They were already arguing. From her curled position on the couch, Imani could hear her two o’clock warming up for their weekly verbal wrestling match. The strip of drywall separating her office from the hallway couldn’t muffle the condescension in the husband’s tone or the hysterical notes in the wife’s as each attempted to force the other into apologetic submission.
“But you don’t know,” the woman snapped. “Why do you always assume to know everything?”
“It’s a logical conclusion that any thinking person would come to,” the man responded.
Imani pulled up the surgical mask cupping her chin. She hated how face coverings complicated reading patients’ expressions. However, she appreciated that the fabric would cover her own downturned lips.
Had it not been for the pandemic, she might not have accepted Mr. and Mrs. Halstead’s business. The couple didn’t want to fix their marriage. Not really. They wanted to rage about who hadn’t done the dishes or helped with homework until they could agree that they’d tried but simply weren’t happy. She was the witness to their failed attempt, the person whom they’d point to later as evidence of their efforts and say, hey, we paid thousands to save our relationship, but it wasn’t salvageable.
Imani couldn’t turn down thousands at the moment.
“I think she had nothing to do with it,” Mrs. Halstead shouted outside the door.
Imani tugged the hem of her sweater so that it rested a little lower over her backside. She’d caught Mr. Halstead checking out her rear during their last session and didn’t want to tempt him into doing it again.
“Guilty people run off,” the husband countered. “People with nothing to hide stay and—”
The door’s creak cut him off. Mr. Halstead was dressed for work in a well-tailored wool coat, suit pants, and KN95, which was a stark contrast to his wife’s snakeskin-patterned leggings, blinding white ski jacket, and floral face covering. Imani silently wished that the woman had dressed more business casual. Mr. Halstead was already dismissive of his spouse’s financial contributions. Looking like the whole day could be spent on a yoga mat wouldn’t help the woman’s argument that her work was of equal importance.
Imani sat on the edge of her Eames lounge chair, positioned kitty-corner to the long couch at a nonconfrontational angle that still made clear she was part of the conversation. As she waited for the couple to sit down, she remembered looking up at the cement sky earlier that morning. Gray was the most prominent color in New York City between December and March. There was nothing particularly depressing about that fact. It was just the way the year started, a blank slate, which was what Imani needed her face to be.
Years earlier, her best friend had taught her the trick to controlling her micro-expressions. “You’re an open book,” Melissa had said, too many glasses of pinot grigio rendering her assessments brutal. “When you anticipate something bad, your brow scrunches and your nose flares like you’ve caught a whiff of day-old diaper. You need to keep a neutral face. There was this one film financier who had a reputation as being a misogynistic bully. Before he came in to talk to me, I pictured a wall so that my affect would be completely flat.”
“And was he as awful as everyone said?” Imani had asked.
“Worse,” Melissa had quipped. “By the end of our conversation, I was imagining that bastard buried in that wall.”
A smile crept behind Imani’s mask at the memory. “So, how are you both this week?” she asked the couple.
“Fine,” the husband said. “Things are picking up at work, so that’s a bit stressful.”
“And I’m juggling clients and the kids.” The wife glared at him.
“You both have demanding careers and a lot on your plates, which makes it difficult to carve out space for one another. How has that—”
A buzz from Imani’s pocket interrupted her. She reached inside and, without looking, sent the call to voice mail. “Were you two able to have any focused time together this week?”
“I tried the other night,” the husband said. “I brought up drinks to the bedroom.”
“You brought scotch for yourself.”
“I brought the bottle. You could have had one.”
“I don’t drink liquor before bed.”
Imani cleared her throat and directed her attention to the husband. “So, you wanted to initiate some intimacy and feel your signals didn’t register with—”
“Oh, you knew what I wanted. You were just busy reading.”
“I offered to watch something.”
“You only like that true crime stuff where everyone kills their spouses.”
“That’s not true.”
“She’s obsessed. Even during the cab ride over here she was talking about a murder that’s on the news.”
It took a beat for Imani to realize that the husband was now addressing her rather than volleying another barbed comment at his wife. “Well, we all have interests,” she said. “Our partners don’t need to share every one of them. Perhaps if true crime doesn’t appeal to both of you, you two could—”
“I thought you’d be into it.” The wife was back in the game. “You were all googly-eyed for that actress when we met. You saw all her movies.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to know all the gory details of how she killed her husband.” The guy pointed at Imani. A smile glinted in his eyes. “Put it on record, my wife has a penchant for mariticide. If I end up with a bullet in the brain, and there’s some suspicious note…”
Imani knew her patient didn’t fear his wife. He was trying to curry favor by flirting while diminishing his partner’s interests. Imani shifted her knees so that they pointed in Mrs. Halstead’s direction. “True crime is very popular right now. What are some topics that you believe would interest both of you?”
