glance at the journal.
“Does it bother you that I have it?”
I stomp down on the surge of emotion. I just have to survive the next hour. “No, I’m just curious.”
“I see in the file that you’re only eleven months older than her. Irish twins, as it were.”
I’ve explained this so many times, the words fall out without thought. “Since I was born in early fall and she came along the very next year at summer’s end, we started kindergarten the same year.”
“That’s awfully close in age. Did you mind having a sister when you were little? Were you ever jealous of her?”
I don’t snort at him, or tell him to look at the photo. I don’t tell him that everyone was jealous of Hope. I don’t tell him she ruined my life. I don’t tell him I hated her sometimes. And I don’t bother telling him I loved her, too. I loved her enough to keep giving and giving when all she did was take take take.
“Even if I was jealous, that’s normal, right?” I ask. “Textbook, even. Half the kids in America are jealous of their new baby brother or sister.”
He holds up the photo, one side of it flopping forward along the scotch tape fault line. “She looks a little different than you do.”
Thank you Doctor Obvious. My brown curly hair looks nothing like Hope’s long, blonde locks. Our eyes are the same shape, but different colors. My pale, lightly freckled arms and legs inspire vampire jokes galore. Her limbs are tanned and muscular from swimming. My angular face and bony body look even more gaunt when compared to her perfect curves.
I guess it's safe to say Hope didn't steal my looks, but she's taken most everything else I've wanted over the years, sometimes without even trying. When we were babies, she snatched pacifiers I wasn’t ready to give up, my favorite stuffed animals, my snacks, and even my cutest clothing. As we grew, so too did the list in my head of stolen goods. I kept track of them all.
Not that I plan to confess that in an interrogation ordered by a judge.
“You’re right. Only our face shapes look the same.”
“Can you describe your relationship?”
I glance at the clock. “We’ve only got an hour, right?”
He smiles. “We have as long as you need, Angelica.”
I shudder. “Don’t call me that. My name is Lacy, okay?”
He makes a note on his yellow pad. It doesn’t inspire confidence that he needs to write down my name, like he knows he won’t remember it otherwise. Or maybe wanting to use a nickname tells him something about my brain. What does it tell him? I want to stand up and demand that he tell me. I want to know what’s going to happen. I want to take everything back. Instead I clench my fists and try to school my face into a façade of calm.
I can’t survive much more of this mock serenity. My head will explode. “For today we only have an hour, right?”
He nods. “I have another patient scheduled after you, but you can come back tomorrow and the next day, for as long as we need. We may be seeing each other a lot for the next few weeks.”
My heart rate spikes. Weeks? I don’t have that much time. Why would this take that long? I always finish tests in the first fifteen minutes. I write five page papers in half an hour. Why would it take that long to be evaluated?
Then it dawns on me. “Shrinks are all paid by the hour, right? So the more time it takes for you, the more money you make. Got to pay for that Porsche for the wife somehow, am I right?”
He shakes his head. “My wife drives a Subaru, and she paid for that herself. Would it interest you to know that psychiatrists are actually the worst paid doctors in America?”
I shrug. I don’t really care much one way or another, but that might explain Melinda’s dilemma.
“Speaking of,” I say, and then stop. She asked me not to say anything, but maybe Dr. Brasher could do something about it. He might want to do something. It’s not like I promised her I’d keep quiet. Things that can be fixed should be fixed. Before it’s too late.
“Did you have something to tell me, Lacy?”
I look down at my feet and then back up to meet his eyes. “Do you like your secretary, Melinda?”
He raises just one eyebrow. “How is that related to psychiatrists being poorly paid?”
“I’ll explain, but I need to know. Are you happy with her work?”
“Of course I am. I’ve been working with her for years. She’s my secretary and also my office manager. She keeps things running.”
“I get that you’re not well paid, but she needs more money. She’s got a son who’s, well, I don’t know exactly what his deal is, but if you don’t give her that raise you can’t afford, you might be looking for a new office manager.”
Melinda’s face had bleached white when we spoke earlier, but Dr. Brasher’s doesn’t grow pale. His cheeks flush crimson.
“Look, if it helps, you can write down that we spent as many hours as you want. I won’t say a word.” Happy shrink, better eval, right?
Dr. Brasher splutters. “I would never falsify my hours. And how could you know that Melinda needs money?”
I shrug. “I notice things.” At least, now I do. “You only get one shot to get things right sometimes.” Familiar tears well up in the back of my throat, my eyes misting. I take a big, ragged breath to head them off. “But whatever. You’re the one with the fancy degrees, so I’m sure you know better than I do.”
He steeples his hands in front of him and studies me. “Now you’ve gone all teenager on me, but you don’t need to. I have an MD, yes, but I still appreciate insightful advice from any quadrant. Your file says you’re in line to be Valedictorian, and I can see why. I feel as though I should set the record straight. For court-ordered evaluations, I’m paid on a flat fee basis.”
