LITMIR.BIZ

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plan.” She gave him an encouraging smile. She was proud of him, proud of the men all her sons had become. “Trust your instincts, Trent. You’re a good psychologist and terrific with kids. Just because this boy is the son of someone you used to be very close to doesn’t change any of that.”

      That was exactly what he was afraid of. Would his past feelings for Laurel cloud his perception or destroy his ability to assess the boy? He honestly didn’t know—and his first priority was to the patient.

      “Maybe you should see him,” he suggested.

      “I can do a consult, certainly,” Kate agreed. But if Laurel had wanted someone else to see her son, she would have asked. “Laurel trusts you and the way she feels transmits itself to the boy. That’s an important part of this healing process.”

      He sighed. “I know.”

      “Give it a shot, Trent,” she encouraged. Her eyes met his. “I’ve never known you to turn away from a challenge.”

      “This is a boy, Mom,” he pointed out, “not a challenge.”

      But she shook her head. “This is both,” Kate corrected.

      She was right. As usual. He tried to remember the last time she wasn’t—and couldn’t. “Don’t you get tired of always being right?”

      Kate pretended to think his question over. “No.” And then she grinned. “When that starts happening, you’ll be the first to know,” she promised.

      Moving around quickly, getting in her own way, Laurel placed her purse next to the front door, then doubled back to pick up the lightweight jacket she’d retrieved out of the closet for Cody. She hurried him into it. It felt as if she were dressing a mannequin.

      This’ll be over soon. Trent’ll find a way to bring him around, she promised herself, trying to steady her trembling hands.

      “You’ll like him, Cody.” She did her best to sound upbeat and hopeful, praying that this time something in her voice would get through to him. “He’s someone I used to know before your dad. When I was in school.” Moving around to face him, she zipped up his jacket. His arms hung limply at his sides. His eyes, unfocused, didn’t see her. “The first time I met him, I guess I was just a little older than you. He’s very nice.”

      All the words tumbling out of her mouth felt awkward on her tongue. That was because she felt awkward.

      Awkward with her own son.

      How had she come to this place? She and Cody had always had so much fun together. He’d been her saving grace when things had gotten so bad with Matt. And now, now she didn’t even know him.

      Laurel supposed that was what had finally driven her to seek out help from a field she would have never thought to tap. She’d never believed in psychiatry or its cousin, psychology. They were for neurotic people with too much time and money on their hands. But now she was rethinking everything, and she was desperate.

      She felt estranged from her own son. Worse than that, she felt as if she were losing him, as if he were slipping away into some netherworld that only he occupied.

      She looked down into his face. It was vacant, as if there were no one there. Laurel pressed her lips together, struggling against a wave of hopelessness.

      These days, Cody didn’t even look at her when she talked to him. He didn’t disobey her, didn’t throw tantrums, didn’t show any emotion at all. It ripped her heart out that he behaved as if she weren’t even in the room. She supposed it could have been worse. He did go where she told him to go, ate what she set in front of him and went to bed when she told him. But she missed him terribly. It was like having a windup toy, a clone of her son. He looked like Cody in every way except that there was no personality, no sign of the laughing, bright-eyed, intelligent boy he’d been a year ago.

      More than anything else in the world, she wanted him back.

      Laurel went to the door and picked up her purse, sliding it onto her shoulder. For the thousandth time, she cursed her cowardliness for not standing her ground that day. The last day of Matt’s life. She didn’t believe in omens, but she’d had an eerie feeling all morning, a feeling that something would go wrong. Some unnamed instinct had told her to keep Cody close, to either keep him home or go with him. She’d chalked it up to her general uneasiness at the time. Matt had dropped his bomb on her only the night before.

      Divorce was an ugly word and it had sent tremors through her world.

      When she’d tried to tell Matt about her premonition, for lack of a better word, he’d called her manipulative and vetoed both of her ideas. Cody wasn’t staying home with her and she wasn’t going with them. He was breaking Cody in on the life of a time-shared child.

      Nerves had danced through her like lightning bolts during an electrical storm as she’d watched them drive away.

      Watched Matt drive away for the last time.

      “He’s very nice,” she repeated to Cody.

      Tears came to her eyes. They seemed to come so easily these days. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t allow Cody to see her cry, but since he hardly ever looked at her, it seemed like a needless vow.

      “Oh, Cody, come out, please come out,” she pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Anything.”

      Her entreaty didn’t seem to penetrate the invisible wall that surrounded the boy.

      With a sigh, she pulled herself together. “It’s time to go, Cody.”

      As if she’d turned on a switch, the boy walked toward the door. She opened it and he walked outside in measured steps.

      “Maybe Trent will have better luck,” she murmured under her breath, silently adding, Please, God, let him have better luck. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

      “Trent, this is my son, Cody.”

      Framed in the doorway of his office the way she had been yesterday, Laurel stood behind the boy. She rested her hands lightly on her son’s shoulders, as if she were afraid that withdrawing them would make Cody disappear.

      Trent immediately rose to his feet. He’d been in the office a full forty-five minutes before this first appointment of his day, preparing. Preparing what, he wasn’t certain.

      He’d never felt anxious about meeting a new patient before. Oh, there’d always been that minor shot of adrenaline to begin with, but that was to be expected. He’d never been anxious before. First sessions were about ground rules, about getting to know the face that was turned to the world. Even children had their secrets and it was his job to unlock them so that his small, troubled patients could go on to have happy, well-adjusted lives.

      But how did you prepare for a child who wouldn’t talk? Who perhaps couldn’t talk despite not having anything physically wrong with him. He knew firsthand that the bars a mind could impose were stronger than any steel found in a prison cell.

      As he watched Cody now, it startled him how much the boy resembled Laurel. Neatly dressed, Cody’s silken blond hair was a bit longer than stylish. A testimony to the free spirit that Laurel had so desperately strived to be, Trent recalled. If Cody’s hair had been longer, he would have been the spitting image of Laurel at eight.

      The Laurel, he thought, who had captured his heart the first moment he’d seen her. Was eight too young to fall in love? He would have said an emphatic yes if he hadn’t been there himself.

      Approaching the boy, Trent held out his hand. “Hello, Cody, my name’s Trent,” he said in his warmest voice.

      Trent didn’t believe in standing on formalities or drawing a sharp line in the sand to separate children from adults. Every adult had a child within him and every child harbored the makings of the adult he was to be. Trent focused on uniting them rather than keeping them apart.

      Cody stared past his shoulder as

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