A beep emitted from Imani’s pocket, signaling a new voice mail. She wondered if Melissa had called. The prior night, her friend had texted and, surprisingly, asked to meet up—ASAP. Imani hadn’t yet replied because she still couldn’t fathom where they would go. A polar vortex had slammed the brakes on outdoor socializing, and Melissa had previously made clear that she was too nervous to see anyone indoors—especially not possible vectors like Imani, who still saw in-person patients and was married to a man who spent six days a week in a restaurant kitchen. Melissa hadn’t worked since Broadway’s close, and Nate’s latest project had been on hold for two years. Imani wasn’t sure if the Walkers had left their house since October.
“Finance!” Mrs. Halstead threw up a hand. “Money and the markets are the only things that interest him anymore. He finds stock more compelling than a famous director being shot dead in his twelve-million-dollar brownstone.”
Imani realized that the wife was doing the same thing as her husband, trying to win over the therapist by painting her spouse as myopic. If Imani had been at a bar and not mid-session, she might have asked about the case. It wasn’t every day that a wealthy celebrity was murdered. But she couldn’t let the wife score a point for the same competitive behavior that she’d pointedly ignored from the woman’s spouse.
“Let’s think about subjects that interest both of you.” She clapped, trying to focus them on the task at hand. “When you first got married, what were some of the things that you talked about?”
A buzz from her cell interrupted the silence that followed. Imani hesitated but ultimately reached into her pocket. The restaurant was filled with sharp knives and dangerous machinery, and Philip had been doing more of the food preparation since laying off 15 percent of his staff. Whoever had left a message could be alerting her to an emergency.
“Excuse me one moment.” Imani withdrew her phone. The school’s number shone on screen.
Imani pictured her kids quarantined in the school’s gymnasium. A rash of psychosomatic symptoms followed. Sore throat. Shortness of breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, forcing the words through her empathy-inflamed larynx. “I have to take this. It’s my children’s school.”
Her office was only the one room. Two hundred square feet packed with a couch, a chair, two bookcases, and a secretary desk. It was no place to take a private call. She turned her head toward the wall as the husband muttered something about cost per minute. “Hello. Imani Banks.”
“Hello, Mrs. Banks, this is the office at St. Catherine’s. We need you to come right away.”
Imani fought the urge to cough. “What’s wrong? Are my kids all right?”
“Yes. Your children are fine. We need you to pick up Ava.”
Ava was not her daughter’s name. Her kids were Vivienne and Jay. Had the school made a mistake? “Do you mean Melissa and Nate Walker’s daughter?”
“You’re listed as one of Miss Walker’s emergency contacts.”
“Is Ava okay?”
“Yes. But it would be best if you picked her up.”
She’s caught it, Imani thought. What other reason could the school have for wanting Ava immediately removed from its premises?
Imani unconsciously touched her neck. As an athletic fifteen-year-old, Ava would probably be fine. But Imani was forty-two. She maintained a healthy body weight, which was in her favor, but she also suffered from mild asthma and, since the pandemic’s start, enjoyed a nightly glass or two of red wine. Statistically, she was far more likely than Ava to get very sick. And if she fell ill, who would take care of her own kids?
“Have you tried Melissa’s cell? She’s usually home at this hour.”
A sharp intake of air answered. Silence followed, as if the person on the other end had muted herself. Imani waited a beat before saying, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Banks, Ava’s parents are unavailable. It’s truly imperative that you come and collect her. This isn’t about COVID.”
Imani wanted to ask what it could be about. But something about the tone of the woman’s voice, an undercurrent of panic that pushed her words together, drowned out additional questions. Imani promised to be right there, hung up, and then returned her attention to her patients. “I am terribly sorry to do this, but I need to reschedule. There’s been an emergency.”
The husband nodded as if he understood but then flashed a hard look at his wife. Imani sensed that he hadn’t wanted to attend their session. Her abrupt departure would become ammunition in a later argument to cease therapy altogether.
“I will, of course, comp today and the next visit. We can even do this virtually, if that would be easier.” Imani grabbed her coat off a hook and then opened the door wide. “I am terribly sorry.”
The wife’s eyes crinkled with sympathy as she rose from the couch. “Kids come first.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
As Mrs. Halstead gathered her jacket, her husband strode to the door. Imani realized that he’d never removed his coat. Perhaps he hadn’t planned on ever getting comfortable. He exited with a gruff “good luck” and continued down the hallway, not waiting for his spouse.
Beneath her mask, Imani’s frown deepened. She felt terrible for the conversation that her female patient would soon face about the “pointlessness of therapy.” She felt even worse that, in this particular case, the husband was probably right.
“I’m sorry to have overheard.” Mrs. Halstead’s brow was tightly knitted above her mask. “But did you mention Nate Walker?”
Imani’s stomach tightened. She tried not to share any personal information in her sessions. Therapists all had stories of clients romanticizing the shrink listening to all their problems. She struggled to recover her gray-sky expression. “I should probably go,” she said.
Mrs. Halstead leaned forward, shortening the not-quite-six-feet of space between them. “I only ask because he’s the director who was found dead this afternoon, and his wife is still missing.”