Great, and my suggestion that he pad his bill makes me look like an idiotic teenager at best, a chronic liar at worst. Another spastic misstep. Heat floods my chest and spreads up to my cheeks. “That sucks for you, but it means you want to wrap this up as fast as you can, right? I’m on board with that.”
“It takes as long as it takes,” he practically growls. This could definitely be going better. He breathes in and out a few times before saying, “How did you feel about your little sister when you were growing up?”
“I loved her, of course. Everyone loves Hope. I’m pretty sure it’s involuntary, like pupil dilation, or breathing.”
Dr. Brasher scoffs. “Pupil dilation?”
I shrug. “I got tired of being the smart one sometimes, okay? It sucks, being the plain one, the boring one, but it's not like I could do much about it. If I bleached my hair and tried to swim or something, I’d have looked like a pathetic wannabe, a disapp
ointing, washed-out clone. So I focused on my strengths and just tried to love her for hers.”
“Did you ever like the same guys?”
My hands start to sweat. I didn’t expect him to have her journal. I have no idea what it says in there. I don’t like unknowns in mathematics, and I despise them in real life.
“Hope was on homecoming court, okay? She’s swim team captain, so she meets a lot of jocks. The kind of guy who likes her is usually good looking, funny, smart, athletic, or popular.”
Basically, anyone who's breathing.
“And what about you, Lacy? What kinds of guys like you?”
“Up until this year, the closest I got to having a guy's undivided attention was when I read Hemingway or Chaucer.”
“What changed this year?” He steeples his hands again.
It’s starting to annoy me. “I bet you’ve already read all about it.”
“I don’t know your side of things,” Dr. Brasher says. “That’s why you’re here.”
“If I walk you through what happened and you write your report, then we’ll be done, right?”
He nods.
“Where should I start?”
“Where do you think it all started to go wrong?”
He already knows what happened and he’s got Hope’s journal, so he’s probably figured out that it’s all my fault. Things went about as wrong as they could have gone. Fights. Missed school. Police. Drugs. Juvie. Possible expulsion. And the one bad thing no one ever seems to want to talk about.
I can barely breathe and I look away. Sniff and wipe my eyes.
She died.
The rest of the stuff doesn’t even matter compared to that.
But looking back on all that mess, in the cluster my life has become, no one's asked for my side of the story. Not the judge, not a single teacher, not my friends, no one. It’s like they’re all afraid of the answer.
And maybe they should be.
It all started the day I met Mason. Is it ironic that the first truly great day of my life was probably also the very thing that set in motion the events leading up to the worst? Or does life always work like that? Mom lost Dad right after Hope was born. Maybe bad always nips at good’s heels like a moronic, overeager puppy, shredding everything and peeing in the corner.
Dr. Brasher still stares at me expectantly and I realize I haven’t spoken a word. "I guess it all started with Mason."
Dr. Brasher rifles through a pile of papers on his desk and then he looks back up at me. "Mason Montcellier?"
I nod my head, impressed when he pronounces the difficult last name correctly. "Yep."
"Why don't you tell me about him."
I bite my lip. I don't want to talk about Mason. It hurts. Not crippling pain, like when I think about her, but thinking about Mason hurts in a different way. Plus, I honestly don't even know how I feel anymore. I cared for Mason more than I thought possible, and now I have no idea how to feel about him. Do I love him? Do I blame him? Do I feel anything at all?
I clear my throat. "It was your typical story, I guess. Outrageously attractive boy meets nerdy girl. It was the 'happily ever after part' where things started to break down."
If you enjoyed this sample of Already Gone, please check it out on Amazon here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to my husband, my mom and my kids. I could never write without the support of all of them.
Thanks to my beta readers, my ARC team and my fans. You have no idea how much your positive reviews and words of encouragement mean.
Thanks to the Writing Gals for helping me learn so much by your generous and open sharing of knowledge!
Thanks to Esther for checking in with me every day and keeping me excited to write. And I’d be remiss not to thank Susannah, for being an amazing cheerleader!
About the Author
Bridget loves her husband (every day) and all five of her kids (most days). She’s a lawyer, but does as little legal work as possible. She has a yappy dog, backyard chickens, and a fish. She makes cookies too often, and believes they should be their own food group. To keep from blowing up like a puffer fish, she kick boxes every day. So if you don’t like her books, her kids, or her cookies, maybe don’t tell her in person.
Also by Bridget E. Baker
Marked: Sins of Our Ancestors Book One
Suppressed: Sins of Our Ancestors Book Two
Redeemed: Sins of Our Ancestors Book Three
Finding Santa: Almost a Billionaire Book One
Already Gone
Finding Cupid (Almost a Billionaire Book 2) Page 25
