I HAD MY WEEKLY session with Dr. Susan Silverman a couple hours after Richie and Kathryn had left, and before I was to meet Tony Marcus.
At one minute after two o’clock, she and I sat across from each other in the downstairs office that was part of her residence on Linnaean Street in Cambridge. As usual she looked as if she had just come from a photo shoot for the world’s best and best-looking therapists. She wore a black dress, her black hair was gleaming, her makeup looked as if it had been applied by a team of professionals, and her dark eyes were full of life and intelligence and curiosity. As always, she made me feel as if the best and most interesting hour of her entire day was about to begin.
“So,” she said, “what’s new and good with Sunny Randall?”
“Plenty,” I said. “Hardly any of it good.”
“Do tell.”
I did. I described my meeting with Tony Marcus, and my conflicted feelings about him, then finding out as soon as I’d left Tony’s office about Kathryn being back in Boston, and her subsequent visit to the house. By the time I finished, I was worried that my time was almost up.
When I finally did stop talking, she smiled.
“Well,” she said, “it seems as if there is a fair amount of threat assessment going on, isn’t there?”
I had changed out of my sweater and jeans before coming over here, into a new Elie Tahari shift dress. So first I had dressed for Richie today; now I’d done the same for Susan Silverman. No wonder I needed a therapist. Before long I’d need a second therapist to analyze my relationship with my first one.
“I honestly believe my arrangement with Tony, if you can call it that,” I said, “is quite practical, if it really does remove him as a threat. Might as well pick it up there, okay?”
“We can pick it up wherever you feel most comfortable,” she said.
“Even in an uncomfortable situation of my own making,” I said.
“Mr. Marcus remains a violent and dangerous man,” she said, “one who became even more dangerous to you because of the way your last business arrangement with him ended.”
“I still think I made the right choice,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“I’m always more interested in how you feel about your choices, Sunny.”
And . . . we’re off, I thought.
“I’d much rather feel as if he owed me one, as opposed to the alternative,” I said.
“And you believe that if you find this woman, that will reset your situation with him?” she said.
Somehow that word, situation, made me smile.
“Did I say something amusing?” she said.
“No,” I said. “But I’m thinking that I have a situation with Tony, with his missing girlfriend, with Kathryn, with Richie’s son. No wonder I’m here. I should have packed a lunch.”
Her only jewelry today was a diamond stud in each ear, her look as understated and elegant as everything else about her. I continued to be curious about her life outside this office, upstairs in her residence. Even though she did make sly references about the man of her dreams from time to time, I knew nothing about him, the way I knew nothing of her life outside this room, and these sessions. But whomever the man was, he had to be a formidable presence, with a life force and intelligence—and perhaps even sense of humor—to match her own.
“Spike asked me why I seemed more concerned about Kathryn being in my life than me being back in Tony’s,” I said.
She reached over and wrote something on the legal pad on the desk in front of her.
“I mean, there is no logical reason that I should view her as an actual threat,” I said. “I know how much Richie loves me.”
“But her appearance in Richie’s life, and yours, has clearly unnerved you.”
“Like I said, it hasn’t been a dull twenty-four hours.”
“Do you still view her as a rival for his affections?” she said.
“No,” I said. “He made his choice. I don’t see him unmaking it at this point. Or ever.”
“So is it the child?” she said.
“You mean the child we never had together?” I said. “That child?”
She waited.
“Interesting way of putting it,” she said.
“He’s a sweet kid, he really is, you only have to be around him for five minutes to get a sense of that,” I said. “I honestly can’t look at him without seeing Richie. I don’t want to see him as a complication. But how can I not?”
“Perhaps he’s more an opportunity,” she said.
“To do what?”
“Find out what kind of mother you might have been?” Susan Silverman said.
“There’s a scary thought,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Maybe it is the boy who scares me the most,” I said.
She smiled again.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“So this is the kind of situation that you have always hated, one in which things are beyond your control,” she said.
“Oh, boy,” I said again.
“But the way you deal with all of it is entirely up to you,” she said. “Worth remembering.”
When I was with her, I always flipped my watch over so the band was on top and the face was on my wrist, so I could discreetly check the time when I thought we were coming to the end of a session. I glanced down at my wrist now. She probably noticed. But I assumed she noticed if I switched between soft pink blush and coral.
“I don’t trust her,” I said. “Never did.”
“As you have never trusted Tony Marcus,” she said.
I felt a smile come over me then. And saw her smiling back. “I think I spot a trend here,” I said.
“Well, I should think,” Susan Silverman said. “You are a trained investigator.”